Wanna Gag?

I didn't want to gag.  The doctor made me.  So, to cut direct to the conclusion, my endoscopy gave pretty close to an all clear, nothing sinister going on inside these guts.  There's still a test result to come for a bacteria the gastro dude felt was a possibility but there's nothing in the way of polyps or weird stuff happening.

The endoscopy was kind of unpleasant.  Not painful, not particularly horror story material, but unpleasant.  I opted for sedation and the throat spray, one or other of which was meant to deaden my gag reflex.  Not my gag reflex, no sirree, that's live and well and undeterred by such things as mere medication.  It put up a good fight against the tube despite all the breathing and relaxing I was doing in a token gesture kind of a way.  Difficult to focus on those things when your body has other ideas.  And a long liquorice like tube went into me and at some point it came out and I was wheeled into recovery where I could quietly watch my resting heart rate and see it rise when I stressed out about farting.  That's a side effect of them pumping air into your stomach so their camera can have a good look around.  It feels slightly anti social even though you know the other three or four women in the room are presumably having the same issues.

Then there were instructions.  A responsible adult for four hours.  Fella found that horrifying, what, spend four full hours with his girlfriend?  Perish the thought.  Then the alarming don't operate machinery or kitchen appliances.  Wait.  Hold on right there. Not even the kettle?  No, apparently I'm not safe to operate the kettle.  No driving for 24 hours, fine, no worries.  No big decisions. I was glad about the no big decisions.  After we walked around Sainsbury's and then on to Co-op for chorizo (not sold in our dinky Sainsbury's), I wanted to buy ice cream in co-op.  Turned out we'd already bought ice cream in Sainsbury's.  Big decisions would clearly have been a bit of an issue.

And all continues, business as usual.

Mid May

What a curious time of year this has proved to be for me over the years.  Today I saw on facebook the wedding anniversary of two of my friends.  Sixteen years it's been.  I missed their wedding because I wrote off my car and had whiplash.  On the same day as I wrote off the car, I got the keys to my house - the home I shared with Dave from 20th May 2000 until his death in 2005.

Three years later in May 2003 I got married.

Fast Forward to 2012 and I met my current fella 20th May.

And every single year I still send my mother in law flowers for her birthday, always with a twinge of sadness because she lost her son and he can't send her a present, or a card, or visit as he used to, and my meagre offering, a symbol of affection and caring is all I can do.

This year is also proving distressing, firstly for reasons I can't quite put into words relating to an old friend, secondly tomorrow's endoscopy which is quietly concerning me.  It's like a rite of passage into a stage of life where medical procedures begin ...

Perry Many

It seems to me it's not something anything attempts to warn you about, the peri menopause.  Mind you, thinking back, I'm not entirely sure anyone did anything to prepare me for periods or for period pains or for the pre period madness.  Maybe back then a couple of friends talked about their periods, because I knew what was going on at my first "showing" as I believe the polite phrase may be.

But in your thirties / early forties, nobody tells you there's this stage which happens between fertility and non fertility, as it were.  This bit in the middle where things start to change.  So things change and you start to seek an explanation.  You talk to friends about bits and pieces, you read the internet, and eventually, finally, it dawns on you that these body changes aren't your fault, that you're not messing up, that you're not dying of some outlandish illness, and for some of them, there's a chance you can do something about them.  You also realise you could have it a lot worse.  There's a veritable smorgasbord of options you can select for how your perimenopause is going to hit you today or next week.

So, I got a massive bad dose of the jittery hormones and a dose of unwanted body fat as part of the gift aging gave to me.  And decided I could no longer be a passive passenger of my body at this point.  I was going to seek help.  And I sought help.  I put aside my usual conventional approaches and booked in at the Alternative Health clinic.  Wincing a little bit as I did so.  And a month or so later, things are normalising - in the way I want normal to be, not in the way my body had decided for me.  A month of fasted pre breakfast exercise washed down with a prescribed amount of smoothie which is all the food I get until lunch and I have energy back, the want to get out and do something with myself has returned.  My old shape has started to return, my waist has definition and my waistband is not obscured by a somewhat alarming roll of belly fat.  Starflower and Agnus Castus and I seem to have levelled out, mood wise, hell, sometimes I even feel quite smiley!

Still, I wonder why nobody warned me ...