Interesting Nightmare

*points at title* No, I'm not talking about the launch of the publishing company (though it's rather entertaining - in a weird way, and the launch's the reason for my being so quiet around here these weeks).

When I have fever (and with the defrosting of the last millimetres of my nerve VII, it happens a lot), I have nightmares. Usually, most nightmares dissolve from my brain when I stand up and go to the kitchen to make breakfast, but sometimes, I remember the nightmares.

I put a notebook next to my bed in order to write bits about the nightmare plots (years ago, I had a terrible nightmare - properly scary and all. I remember thinking that it'd make a very, very good story, and the moment I got up, "Poof!" most of it was gone. I still hope my brain will give me that plot bunny back one day - even if it's scary).

Last night's nightmare is still in my head. It's not a plot bunny candidate this one... It's just... odd.

It brought me back to my college days, back when I was still a student and I was a teacher as well. Until I sat for my PhD, I was afraid that something would happen, and my delightful, feverish brain brought me back to that time in my latest nightmare:

I was teaching at my old college (that was odd, because I taught a few classes at another college back then), and I was planning to sit for my PhD in a couple of weeks when someone from administration came to see me and informed me that they thought I was missing a unit for... my BA.

I protested that I could prove that I had my BA - and my MA, and my M.St, but they were going back to my BA and were quite cold.

No one was helping me until... one of my colleagues decided to fight for me. That colleague? Oh... just Mr Gary Sinise (let's blame that one on Criminal Minds, shall we?).

He did manage to help me, but he did it not in the way I wanted to prove that I had my BA, and I was quite angry.

He tried to apologize by bringing a small military band (like the ones that play at St James's Park) to play for me, and... I woke up.

It's very strange because Mr Sinise was quite nice, but the fear of losing all my hard work because someone had lost an old file of mine was quite vivid and unpleasant (yes, I do see the possible link with the stress caused by the company launch, thank you).

Back to work...

See you "soon"...

Selfish in the City

Dear (incredibly silent) blog readers,

it's strange how noises affect us.

When I was a little girl, I spent years in a very quiet flat. When I moved with Mother to the flat where I still live, I remember my surprise when I could hear the near-constant flow of cars in the street; the very first night, I barely slept.

I quickly got used to it. I got used to the hubbub of my city...

Right under my flat, there's a restaurant. The one that was there when I was a little girl was owned by noisy plonkers (well, it was a bikers' meeting point). A few years later, new owners: they did most of their cooking in the flat below, and my bathroom often smelled of tomato sauce.

The restaurant was bought by a happy bunch of idiots last September (works from 9am to 6pm five days a week for weeks!). Then the works stopped, and they opened.

On Friday, January, 17th, 2014, I (finally?) noticed an odd noise, kitchen-side. It was two in the morning, I was typing something at my desk (on the other side of the flat), and there was an engine purr; I instantly feared that my boiler was acting up.

It wasn't the boiler.

I listened carefully, walked to my kitchen window, opened it, and then... Life as I'd known it went down the drain: the little idiots downstairs are using the properly antediluvian A/C unit that the restaurant owners before them had never used.

They're using it 24/7, and it's so loud that I always hear it. It's like being in an engine room day and night.

It's really strange how noises affect us. The constant din is making me extremely tired, extremely tetchy (let's face it, my usual, if extremely rare, version of Mrs Hyde would sound like Minnie Mouse compared with my current state), and even though I realized that there was an issue just over a week ago, it's possible that my body registered the trauma before I consciously did.

When I wake up, I feel some odd chest pressure now.

As of last night, my left arm is cramping.

No, I am not calling an ambulance.

As soon as I could, I complained to my building manager, but I cannot know how long it's going to take the council estate offices to react (after all, they're all far away from the din).

All my neighbours are growling, but I've been informed that only one other tenant did complain officially, like I did; the others are cowardly doormats.

If I don't hear from the manager on Monday, I'll have to call her.

I may have to call the police... All that because a happy bunch of idiots are selfish (if the restaurant owners don't know how noisy they are, they're decerebrated - no other possibility). They simply don't care.

I was still healing from the Great Freezing of my nerve VII, but I'm collapsing again, and it seems that my heart cannot stand residing in an engine room.
I can't sleep properly, and no one cares. On top of making me super tetchy, I can't concentrate, and I forget tiny things. Basically, things don't look too good.

