My Fitness Pal Blog - Day 22-25 - And Getting Impatient

Come on scales. Arrive already.

Thank you. That is all.

Yeah, I can't get away with posting that little. It's hard, though. I'm not someone who feels like they can really track their progress without having the numbers in front of me. At this point, taking measurements of things like waist and hips is fairly useless - with the intestinal blockage, my stomach measurement can vary as much as eight inches in A DAY - so I'm really needing to rely on weight to see if I've actually lost anything. And they haven't arrived. I paid Amazon a fortune for what should have been express delivery, and ordered on the 26th...and I got an email the other day saying to expect them on the 8th of January. FFS.

Everything else is - well, slow. I've had these awful pains in my upper back and shoulders for a couple weeks now. At first I thought I could exercise it out, so I tried that, but then it got a lot worse. So I rested. And it still gets worse. I'm a bit lost as to what it is - usually when I pull a muscle (or more than one) it heals in a week or so, and this has been getting slowly but surely worse for two, maybe two and a half weeks now. It's worse when I get up, so I suppose I'll have to buy some new pillows and see if that helps at all. Might be something to do with my body recovering from the infections. I know that when I'm getting over one, I often get a whole load of hypersensitive nerves once my immune system gets back online.

I saw the dentist today, although she didn't do any treatment. She says she doesn't want to do any more tooth work for at least eight weeks, unless there's an emergency - the jaw needs time to heal. Which kind of sucks, in a way, because I have an infection (no real pain unless I bite on it, but awful taste and stinky breath) in one of my upper back teeth. The idea of walking around with halitosis for eight weeks is not a thrilling one, but I don't see that there's much I can do - I brush and floss and use mouthwash, then two minutes later I smell again, or at least I can smell and taste myself. Ugh. Unless it starts to hurt, though, stinky breath and a taste that makes me nauseous is (supposedly) preferable to chancing more damage to the mandible.

Sigh.

It's been a pretty exhausting couple weeks. It's just like, as soon as I get one thing feeling a bit better, something else starts up, you know? All my good intentions about health get scuppered because I can't seem to rid my body of infection. It was like this after the strep in Oct 2011 - I'd manage to get one part of my body feeling reasonably good and then it'd crop up elsewhere. But short of paying for a private hospital stay and IV antibiotics there's not much I can do aside from rest, exercise and eat cleanly. Which I haven't been great at doing. It's a vicious cycle with me - eating decent food requires energy, for shopping, for preparation, and sometimes for chewing and swallowing. At the worst points in my illness, I starved not because I was trying to not eat, but because I literally did not have the energy to chew and swallow food.

I'm also coming down onto the half dosage of my daily meds, which is going to be hard for a month or two. I was happily adjusted to the half dose, but when I got the eye abscess in October last year, it was so excruciating that I had to increase to the full dosage of painkillers. That was supposed to be temporary, but after the eye abscess was the broken jaw, and the infected socket, and then the ear infections...and now it's gone on for two and a half months, and it's going to take a lot of effort to get back to the half dose again.

So yeah, things are hard right now. I'm exhausted and swing between being ravenous all the time, and not having any appetite at all.

But there's nothing to do but keep plugging away, I guess. Things will get better soon, once I'm sleeping better.