under the weather

I think this is one of those posts that I'm writing more for me than for you. I'm writing it for future reference, as a record and to try and get it out of my head and into my computer. So please, feel free to skip this one, it's not going to be very exciting or uplifting. Hopefully I'll be back here later in the week with something a bit more fun.

So basically I've been feeling crappy for quite some time now. Crappy physically but not emotionally. About six or eight weeks ago, almost exactly a year to the date of my left breast saga, I got the same infection on the other side. This time it was quickly diagnosed and treated and within a few days of starting an antibiotic course it was history.

But I mustn't have started taking acidophilous in time because next thing I knew I had a rather itchy situation. Too much information? Sorry.

All of the above knocked me around a bit but after a few days I was back to running around like usual. Until one Saturday evening I discovered that everything I ate or drank tasted like poo. This went on for a few days resulting in a complete loss of appetite, many conversations about what poo actually tastes like, me having to convince the girls that I am definitely not pregnant, and of course lots of googling.

I think the poo-taste thing lasted for about two weeks and then gradually disappeared. Only to appear in the mouths of a couple of school parents who must have asked google much better questions, I know they used the words battery acid rather than poo, and discovered a little thing called pine-mouth. Pine mouth!!!!! After all that pesto I'd been making and all those pine nuts I'd been sneaking, of course it was.

The diagnosis brought relief but also the feeling that we have to stay truer to our only buy organic and Australian grown or don't buy it at all rule. Pesto filled with dodgy Chinese pine nuts? No thanks. From now on I think we'll use almonds.

After that was cleared up for some reason I stopped sleeping. For what felt like three years but was possibly only a week or two, I just stopped sleeping. At the start I didn't mind so much. The nights are so quiet and I got lots of reading and thinking and looking at Facebook done, but unfortunately the days after the nights spent awake were a disaster. I was fragile and impatient and shivery and felt like my brain was full of a ton of wool.

Are you sick of me yet? I am.

Then of course I got a shocking head cold that two weeks later I still haven't completely shaken. Blah!

Then not last Saturday but the Saturday before as we were doing the rounds visiting our bee hives, I was stung four times. This in itself is not such a big deal, we keep bees and occasionally we get stung. But the fact that I got stung in my suit is weird and has never happened before and also I had some sort of reaction to the bites that I've never had before. In the past they've stung for a few seconds, maybe a minute and then nothing for a few days until they've itched like crazy and then disappeared. This time my bites swelled up until they were enormous. The ones on my ankle were so big I couldn't put my shoe on and the one on my thigh was the size of a small plate. And they burned. The only thing that calmed them down was a bicarb paste. Gosh they were nasty. A week later and you can still see the shadow of them like they are bruises.

And lastly, gosh how I hope it's the last of it anyway, my old shoulder injury has flared up and is travelling right up my neck, into my teeth and all the way up to my head. What even??!! I'm having a treatment with my pilates teacher in the morning and I have a whole range of exercises to do, so I'm hopeful that this will be short lived.

I know they're all just little things and I'm trying to see the bigger picture and not let them get the better of me, but sometimes it's just trying. I accept that I'm run down and my immune is low but I can't work out the reason why. I live on an organic farm, my work is pretty active, I eat a fresh and organic diet, most of which we've grown here, and I love what I do, who I do it with and how we're doing it.

I hate to complain partly because I know there are so many who are doing it so much tougher and I hate to complain because I HATE BEING THE SICK ONE!!! It's driving me cuckoo. Like I said at the start, it's just boring.

Lucky I have the apple picking, the preserving, the farm stall, the girls, farmer Bren, my knitting, stripey tights, a big pot of lentil bolognaise on the stove, linen sheets on my bed, a great book, big travel plans and the kitchen garden to take my mind off it all.

I hope you are well and happy and have lots of nice things going on.

Big love xx