So a summary of 2023, to be fair it’s probably gonna be a short post. What would normally have been some highlights from the year will be replaced with some things that just happened throughout the year and even at that there wasn’t much and certainly not “highlights” just things I remember.
The year started off pretty badly and continued that way, although not to the extent that it started. I wasn’t able to sleep and was coughing badly, but it was the weekend and new year so I didn’t want to phone the hospital as I had a few things that had to be done and needed a weekday for it.
A couple of days later I did and ended up being in hospital for 4 weeks on oxygen and so bad for a few nights that I wasn’t even able to be moved to intensive care and it wasn’t until the 4th day that they managed to rush me up to one of the wards to settle in. The chest infection did improve but I lost a lot of physical ability and my chest was very restrictive and was getting very fatigued light headed and short on breath.
I finally got home home and at that stage with all the antibiotics I started running to the toilet, that lasted a whole month and eventually stopped in March. At that stage I thought “great I can maybe start doing things again” but no, I spent March recovering still, trying to build up my fitness but no matter how hard i tried it just never really improved and with the increase and then decrease in steroids made my leg pains a lot worse.
With the reduction of steroids my chest was getting more and more restrictive too and not able to get enough air into me when I did any more effort than normal.
It was getting harder and harder to do things on the treadmill and by March some days I was in agony and I couldn’t put any weight on my legs, thankfully this only happened to one leg at a time and not both. If it was ever both I would be in a lot of trouble and would have to crawl everywhere just using my arms.
This happened fairly regularly for about 3 or 4 months and there didn’t really seem to be any actual triggers for it, it took a couple of days to peak and I was never really sure what exactly caused it, if anything. Turned out that I had fractured both hips and there was something that was triggering them getting sore, even if it was just sitting relaxing.
I done… 4 maybe 5 road trips in the car, one was up the Antrim Coast and that was due to a chance conversation I had with one of the staff in the hospital as I recognised him from a couple of weeks before in a different ward as he was testing the O2 supplies and a flashback on facebook, at the time it felt like a waste of time and I didn’t enjoy it.
Another was around Ards Peninsula, it was nice to go round there and see the changes that had occurred since the last time I was there and I did see a couple of dolphins too which was reminiscent of the times I went out quite regularly and things like that happened all the time.
Another trip was to get pictures of red phone boxes in Fermanagh. That one irritated me as the phone kept disconnecting from the car and kept losing the satnav and the one I got for in the car wasn’t doing things as simply as it should have, but that is how I would like things to be just getting up and going off to places I have no idea and taking pictures. But it was incredibly sore and I suffered for it afterwards, and during… Which is the way of things.
The one good thing that came of all this was that I started watching more films as I just wasn’t able to do much else, I was still reading a fair bit prior the whole time and probably after this I did cut down on reading as I was finding it harder and harder to keep attention on anything.
I was getting bored and annoyed with TV and social media, and so I’ve been cutting them out little by little and been becoming more and more reclusive, not ignoring people but just not taking any steps to talk or interact with people.
The only thing I started this year was going to the cinema and that’s just watching a film with slightly different scenery and the cinema I go to is very quiet, a lot of the time I’m the only person in the screen.
I have continued to go to the bookclub each month, but even these I sometimes really struggle being bothered to do, the cinema isn’t too bad cause at least I can go another day but the bookclub is a specific time and place, so I really need to push myself to go there when I’m just not feeling up for it, I do enjoy it each time but like with most things do I enjoy it enough to make it worth while suffering afterwards?
Most of the time the answer to that is no and so I am losing interest in everything.
It’s getting harder and harder to sleep, taking hours to get to sleep regularly and struggling to stay asleep with the different pains, then when I feel like I should be getting up struggling because I know how sore it is going to be to take those steps back downstairs but it’s better than just lying there thinking and staring at the back of my eyelids.
Then I continue to sit and watch tv and read all day, contemplating what I have to do and waiting until the last possible moment to go and do as much as I can in the one run before returning home and then suffering afterwards. And repeat.
I should have higher hopes for 2024 but I really don’t, IF anything is to happen like getting the hip surgery it will be a long recovery for the first leg and then the same for the next. And even if they do work perfectly as they should I still have all the other issues which will continue on afterwards and probably even get worse too. So I’m not in the most hopeful of moods about anything either.
But I have good days and bad days, I’m content enough with sitting about reading and watching films, but I would like to do a bit more gaming which I haven’t really done this year. Maybe I’ll get a bit of an interest in that again next year…