Dear Diary...

This is not a Happy New Year… in fact it’s begun with a Huh.?!! Bear came home from work yesterday moody, antsy and with something very clearly on his mind. I said nothing, giving him the time and space he usually needs to collect his thoughts and find the English words to express what he needed to say, and waited. He said nothing. He spent the evening being distant, moody and didn’t want to interact with me or the dog. Which is pretty strange in itself, but when midnight struck and I got a peck on the cheek and a very lacklustre ‘Happy New Year’, I knew something was very seriously wrong. The New Year dawned and Bear got up and went to work, still saying nothing; and I spend the day cleaning, cooking and doing laundry, worrying about what’s going on in Bear’s head and if I’ve done or said something without realising it that had hurt him, and then of course, tried to think back over previous months to try to figure out what it could have been. I am known for being flippant, undiplomatic and not taking things too seriously so it could have been anything in all honesty.

Thankfully, it wasn’t me… well, not in that respect anyway. Once home, and with a mug of coffee beside him, Bear’s problem, as he expressed it was that life had become joyless and mundane, was boring and he couldn’t take it anymore. Gee, thanks buddy.! 😦 He cried and was really upset that life had taken this turn and said that he wanted to get back the social life he had before he met me.! He wanted to be more sociable, hang out with friends more and be free to do things when he wanted, but that he didn’t want to start resenting me because he felt he couldn’t. And there it was… that massive HUH.?! So, it was my fault.? I had been holding him back from being the social butterfly he really was for the past 13 years.? What the fuck.?! I gave his words some serious thought. I can totally relate, being indoors 24/7, staring at the same four walls with a dog for company but no intelligent conversation is soul-destroying. It’s boring as fuck, and if you’re not predisposed to isolation and being at the mercy of your own thoughts, it can make you feel like ending it all. So I totally got how Bear could be this upset and sympathised, but it being my fault.. go fuck yourself.!

Not only have I never held him back from doing whatever he’s wanted to do, when he’s wanted to do it, I’ve actively encouraged him to go out with his friends when they’ve invited him to gigs, concerts and movies, or just out for a beer. He is the one who refuses the invitations, saying he’s tired, or not feeling up to it or he has to work early the next day, so thanks but no thanks. So his friends stopped inviting him. Now for those of you who aren’t aware, I am an introvert. I have been people-averse for most of my life and choose to be separate from them as much as I possibly can. There are less than a handful of people in this world I am genuinely happy to be around. Over the past 13 years that has not changed. For the past 13 years Bear has insisted that he too is an introvert, that he’s very much a home body and prefers to spend his evenings at home with me rather than going out. He prefers my company to that of other people’s and he’s very content to be at home every night. It took him two years to introduce me to his group of friends, because he said, he wanted to keep me all to himself.

Which is complete and utter bullshit.!! Bear is the most extroverted introvert I’ve ever met. He has numerous Whatsapp groups full of people he chats to all day and night. He has a Twitter following of hundreds of people he interacts with daily and he spends all day and night on those apps chatting to people. Making me the scapegoat because he can’t make a decision for himself is not cool and I’m not taking the flack for it.! He’s made this rut for himself and dragged me into it. He feels that if he goes out at night, after being at work all day I will be lonely, because of course I am not a grown ass woman of 50 years who has entertained herself for the best part of those 50 years without any problem at all.! He feels that he can’t go out without me, because it’s not fair that I don’t get to go out all that often because of my mobility issues. Oh boy.! So basically, because my health issues have caused me mobility issues since before the day I met him, he feels he has to baby-sit me, even though he has been told and understands that I don’t need him to look after me. I’d been going it alone for nearly a full decade before I even met him,

I don’t know if I find it funny or infuriating that he thinks I’m so bloody helpless. Like I need a big strong man because I’m so fucking weak and feeble and need a personal guardian, for fuck’s sake.! What brought this avalanche of bullshit down on me was his friend Bas going to a gig that Bear had very much wanted to go to. When Bear asked Bas why he didn’t mention he was going, Bas said he thought Bear didn’t go out anymore. Which really hit Bear hard, understandably.. but Bear did this to himself. Pretending to be an introvert when he clearly is not has fooled everyone but me.

