No! No! Crusty's Gotta Go!

Dear Liberal Party: DO NOT ALLOW Crusty Clark to become your leader. Let’s get an “anybody except Crusty” movement going. She’s vile.

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Thursday began with a walk under bright skies with Her Highness—or, as I think of her now, Bladder Bitch. While we walked, the throw carpet that was down by the guest rooms, was being washed. It was the source of the stink. It was wonderful to come home to absolutely no odor whatsoever.

We walked three times, and I went into the village with HH to fetch a few supplies, because last night, I partied. To be honest though, the night was no different from any other of late, but I was feeling very happy to be odor-free. Last night, I took HH out for a walk just before going to bed. This will be a new habit for us.

It was so, so, so wonderful to wake up to an odor-free home. Today will be a good day. With every intake of breath, I notice the lack of scent. And that’s a good thing because we are back to wet and dark weather. We’ll walk with our friends this morning, and then stay warm by the fire for the day.

Diversions

Each day is the same. Each day is structured around meals and walks. There are naps, usually two, and there is the computer. I subscribe to three YouTube channels: Martijn Doolard, a Hollander who bought two derelict stone buildings on six hectares of Italian Alp land; Bram and Simon, two fellows, one German, the other Dutch, bought an old farm in France, and Eric is a Swede who has built and is living in a log home on remote family land.

I’ve been watching Martijn from the beginning of his journey. I’m excited to see his weekly vlog every Sunday morning. It’s better than television because it’s real, and all of these fellows are good at filming, editing and scripting. I respect them and their achievements, and I am drawn to their personalities.

And because of these three subscriptions, YouTube is always offering me a palette of frontier adventurers building cabins in remote places. Watching them all, humbles me. These guys to electrical, plumbing, concrete, solar, etc. Eric is unbelievable with wood. He is a magician, and he has very nice thighs. I really like watching people build things. I have since childhood. Watching these videos has replaced reading as my primary source of entertainment. I also watch baking and medical videos.

Each day, I get a thrill from checking off another day as I get closer to my heart tests. I’ll be crushed if nothing is revealed.

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Last night, I heard Sheba jump off the bed. Soon afterwards, she was back, jumping back onto the bed, and it made me wonder: Did she get up to pee in the house by any chance? So, I got up, fetched a flashlight and discovered that she had peed on a carpet in the hall. Stink mystery solved. Henceforth, I shall be walking her late at night before we go to bed, and today I wash all my carpets.

It's bright and there are many patches of blue sky today. I shall Zoom with my UK FND group, do some chores, have naps and walk with Her Highness. This afternoon’s walk will be a nice one because it is so mild and bright.

 

Oh Stink!

Shots from Steve's living room looking west in LA.

My gazillion Daffodils are already up and they’re two inches tall! And my Clematis is covered in short shoots, in the beginning of January. I can’t believe it! On Monday morning, scanning the news online, I saw a headline that our January will be warm and dry. So, when we went trail walking and the clouds thinned and the day turned bright, it felt to me, having seen the shoots and the headline, that Winter was over. Tuesday morning, however, it felt like Winter again. The humid and cool air had me looking forward to getting home and the fire as we walked together through Elder Cedar.

For the past two weeks, I have been trying to find the source of a nasty odor in the living room. I looked under everything and in everything in case there was a dead animal in the house. I found nothing, so next came sniff testing everything. I hope nobody was looking in my front window as I moved around the living room on all fours smelling all over the furniture and rugs.

Two weeks of seeking the answer to the odor problem led to naught, so I spent a good part of Monday trying to find a carpet and upholstery cleaning service that would come to Gabriola, thinking it might be pet stink on my chaise and chair. I couldn’t find anyone who would come to Gabriola, and so I started looking for places to rent equipment, but it gets very expensive because they charge by the hour and there’s no way I could get to Nanaimo, come home and do all the cleaning, and get back to Nanaimo on the same day. Yesterday morning, therefore, I bought a portable steam upholstery cleaner on Amazon. For $140 I got the cleaner and the proper shampoo. Buying it was cheaper than renting one. It won’t be here for ten days or so, but I’m less stressed by the smell because I know that it may soon be gone. 

A spark of insight had me decide to wash my floors thoroughly in case there’s old pee between the planks. It really disturbs me to have a stinky home, and when we walked yesterday morning, when we came in the front door, the stink hit me like a hammer. It must me here, I thought, in my front door hall somewhere. That’s when I remembered Sheba peeing here when she was a puppy. I always cleaned it up, but what if I missed cleaning up some pee she left during the night? I washed the floor in the hall three times before we went for our afternoon walk.

