David Gillon

My hips and pelvis have been acting up since before Christmas*. No clear cause, no clear pattern, but some days no problem, some days it's the right hip hurting, some days the left, some days the SI joint.  Sunday it was my coccyx, and I ended up going to sleep on the couch at 8PM and waking up about 2:30AM. Monday was fairly horrible pain-wise, worst day in a long time, with pain hitting both hips at once, which was not helped by having forgotten to renew my opioid patch on Saturday - pauses while he remembers to send in the repeat prescription request - and I spent most of the late morning and pretty much all of the afternoon sleeping. Which of course has thrown my sleep schedule even more completely out of sync. So I was awake all night, during which the hip pain slowly faded away, and about 11AM today I started getting to the point where I needed to fall asleep, or fall over.

So I went to bed and slept until about 16:30 and woke up pretty much pain free and a lot less sleep-deprived, but I have a very vivid memory of waking up at some point in the afternoon with major pain in my right shoulder and thinking quite clearly "Oh, FFS, I'm definitely in a pain flare, where's it going to hit next?"

But my shoulder feels fine now. So was that shoulder pain real, or was it a dream?

* For anyone who's new around here, this is nothing new.

As best I can recreate it, the dream-narrative was that I was in the mountains as some sort of scout and there was an invading force trying to tunnel through the mountain, so I had to get back to warn everyone. The weirdness being that both I and everyone in the invading force were disabled and using crutches and leg braces.

I can sort of figure out the source material, the tunnelling and mountains probably come from stuff in my 7 Days to Die game, and my walking was wobblier than usual over the weekend (seems to be back to normal, for my values of normal), but a wilderness adventure with crutches and calipers is a bit strange.

I was due an Asda delivery between three and four PM today, and the timing's always a bit iffy (30 minutes early to an hour late), so 1pm-ish I was debating what to do for the afternoon that I could interrupt at need. I decided to start with a soak in a hot bath as I could finish that well before the delivery was due. 2PM-ish I'm in the tub when the phone rings. I ignored the first call, but then it rang again, so it's hop out of the tub, grab a towel and grab the phone time.

"Hi, it's your Asda driver, I'm just around the corner, if you're in can I delivery early?"

On the one hand, aargh, on the other it gets it done with. So I start throwing clothes on.

And when he said "just around the corner," he apparently meant it, he had the first crates stacked outside the door before I managed to get socks on.

So I now have a reasonable variety of food in the house again, even if I still need to find the energy to shelve it (and I've restocked the spirits stash, which was seriously bare).

Sleeping was again a disaster, post 8AM into the arms of Morpheus for the second day running (so I'm working on three hours sleep). But at least I remembered a fragment of today's dream, which seemed to involve me and an accurately portrayed friend (including his rather worrying view of traffic regs as strictly optional) visiting a mashup of several different female friends who was in rehab after a spinal injury and not taking it at all seriously. I'd presume the SCI side came from my symptoms flaring up last week (thankfully they've mostly settled down again), but while being conscious that I'm dreaming is nice, I'd really quite like to get a full night's sleep sometime this week, please?

Oh, and today was the first time I've noticed significant evidence of frost lingering on the roofs even at nearly midday. Clearly it's getting colder.
 

I was feeling a bit sinus-y before I went to bed, and evidently didn't sleep well, so when my alarm went off I felt terrible, got up, found a cough sweet and went back to bed, finally waking up early afternoon. Sleep might not have been great, but evidently it set me up ideally for dreaming.

The first one (or two?) had one of those lovely set-ups where you've woken up from the dream (I don't remember the details of that one), still have major problems to deal with, and then finally realise that actually you're still dreaming. The second one evidently borrowed a fatal accident from the book I'm reading, but then segued into blockages in the sewers caused by illegally disposed of experimental corpses - lovely!

Keep it up subconscious!

But I have spoken to two separate people face to face in the same day (receptionist and nurse) for the first time since the 25th (and the time before that would be the pub quiz on the 3rd November.

I'm not normally old enough to get the flu jab free from the NHS, but this year they're doing everyone over 50, so I got a text inviting me to arrange an appointment last week. I was going to leave that until today, but they rang me on Saturday to arrange one, offering a choice of three different clinics on Monday, which I suspect means they didn't have many takers (a lot of people probably already paid to get one at their chemists). I picked 'mid-afternoon', on the assumption that was when the surgery would be least busy, and was promptly given the 1:05PM slot - which I wouldn't have called 'mid afternoon'. OTOH I appeared to be the only patient in the building and was called straight through by the nurse, and was back at my car by 1:06PM.

That was also the first time I've been out in the chair since the start of the first lockdown, so I had to pump the tires up last night - sooo soft. But it's as well I did plan for that as when I popped out at 12:30PM to put the chair in the car I found the front windscreen was still thick with ice as it's still in shadow. Fortunately that came off relatively easily, but it would have been a definite recipe for panic if I hadn't discovered it until 12:50PM, the time I planned to leave.

I think that's the first vaccination jab I've had since BCG at 14.

Totally unconnectedly, last night was either the first time I ever managed to lucid dream, or I was thinking about the scene I was plotting so close to sleep that it got misfiled as a dream. No variation on the plotting, so I suspect the latter, but still interesting.

AKA I came down with another inner ear bug over the weekend. Fairly mild, I'm just very slightly dizzy when I move around, but annoying as I've a few errands I want to run now there's hints of spring in the weather and there's no way I could safely drive. I think I've had one bug or another more than I've been bug free this year, and that may well be true as far back as last September, which is getting boring.

So I mostly spent Monday dozing in bed, which seems to have helped, and there was an interesting sequential dream to keep me amused. 'Sequential' as I woke up several times during it, but the dream picked up once I'd dozed off again.

Slightly futuristic setting, the characters were the high command of Singapore's space navy (?!) until an attack with a WMD took out the top man, at which point his deputy has to take over, said deputy being something of a joke and alleged former crook. Unfortunately for the bad guys he's also Bruce Willis. So cue thorough reprisals, both individually against those who plotted the attack and collectively against them as a nation - I never did work out who the bad guys were, but my subconscious is saying South American. Some of the reprisals were slightly Cthulhu-esque, probably a result of the Laundry Files re-read I've been doing. It's interesting the places my dream-director chooses to go.

Hopefully I'll be over this buf soon, but if not I'll settle for a few good dreams.