What I don’t get is why the hell he’s done this to himself.? Because of me is not a viable excuse nor reason. It’s total bullcrap, and he knows it.! I did not spend 10 months out of every year alone with two kids (who are also incapable of intelligent conversation) for 15 fucking years to suddenly need to be baby-sat. Yes, I have mobility issues, but they’re not permanent and when Dr. ‘you need to walk more’ gets his head out of his ass and deals with the problem instead of blaming the patient I might actually be able to walk like a real woman again, instead of a drunk on a pub crawl (although admirably I have that shit down pat). What he’s done is forced himself to be more like me to make me like him more/not walk away (possibly).? I don’t know, it all seems stupidly ridiculous to me, but he has and it’s backfired on him, as these things always do, but am I fuck going to be the excuse for it. You did it, you own it.! And Happy New Fucking Year to you too.! Dick.!

Blatantly Fucking Incompetent.!

There are 3 able-bodied people in this house and all of them are blatantly fucking incompetent.! On Thursday I went into hospital for my total right hip replacement surgery. I came home 10 hours later to piles of dirty dishes, dog hair all over the floor, dog food teeming with flies and no support aids. It was the beginning of what has been the most disgusted and deeply disappointed I have ever been with the people in this house.

Just over two weeks ago, Bear’s teenaged children came to stay for three weeks for their Summer holidays. They are 16 and 17. All they’ve done for the past two weeks and four days is sit on their asses and stare at a screen. They make their own breakfasts and lunches and get their own drinks, leaving crumbs, juice, peanut butter, cutlery, dirty plates and glasses on the kitchen counter, making absolutely no effort to tidy up after themselves.

Bear can’t seem to keep less than 2 metres of kitchen countertop clean and spends his time sat in front of a screen too. Meanwhile I can barely walk, am lurching around on crutches in pain that’s barely controlled by my own self control, which right about now is slipping dangerously.! Yesterday afternoon I went off on Bear because for the third time in as many days I’ve had to clean up the sink surround in the kitchen because he hasn’t.

There’s food waste left on the countertop; breadcrumbs, sticky squash rings from the bottom of their glasses, small pieces of dog food strewn across the countertop, all of it being a sumptuous feast for the flies and nobody gives a shit except me.! As much as I’d like to leave that hazard to my health right there for someone else to deal with, I’m not stupid enough to believe anyone but me will even THINK about cleaning up that revolting mess.

They haven’t even thought to get the vacuum out to get rid of all the dog hair that’s like a carpet over the floors. The kitchen floor needs cleaning, the toilets need cleaning, Bear’s done one load of dark laundry in six days and no-one’s bothered to wipe down the door handles or stair rails with a hygiene wipe. I could fucking scream at the lack of effort being made for me by my ‘family’. Of course I’m the bad guy. Typically emotional, or just lashing out because I’m in pain.

Which to some extent might be true, but my pain doesn’t come from the traumatic surgery I’ve undergone, it’s from the hurt I feel that over the past six days, the people I am closest to have shown me that all the time I spend cleaning this house, making sure it is hygienically clean and ensuring they are safe from germs that could make them seriously ill is of absolutely no value at all.

Moving House & Lofgren’s Syndrome OR Seriously Crap Timing.!

In early March, Bear and I decided now was the time to start the process of moving house. We’ve been in this hellhole for more than nine years and finally the house prices had started to rise, so we could finally afford to get out and find something new in a much better neighbourhood. So he called around a few local estate agents and made appointments for them to call in and give us their best quote on what they thought we could sell our house for, bearing in mind our obnoxious shithead neighbours.

The first agent didn’t like dogs and gave us a lower than expected re-sale price. We crossed him off our list. The second agent loved dogs, was bouncy, smiley and personable and told us he could easily sell our house and gave us a pretty satisfying price. I hate bouncy people, but held off crossing him off the list because he loved my fur baby and had no problem being jumped on, sniffed and licked. The third agent liked the dog, but stank of cigarettes and the dog gave him a wide berth.