We went to Elder Cedar to walk, and at one point as the sun broke through the clouds and lit up a glade of fallen trees and some standing beauties where everything—everything—is coated in thick brilliant green moss and moss hangs in thick strands off the branches. I burst into tears at the beauty of it all. As we walked it got brighter and brighter, and clear blue sky was everywhere. Oh, I felt good! And then, when we got home and came into the house… barely any stink!

Clear skies and no stink made my late afternoon one to remember. And the evening was just as uplifting because I was full of joy. I got notice of our upcoming ASL classes, and I chose not to register. I want to avoid people, especially people I don’t really know. I’ve been having seizures again, not many, but they are back and that was part of the reasoning behind my decision to stop learning ASL—that, plus all the medical appointments I have coming up.

This is so sad. My life is so dull, I’m reduced to writing about a stink in my home in Pinecone Park.

I've Been Re-Reading My Blog

One April morning in 2016, I woke up and had a massive violent seizure. Imagine that happening to you. I lay on the floor beside my bed confused by what had happened and exhausted from all the jerking and shaking. I went to the phone and called someone and discovered that I couldn’t speak.

For a year, almost every blog post was about the horror my life had become. My most vivid and powerful memory is not about a seizure, it was going out for a walk outdoors for the first time, about three weeks after my first seizure. It was a beautiful warm summer day, and I remember walking down a lane, because lanes were empty of people, and I had earplugs in my ears, two pairs of sunglasses on, I was wearing a very bulky coat and I had on my roller-skating pads to protect me if I had a seizure.

For the ensuing two years, almost every blog post was about my symptoms or insights provided to me from Dr. Shoja. But my new life was emerging. I’d moved to Gabriola, and I had lots to write about besides my mental health. My posts about my symptoms, particularly my speech, slowed and then stopped.

Two years ago, my symptoms got worse, and I returned to the care of Dr. Shoja (I’d taken a couple of years off from seeing her.) Soon after going back into her care, she used the word “neglect” do describe my childhood and the cause of my condition. That triggered a return to a long, long series of posts about my mental health as I came to terms with her revelations about the impact of trauma on body and soul.

My breakdown was the biggest challenge of my life. I never thought I’d endure anything worse than the kidney stones and migraines of my early years. It took years of living with my condition and years of therapy to accept and adapt to life with C-PTSD and FND. Now I am well into this new and very different life, a life that is profoundly different from how I was living before my breakdown.

Since the onset of my condition, I have wanted to have a radio to listen to, and I listen exclusively to classical music. I neither listened to radio nor classical music before becoming ill. I live on an island now, I have pets, a huge garden, a car … a generator! I chop wood every day.

But the biggest change is in my mind where I form ideas and compose words to speak and write. When I first became ill, I was sent to the Pacific Speech Clinic at Vancouver General Hospital. That is how I met Dr. Shoja. I supplemented my sessions with her with research and participation in speech and FND support groups, and dozens of times I have heard my condition being described like this: “Think of it this way: Your brain is a computer—the hardware—and FND is a software problem.”

It meant nothing to me at all when I first heard it. I wanted information, and lots of it, not trite sound bite phrases. It was too abstract; I needed hardcore facts to understand how being neglected as a child can cause me to have a mental breakdown late in life and come out of it as a totally altered person. Now, that phrase has great meaning to me. I love the metaphor. And if the brain is hardware, so is the rest of the body. 

I’m having trouble reading and walking. When I try to read, after as few as several paragraphs, the book is on my chest, and I am dozing. I wake up, and I want to move around, and I do just that. And then I’ll try to read again, and I just cannot stick it. I seem to be unable to settle, but I can when I watch TV. Even then, though, I’m up and down. The walking issue is due to my heart (maybe). 

I discovered my inability to concentrate when I moved here. I built myself a studio—with a fireplace.I’d always built things in my home, so having a dedicated creative space was a dream come true. But I have not used it. For one thing, it’s expensive to heat two buildings, but my desire to create died.

Now reading is suffering. As I say, I am pissed. I shall keep trying. I’ve been napping much more, I notice, too. Winters are hard. They press down on me. The fireplace is the antidote.

I think I may have more energy and feel more myself if the problem making me so weak can be fixed. Three weeks today, I get my first test, an echocardiogram. Nine days later, I get two MIBI scans (nuclear medicine). Then I wait to hear the results. There is something wrong, but will they find out what it is?