So... if I end up liquefied on my linoleum, half-eaten by my cat, the idiots downstairs will have killed me.

Merlin! What a cheerful post!

xx,

Dru

ps: testament still in my black box, in the tax folder.

This Is Impossible!

I am not going to pretend that I'm a GP, but I'm in my body, and I happen to know it rather well.

Since my nerve VII froze, I got even more used to reading the weird healing signals that I've been given over the past six years.

Strangely enough, since my nerve froze, I caught one cold. Just the one.

But... each time I have a major defrost, I do have cold symptoms, as if whatever I caught was attempting to leave my body alone at last.

Now, I can hear most doctors telling me that it's impossible because the virus died six years ago. I may not be a GP, but I understand as much. And yet... Each and every time I get better, it's after a bout of fever, or a lot of sneezing, or a runny nose, or some coughing (and let's not forget that each morning my eyes are practically sealed shut because of the infection)... and I'm not catching a cold or some odd-ish virus every other fortnight.

Now, that thing I've caught six years ago may have changed me, but I have super strong antibodies (I've got a vaccine scar to prove it), and when I do catch something, it lasts for a week - at least.

And what happened this week? Wednesday night, I thought I was severely dehydrated (after all, it wouldn't have been surprising since I was back on stage this week, and I hadn't been drinking enough on Monday night), but it turns out it was the beginning of two days of fever cum runny nose and severe coughing.

Work was hell on Thursday, and I spent most of Friday plagued with fever.

Last night was mostly unpleasant, but today was okay.

Then, I've been unwell for about two days. Now, I did some research and it might not be entirely impossible for a common cold to last only three days (anyway, I was 'off' only for two days), but with my reactions, it has never happened to me - and I don't think this is what happened to me.

I can see most doctors ready to ship me to Bedlam, or growl at me that 'it is impossible', but since I probably caught an orphan disease, I'll be the judge of what oddities my body's guilty of producing.

Oh, and to the ones who are going to think that I'm smoking the lawn (and I'm not a GP), how do you explain that, after this bout of weird and severe fever, my cheek is almost back to normal?

Then again, in the 'weird' department, I've had a really noticeable improvement when it's 'that time of the month' (not complaining, but you'll have to admit that it is odd).

Amongst the few people who caught the same virus I caught, I am recovering, but not everybody's that lucky.

The Faculty washed its hands and abandoned me four years ago. 

It's a bit sad when unusual cases are dropped because they're too strange, or too complicated, or too 'I don't know what' (might it be 'not common enough'?).

I know I've got to be right about that thing that's in me (and leaving me), but professionals never listened to me or believed me from day one. Why would they listen to me or believe me today?

I'm "just" in that body, and I read it pretty well, but even if I'm right, most doctors would look at me as if I were a simpleton, and some would snort at my audacity to self-diagnose.

I loved House, but each time one of the characters said that everybody lies (meaning patients lie), I cringed. I keep telling the truth, and no one listens because it doesn't fit known symptoms. Perhaps I should write a TV pilot on this topic...

August 2006: Mensis Horribilis

Back in August 2006, I caught a cold that resulted in something that looked at lot (but was not) Bell's palsy.

In 2006, everything was a combination of weird things and complete bad luck. First, I’d had a major emotional shock in the spring, and I was still trying to recover from that, and then, as usual in the summer, I went to spend July and August with my relatives. Unfortunately, both months were quite cold (at least, by my standards) and back then, Mozer considered that I was a wimp if I put on a jumper when it was 18°C outside (now that she’s seen what her stupidity did, she doesn’t make fun of me if I say that I’m cold). [Yes, I was stupid enough to not put on a jumper, but why, in the first place, was she making fun of me for being cold? Frelling manipulator!]

For a few days, my right ear whistled from time to time, but I thought it was just odd, and I was quite cold. Then, it was time to head home and back to work. 

The day I left, I remember that the right corner of my lip was tickling from time to time, but I still thought it was something odd. I fell asleep on the train, and when I woke up, my speech was slurred for a minute or two, but I put that on exhaustion (I usually need about a week to recover from such a long stay in the country).

When I arrived home, there was nothing to warn me that the next morning I’d wake up with my face half-paralysed on the right side. My cranial nerve VII had frozen.

I was in a terrible state. I wasn’t hungry, and when I got up to get some water or visit the bathroom, the Earth was spinning too fast, and my balance was so awful that I nearly collided with walls (the first time I went outside to buy a few things, I almost hit a wall, which prompted me to unearth my grandfather’s cane in order to walk in a relatively straight line).