He gave us a similar value as the second agent, and mentioned that he’d already got a client in mind, an investor in houses in our area. We gave that some thought, but decided against it and waited for number 4. Who was late, very late and then despite liking my dog (yes, I do make life decisions based on peoples’ attitudes towards my dog) gave us a low re-sale price. I crossed him off the list. The following weekend the children stayed and as per, the girl child was riddled with germs and decided as is her wont, to spread them around.

Thankfully, I didn’t get ill, but Bear did. Oh, how he got ill… within a day he was coughing and wheezing, by the Sunday he had huge, red sores on his lower legs and felt exhausted. He took the children home on Sunday evening then collapsed on the sofa and slept until I woke him up to go to bed. Over the next three days he got steadily worse. The lesions on his lower legs spread and got bigger and more painful, he was feverish and coughed all the time and felt like death. He could barely stand up because his legs and feet were agonising if he wasn’t horizontal. He called the second estate agent back and secured his services and then called the doctor.

At first the doctor thought it was erysipelas, so she prescribed antibiotics and sent Bear to the hospital dermatologist, who said it looked a lot like Erysipelas, but it wasn’t, it was something else and worse. Back to the doctor, who hearing Bear’s breathing, referred him to a lung specialist and pulmonologist. Where he had a battery of tests as they tried to confirm what they suspected it to be, Lofgren’s syndrome, the acute form of Sarcoidosis. X-rays showed he had lesions at the bottom of his trachea, at the junction with his lungs, as well as on his legs, arms and left hand.

The antibiotics had no effect because all this had been caused by a virus so Bear was left to suffer and struggle until his second appointment a week later with the lung specialist. Meanwhile, the second estate agent had come back, taken measurements and informed us that we had two weeks to get the house all bar emptied for the brochure photos, and then our house would be put on the market. Two weeks to sort through nine years of dumping stuff in the cellar we no longer used and getting rid of it and cleaning the house to the point of spotlessness.

Two weeks. I rose to the challenge, because I had no choice, Bear could do nothing but sit up on the sofa and rest, he had no energy, was grey and couldn’t stop coughing, so I did it all myself. In two weeks, I went through the cellar like a whirlwind, sorting through every box and bag, dumping 80% of it in a huge pile outside the back door to go in a skip and cleaned every room until it shone, hiding our personal possessions away in stylish boxes so the place looked like something from a magazine. The house hadn’t been so minimalistic since just before we’d moved in.

During that first week, the hospital phoned. They wanted to prep me for my hip replacement surgery three days later. I said no. I wasn’t leaving Bear alone when he was so ill. I needed to be there and I needed to get that house sorted out or we wouldn’t be going anywhere and I sure as hell wasn’t staying after getting Bear this far. I asked if I could postpone until we had moved and were settled and Bear was better and was told I could. They’d try to fit me in whenever I was ready. That is another reason I love Dutch healthcare.

The last weekend, Bear’s friends rallied round, one, an ex-military man and his son came to help me dump everything in a skip we’d hired, boxes of stuff that hadn’t seen the light of day in almost 30 years, boxes of rubble from the downstairs toilet project that had never been completed and the upstairs project that only just had. Another friend plastered the downstairs toilet walls so it looked at least like it was supposed to be something, and another came to take the dog out for a long walk. The poor little fella hadn’t had a walk in almost three weeks and couldn’t believe his luck.

By the time the photographer turned up to do the photos, the house was all but bare. She was in and out in 10 minutes and two days later, our house hit the market with a pretty healthy selling price. Now we had to keep the house clean and bare for the viewings. Which was not easy when it rained all the next week and the dog gave not one fuck about cleanliness. In the first week we had 17 viewings and took the dog over to The Mommy’s, to be spoiled rotten and filled with treats.

It was the first time she’d seen her son since he got ill and she was shocked. He was still grey, barely able to move and struggled to breathe after walking only 20 feet, he looked like a waif, having lost a lot of muscle mass and while he hadn’t lost weight, he looked like he’d dropped 50 lbs. He had no appetite, which definitely wasn’t him, and he could only eat bland food and drink water. He still had lesions but some were starting to fade. The coughing was now a major problem. On Friday of that week, we went back to the lung specialist.

