Let me tell you about how yesterday went.
I woke late in the morning and debated having a shower. I wanted the shower, I probably needed the shower but I didn’t have the shower because I needed to save the spoons for getting dressed and going out. I eventually persuaded my aching and uncooperative body out of bed around lunch time. But only because I had an appointment.
I had spent a week trying to get an appointment with a GP at my local practice but ended up settling for an appointment with a nurse practitioner. It’s not that I have any problem with nurse practitioners it’s just that I wanted a potentially complicated problem diagnosed and I think that’s something that doctors are better trained for.
I walked to the surgery even more slowly than usual because my left ankle decided to be a whiny little bitch. It was swollen and painful and it was like walking on a leg that has a spike through it. It’s the kind of problem that I often have to deal with and while it doesn’t stop me from going anywhere that I really need to be but it does slow me down and make me regret being alive. In the end I was only 3 minutes late which is not bad given that I’d got the time mixed up and thought my appointment was 10 minutes later than it actually was so in my head I was 7 minutes early.
Because my appointment was with a nurse practitioner I decided to shelve my original plan of saying something like “my hands are messed up and I’d like to know why” and risk raising the spectre of self diagnosis with “I think I might have rheumatoid arthritis in my hands and I’d like to find out and maybe get it treated while my hands still work”. The nurse asked my why I thought that and I was able to answer with some reasonable basis for my hypothesis – pain in my fingertips, leading to swelling in my finger joints, and hey this finger is crooked and no longer bends properly also my mother has rheumatoid arthritis.
I left with an appointment in 2 weeks to get blood tests and another one a week after that to discuss the results of the tests with a GP. The nurse also told me to try a low dose of ibuprofen to deal with the inflamation.
So I hobbled home and got some ibuprofen on the way. I don’t normally keep it in the house because I’m asthmatic and on the whole asthmatics should avoid NSAID painkillers like ibuprofen.
As I entered the pharmacy to buy the Ibuprofen I passed an older white man who said, in a petulant tone, “You’re welcome”. At first I was confused. Was he talking to me? There wasn’t anyone else around? I hadn’t asked him to do anything. I hadn’t spoken at all. He did stand back for a couple of seconds to let me enter before he left. Was he expecting me to thank him for waiting two whole seconds to leave the pharmacy? For allowing someone with a walking stick and in obvious pain to enter instead of pushing past me to get to the carpark? Who knows.
Got home. Now in absolute agony. Like incoherent with pain levels of agony. Decided that it was a good time to try ibuprofen, and also paracetamol (acetaminophen for American readers) and tramadol (synthetic opioid). That succeeded in killing most of the pain but then my eyelids started swelling up in a clear allergic reaction to something. Maybe the ibuprofen but maybe just pollen, I do have hayfever and I had just been outside.
Which was when I realised that I hadn’t bought any antihistamine the last three times I went to the shops. Because I’m a fucking idiot.
We searched the house in the hopes of finding some antihistamines somewhere but there were none. Which meant that one of us had to leave the house and go and buy some. And by one of us I mean me. I’d just spent more than a week trying to talk my spouse into leaving the house but social anxiety and agoraphobia is a nasty combination and the fact that walking anywhere causes them terrible back pain doesn’t help.
So I went back out again. Yes I went back out on my ankle that felt like it had a spike through it. Now with added swollen, horribly painful and not really working very well eyes. And I walked back to the pharmacy where I had bought the ibuprofen.
When I got there it was full of bastards. No, not really. Just full of people. That’s just how it felt to get there and discover that it was suddenly packed with people all of whom were in the queue ahead of me. And the reason for the queue was that the pharmacy was short staffed. So the queue wasn’t moving much. And everyone in the queue ahead of me wanted to complain about the queue. Which meant that the staff had to explain, yet again, about the staffing issue and then apologise for the wait before they could begin to deal with whatever the customer actually wanted.
And of course all the time I was waiting i was standing. On my ankle with it’s imaginary spike through it. Eventually I got to the front, spoke to the pharmacist and she sold me eye drops and tablets that I could safely take together. And then I just had to get home.
I’m fine today. Well fine-ish. Ok it was gone 3pm by the time I got out of bed, I still haven’t had that shower and it’s going to be days before I’m able to do much in the way of housework but I’m not actually dead and apparently that counts as a win.