I waited for a couple of days, hoping that the nerve would come back to life (and I was in no shape to go anywhere: the first time I showered, I fainted briefly), and when it became obvious that there was no improvement whatsoever, I dragged myself to my GP (I realized later that I could have called him to come see me, but it hadn’t occurred to me since his surgery was across my street; truth be told, I was in no shape to think straight). When I saw him, he thought it might be a stroke even after I explained how I felt the bloody thing happen over days (mind you, no one in the medical ranks believed me until they saw the MRI).

He prescribed… *drum roll, please* aspirin and ear drops (incidentally, he was so focussed on me that the prescription was for a nose spray, and it was my chemist who spotted the mistake: I had to hop back to the surgery to get it changed). Three days later, I was still in the same state, and I was to go back to my classroom about a week later (I couldn’t speak properly and I was beginning to seriously worry: I had a temporary position, and if I didn’t go to work, I could kiss that position goodbye and my status was such that I couldn’t really go on the dole, or, at best, a jobseeker’s allowance would have been available for a few months, and then… straight under a bridge, or into the river).

I went back to my GP, who, by then, was openly making fun of my being paralysed. After long negotiations, he agreed to give me antibiotics and corticosteroids – for five days. What I learnt later was that he should have done that the first time I went to see him and the treatment should have been for ten days. The corticosteroids did some good, but not enough.

I went to see another GP, who told me it was too late, and we just had to wait. Still, wanting to cover his arse, he shipped me to a clinic where I had an MRI (that I had to pay almost in full, which still makes me growl because the bloody thing showed……… nothing: pretty normal since it was a twisted virus that had done me that, and it was not a stroke).

I went to see specialists, who were puzzled, clueless and generally at sea (seriously, twenty minutes on the Internet once I was well enough to sit at my desk taught me more about my condition than any of those “pros”!).

They told me I had to wait.

Then, it was time to go back to work, and I was shown the best and worst of mankind.

Here are a few examples:

Worst	Best
One colleague saw me walk in with my cane and tense face and ran to the staff room to tell the others how funny I was, and being complete plonkers, they ran to check my face for themselves. They thought that I couldn’t understand what they were doing!	A school secretary read the Riot Act to students she’d heard making fun of me telling them that I was a very good teacher, and one who was coming to teach them whilst I could have stayed home (I couldn’t afford that, but it was nice of her to lie about it).
People saw me walking slowly with a cane, but they rushed towards me, and I was the one who had to move away (note to self: if there’s a next time, use the cane to hit them).	My boss at job #2 did everything she could to make things easier for me.
On the bus, an old lady with a big bag, and obviously very tired, refused to sit down next to me. It was obvious that she was repulsed by the way I looked.	On the bus, an old gentleman came from the back to help and escort me to his seat (I haven’t recovered from that one!).

One of my colleagues at job #1 tried to warn me that healing might take time because he knew a man who’d had something like that for about a year. Back then, a year looked so bleedingly long.

I wasn’t really in pain. I was just awfully tired and sleeping like a happy log any chance I got. However, back then, if you’d told me that inhaling a kilo of cocaine, or flour, or whatever would have healed me, I’d have done it instantly.

Later, I heard and read about several similar cases. Nerve freezings that happened around the same time (I know a lady who’s still stuck on her sofa as the Earth keeps spinning way too fast when she stands). There might have been an odd virus around summer 2006.

Why am I writing this now? Because I’m almost (crossing everything that’s crossable) healed. Six frelling years later.

The nerve keeps improving, and my face mobility gets better and better. I am lucky that it’s still improving because after two years, the Faculty deems cases such as mine “hopeless”.

Why am I writing this now? Because the muscles on the left side of my face are a bit tense and I can’t bloody find if it’s just those poor muscles that are exhausted and tense after doing most of the job for six years, or if it’s something else (for once, the Internet isn’t helping, and my new GP is hundreds of miles away – and anyway, I find him too clueless for my taste).

I do wonder if my cranial nerve VII on the right is linked to the one on the left, and if the tension is a new symptom of my healing (incidentally, if such a thing happens to me again, I’ll blow a fuse).

There was an interesting side-consequence to all this: it showed me where my real friends are.

I’m glad I typed this testimony and got that off my chest.