He prescribed the highest strength anti-inflammatory painkillers to try to quash the infection and stomach lining pills. He took down every detail of what Bear had been going through from onset of symptoms to that day. He was convinced it was Lofgren’s syndrome and told Bear it would start to ease and should be gone within the next 5 weeks. Five weeks is a bloody long time when each day stretches before you lying on the sofa, with no energy, no appetite and coughing yourself hoarse all day.

Appointments with the pulmonologist, rheumatologist and repeated blood tests and lung capacity tests followed. They all knew it was what they’d thought it was but the pulmonologist wanted Bear to undergo a lung biopsy. He refused. He had enough trouble breathing as it was. Slowly with the help of the anti-inflammatory painkillers Bear started to get better, some days were a small step forward and some days were a huge step back. It took seven weeks for Bear to be free of the lesions on his skin and for the coughing to finally ease.

It’s been 13 weeks since Bear first got ill and he’s still not better. He still coughs in the mornings, tires easily and has limited energy. He can’t do very much to help with the house move, but at least he’s been able to view a house a day. We found a house in the same area his Mom lives, that has a similar configuration as this one. We move in four weeks.

My Body’s Trying To Kill Me.!

After more than a year of putting up with my body trying to kill me, I finally went to see the doc and ended up here… in an MRI machine. It took it upon itself in early October 2020 to begin a campaign of terror in an effort to either kill me (my preferred option) or convince me that it was finally time to do something about the pain in my hips and lower back that had been going on, on and off, for more than a decade. Now, I know I have osteoarthritis, I’ve had it for nigh on sixteen years and was diagnosed in Germany in 2007-8 and I know the majority of my pain is caused by it, but the sudden onset of agonising pain was a surprise.

Apparently my body had had enough of said surprise, so proceeded to attempt a coup, randomly throwing me against stairs, the sofa, the bed and any other hard and very painful object by making my right leg give way beneath me. My balance wasn’t up to par before this bodily charade, but at this point I couldn’t even stand on my own two feet without being in agonising pain. I conceded the point and went to my favourite sadist, who prodded, poked and amazingly didn’t decide to stick a needle in me.!! Instead he sent me to the knee specialist, as we were of the opinion that my knee was likely the culprit. The knee was almost entirely innocent.

The knee specialist confirmed the knee was innocent, but felt the issue might be neurological, so referred me to the neurologist who sent me for an x-ray. Which solved the mystery in one foul swoop. My issue wasn’t neurological either. The guilty party was my right hip, which with no cartilage support to keep it from rattling around in there, was happily rubbing up against my sciatic nerve when the fancy took it, which was what was causing my leg to collapse and causing the agonising pain. With no cartilage left in my hip joint there was only one solution… a referral to the orthopaedic surgeon.

Who took one look at the lack of cartilage and told me I needed a hip replacement, stat.! So here we are… lying in an extremely cosy (yes, I’m claustrophobic) and very noisy magnetised tube, with headphones on listening to the radio between scans and wondering if I’ll develop superpowers…

The Sadist And The Skin Tag OR Never Trust A Doctor With A Silly Grin

Yesterday I went to the doctor’s because for the past three weeks my hands have been permanently hurting. I have arthritis in my hands and wrists and it’s been getting ever worse over the past year, but only recently have I noted that the aching pain just doesn’t go away by itself anymore. I also went because I had a large skin tag on my side from my bra strap rubbing. Now, my doctor is about 6 foot tall, blond, blue-eyed and always smiling, he’s a perky little bundle of joy, a husband and father, and the owner of a cute little golden Labrador. He’s also a sadistic fuck.! Which is probably why I like him. He has a cabinet in his examination room I call the Cupboard of DOOM because he keeps all the needles and other sadistic toys in there, bringing them out with a flourish that is very unbecoming in consideration of what they are and what they’re for.

