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October 1992
The following October, I met my partner and felt content to have an uncomplicated relationship without the clutter. While he was in Australia over the Christmas period, I decided to try to lose some weight I had gained over the months but without success, it just seemed to pile on and this made me feel even more depressed. By the time my partner returned in March, I was even more desperate to lose weight and was also taking the odd laxative as I started getting acutely constipated. The pain on the left side of my stomach was horrendous and felt like some kind of lump was pushing itself through the stomach wall. I assume this was the bowel struggling for some movement. I was also finding it more difficult to sleep properly at night, so I chose to write!
It was during this time I started to rewrite poems and prose about my deepest thoughts and fears; I had so many ideas, it all come easy to write, but strangely, when I feel well, it is not so easy to piece some poetry together; Inspirational thoughts seem to belong in an Underactive Thyroid world of deepest depressing thoughts, the ones that were stuck in a barbed wire of tangled words.
It was also during this time, I was helping out with some Office administration and could not understand why I found it so difficult to cope with simple telephone enquires and customers and found it hard to hold down this job.
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Desperately trying to lose weight
My new lodger, had found himself a girlfriend; she did seem nice but kept bringing her back to my home and at times I found the house I was fighting so hard for was not my own. This just made me feel even more depressed. By the time my partner returned, I was desperately trying to lose weight, was also taking the odd laxative. The pain on the left side of my stomach was horrendous and felt like a hernia. Eventually, I found out that this was my bowel that was struggling for some movement.
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Photograph taken at Christmas 1992
Above right, my best friend was my moral support throughout my life. She tragically died in February 1997. My daughter had to grow up fast, but the last thing she wanted was me getting ill. The disease here was slowly creeping up. |
I was reasonably happy with the relationship between my partner and myself and took a short break over the Easter period of 1993, but ended up with mild food poisoning during the stay in a hotel. The first of many ailments that I found hard to shake off or recover from. During the months after this, my periods begun to get very heavy, painful and more frequent. One morning the pain in my stomach and legs hurt so much and felt the blood rush to my head from my toes. A neighbour called the Doctor, but understandably he could not do much other than to offer a strong painkiller and felt as if I had wasted his time. My daughter telephoned a close member of my family as I was so frightened, but she too did not understand how I felt and maybe because of my odd, slow behaviour at times, she failed to give me any support. By now, my memory was dreadful, for example when I tried to fill in a crossword, I found myself looking back to the clue over and over again, only to forget where the words in the grid were meant to go! It was so frustrating. I put all this down to being depressed and thought after the divorce I would be able to grieve for my Mum at my own pace and start thinking and acting more clearly. Each day became more of an effort to get through; it felt like I was in a permanent kind of fog. I kept developing rashes over my body and suffering from one allergy or another. I took antihistamine for mild Hay Fever; it also relieved my breathing, as it felt so heavy, as if I had smoked a hundred cigarettes. The allergies were a mystery. Over the years I had developed an allergy to wearing metal and had to remove several earrings as the piercings started to weep and ended up going to outpatients to clean my ears up as they become swollen and was prescribed antibiotics. I remember wearing sunglasses during an administration job in 1990 because Eczema had appeared around my eyes. At a later stage sitting out in the sun and especially near some plants and flowers always brought me out in an allergy. Over the following months I caught almost every virus going around, with endless coughs, colds and infections. I could not remember a time I had felt healthy.
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