T + 231 Collywobbles in his Pandenoodles

Well it's been a funny few days. Funny peculiar I should say, not funny "ha-ha". 

Just before the close of normal business on Friday evening, with me looking forward to a long break off work until Thursday, I got involved in helping with an issue for our Houston office that on and off took up, for me, most of the night until about 23:00. (Other worked on to it long into the early hours but I didn't want to push my luck more than I already had).

I coped pretty well with the extra work but one thing I've found is that when I get for the want of a better word, excited, about a work problem I end up with an occasional attack of the collywobbles, by which I mean a sort of quivery feeling and slight tremors in the hands that reduce my fine motor skills like writing, typing or moving the mouse. ( I see from the link given that collywobbles means something different but I've always thought of these quivers as collywobbles, but I digress.....).

The best way to describe it, is that nervous feeling in the pit of the stomach and quivers you get as a small child on Christmas Eve (OK I still get this as an adult, I admit) accompanied by, as I say, these hand tremors. It's not serious and a few relaxing deep breaths settles it all down. I suspect it is related to my steroids and either an excess or absence of adrenaline.  I'll mention it to the doc at clinic tomorrow and see what she says.

Well Saturday morning saw me helping out again with Houston and then I had a lovely evening at my friend Andy's. He is a most convivial host and a very dear friend. (Someone buy his house ).

Sunday I woke up feeling a bit like I did the other Saturday, puffy eyes and low energy levels. Whether this was the result of overdoing it a bit over the last two days I can't say for certain but I doubt it helped. I managed to rally a bit by about 10:00 and logged on to work email just to see how the Houston issue was progressing only to discover a problem with one of our UK servers. I knew my colleague Yvonne had only had about 6 hours sleep in the last three days so even  though I was less than 100% I stepped up to the plate, as our transatlantic cousins say. It took a couple of hours to resolve the problem.

I went to Mom and Dad's for Lunch and was rather lacklustre and didn't feel up to doing the washing up as I would normally do with my Dad. The afternoon was spent watching the snooker on the settee first at Mom and Dad's and then back at the flat.

Monday followed much the same pattern, low energy levels and puffy eyes ( not that the two are necessarily related ). I also noticed what was the slight rash on my chest was more obvious. Again it wasn't until mid-afternoon that I felt a bit better and even then I had to have a nap in the early evening. I did manage, however, to make some delicious Borscht soup with the beetroot from the veg box, and two liberated from Andy's on Saturday night.

This morning the rash on my chest, which is almost definitely GVHD,  was much more noticeable and I decided it was time to put on some Betnovate cream rather than just the E45  cream I had been using. 

My eyes are puffy , the lids are sore and I was still pretty tired but functioning, just about first thing but have started to feel more with it now. It's a bit soon for me to need a blood transfusion and it doesn't quite feel like that sort of fatigue. It is more like the steroid withdrawal symptoms I had a few weeks ago when I was down to just 5mg a day. I'm currently on 5mg one day and 10mg the next so quite a low dose. 

Meanwhile Gareth has been away in Copenhagen on a much needed break and from the texts and tweets it appears he's had a great time which is just what he needs. This afternoon I am borrowing my Dad's car to pick him and his Mom up from the airport. ( I shan't be going in to the terminal building, I shall just drive by the pick up point, bundle them into the car with a liberal squirting of alcohol rub hand cleaner and speed off :o)