Yesterday, after determining that the only thing he could do for my hands was prescribe a stronger painkiller, he invites me to step into his lair and sets about examining the skin tag, informing me he has just the thing for it. With his eyes alight from the huge grin on his face, he unlocks the Cupboard of DOOM, reaches in and with a flourish retrieves a small, flat blue box and shows it to me, as if looking for my approval. He holds it in the palm of one hand and opens it with the other, where on a bed of blue velvet-looking, moulded plastic lies a white curved wand with a square tab on the top and a two pronged round plastic disc with a corresponding square hole. Lying the open box on the examination bed next to where I was standing, he removes both, attaches the pronged disc to the wand and holds it up, telling me with an evil glint in his eyes ‘we’re going to BURN it off!’

“What.?!” I was expecting a cryotherapy wand, had braced myself for the sharp pain of Liquid Nitrogen like you get with warts, but no, that sadistic bastard was fully intent on burning that poor defenceless little skin tag and by design ME with electricity and Oh. My. God. Did it fucking hurt.! It took 3 ‘cuts’ to get rid of the tag and another three prods to cauterise the wound. Meanwhile I’m hissing through my teeth and biting my tongue to keep from cursing him out because not only can I smell my burning flesh, I can see around my raised arm that he’s loving every second of inflicting excruciating pain on me. It’s his thing. When he’s finally finished I breathe a huge sigh of relief and watch as he mops up the last of the blood with a tissue… and there is more than a fair amount of blood on that tissue. “That was a big one” he chuckles as he gets a pad and a large white plaster to dress my still throbbing side and then goes to wash his hands.

How To Kill A Marriage, Secretly & Long Covid

On October 30th last year my brother walked out on his wife of 26 years. They’d been together 33 years before he decided, on a whim to start afresh with someone new, saying nothing at all to his wife and two of his three children. The month before he left, he took his wife away for the weekend and couldn’t keep his hands off her, as she tells it, he was loving, attentive, constantly wanting to be beside her or touching her, telling her he loved her every single day. The night before he left he initiated sex with her and was gentle, considerate, loving and sensual. The next morning, he got up, made her breakfast in bed and told her he was going to visit his Mum and he’d see her later, he even kissed her goodbye. She texted our Mum to let her know he was on his way. Mum texted back to let her know they were out and would be all day, so to tell my brother not to bother. So my brother’s wife texts him to let him know our Mum wasn’t in and to not waste the journey. He texts her back to say he’s not coming back, he’s left her.!

She was absolutely devastated. They had no issues that she knew of. They’d never kept secrets from each other, as far as she knew, and to top it all, she had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer.! She was a mess and justifiably so. Three days after he left, his house keys, phone and a note arrived in the post. The note just said he’d taken his name off the rent agreement for their house and all the bills were now in her name alone. The problem was she had no money. He’d gone behind her back and taken his name off of everything that was a part of their lives together, even closing down their joint bank account. Now she is alone, penniless and a month behind on the rent and all the bills. She can’t find work, because she has arthritis in her knees and ankles and she hasn’t worked since the day she gave it up to look after her firstborn back in 1992, so she has no valid qualifications. She can’t get benefits because all his stuff is still in her house and the DWP don’t believe that he has left her. She has no idea what to do with it.

My brother is living it large. He transferred his security job to a new hospital, lives with a woman in Bridlington, who has an autistic teenaged son at home, and only pays half her rent and his share of her bills. He gave his laptop to a mate after cleaning the whole system back to factory settings. He’s deleted all his old social media and opened new accounts. He hasn’t spoken to his wife or eldest daughter since the day he left. He spoke to his son on New Year’s Day and he only has contact with his youngest daughter when she initiates it. He’s obliterated everything he used to cherish, deliberately and cruelly and while he may be my brother, if I ever see that vindictive fucker’s face again, I’ll paste it on a wall as self defence for his poor wife.

It has been nearly three months since Bear tested positive for Covid and he still is not well. After the initial seven days of self-isolation, he felt better and seemed better in himself, other than experiencing a brain fog and being out of breath after climbing the stairs. He went back to work and was sent home within an hour after being doubled over trying to catch his breath after climbing a flight of stairs at work. He was sent to the doctors and given a fortnight off work to recover. After that fortnight he went back to work, still experiencing the brain fog, lack of breath and having a heart rate that was too fast. He worked four hours and was sent home again, exhausted. He slept for six hours.

He is not the only one of his work colleagues experiencing Long Covid symptoms. There are now four staff members who are unable to work more than 2-4 hours a day without feeling exhaustion and breathlessness. Bear worked for four hours every other day in December and was checked by the doctor who found no discernible improvement in his condition, so he is now working 2 hours, every other day. His health has not improved. He is not able to attend Covid Recovery Therapy because his heart rate is too high and his breathing too laboured. An otherwise strong, healthy man has been left with a limited lung capacity, a loss of memory and a too-fast heartbeat, all thanks to Covid.

My OCD Is Pissing Me Off.!

Last night I went to bed at 11.15pm, after ensuring Bear was settled for the night and had everything he needed and wanted. He was very tired, his sinuses were completely blocked and he had a throbbing headache. I finally managed to sleep around 2am, completely exhausted after spending almost three hours crying and thinking about what I would do if he didn’t wake up. In April, a good friend of ours, a man named Ruud, only two years older than Bear died from Covid a fortnight after having a positive test result. He didn’t even have symptoms until the last three days and was admitted to hospital two days before he died.

This and the fact that Bear was completely fine yesterday evening, but by the time he went to bed he was really ill kept my mind actively presenting all manner of horrific pictures of having to tell his parents he had died, having to tell his children, having to organise his funeral and having to live without him. Needless to say I did not sleep easy and was awake at 5.10am straining to hear any tiny little sound from a sleeping man two floors below me. At 5.15am I slipped out of bed and downstairs to the basement to check on him. I needed to know if he was okay. When I heard him softly snoring I wept with relief.

Unable to go back to sleep I sat with the dog and read until 8.30am and then went upstairs and got dressed and started the day. At 10am I went down to see how Bear was doing and if he wanted coffee. He seemed a little brighter but was still stuffed up and croaky voiced, although he assured me he had no throat issues. I have insisted he comes upstairs to eat. We have a long dining table and if we sit at each end, there is a two metre space between us, plus it is the only time I will see him and know how he is doing. I made coffee, breakfast and freshly squeezed orange juice, any help I can give him to fight off this virus is worth the work.

After breakfast he went back downstairs and I got on with the housework. I did it all yesterday but I need to keep busy or I’ll fall apart. I’ve baked chocolate peanut butter oat bars and an American cheesecake and had dinner prepared well before time. This evening I’m watching the Ravens/Vikings game while Bear watches F1 downstairs. We’re keeping in touch via Messenger. My OCD is having a field day. If it’s not showing me horrendous images of my beloved in death it’s telling me I will die if any of those COVID germs gets to me and then shows me all the occasions on which I had kissed Bear before his positive test result. It encourages me to sanitise myself, the house, the dog and everything Bear has been within ten feet of. I am already using masks, gloves and hand sanitiser and wiping down everything before I touch it.

I have to keep telling myself not to go there. That I have to be stronger, for Bear, he has enough to deal with without me going full-retard (pardon the expression) because I’ve lost control of my mental health. I am not looking forward to another night alone.

Bear has COVID.!

This evening Bear tested positive for COVID. After spending the past 21 months protecting not only me but everyone else around him, wearing masks and gloves, using hand sanitiser and hygiene wipes, distancing and adhering to all the rules and regulations and willingly getting both vaccinations to ensure the safety of others, one utterly fucking selfish piece of dumbass shit who refused to get vaccinated for whatever pathetic excuse they told themselves was acceptable, caught COVID and spread it around their workplace. Now Bear, to keep me safe, has self-isolated in the basement where he intends to spend the next 7-10 days alone. It’s his birthday on Tuesday.

I tested negative but it makes no difference. I too am alone. I am upset. I am angry and I am already stressed. I can’t hug him, I can’t kiss him and I can’t snuggle into him to sleep at night as I normally would. I can speak to him only over Messenger because that stupid, self-entitled bitch who should never be allowed to work in any form of healthcare ever again decided her right to spread her deadly disease around was more important than the health of her work colleagues. I am worried for him and I am scared, for myself, for his family and for his children. He is in his mid-fifties and a little overweight… a friend of ours of the same age died from COVID in April.