If I Could Be Serious For a Few Minutes?

 This is something of a serious post, but I hope that I might be able to offer 'something' to others who may be in the same place.

It's time I spoke up about an uncomfortable topic.

The last 5 months have been the worst of my life. I've been coming to terms with the loss of family and moreover, I've averaged 3 hours sleep due to the worst pain I have ever experienced at night, across my ribs and shoulders, with added joy of a diagnosis of sleep apnoea which stops me breathing on average, 45 times per hour, what I think is a problem with my rotator cuff in my left shoulder and to cap that off a lack of strength and grip in my left hand coupled with some pretty spectacular pain.

Lockdown and the lack of access to my regular G.P has meant that I've compounded a few things into a pretty toxic cocktail of pain and fatigue, not to mention depression.

I've worked myself just as hard as usual, because you have to work to live, and we've purchased a total of thee mattresses and two mattress toppers to try and see if there was an issue there, at the cost of a decent four-figure sum.

Now, I am a pro-life kind of guy. Anyone who knows me, will tell you I've bounced back more times than a fat bloke who's fallen 100 floors onto concrete. But there you see is the rub... Eventually things come to earth with a splat.

I ama man of simple tastes and needs... Interesting friends (just a few, because I'm not gregarious and have set a high bar in that regard) 80s T.V, gaming, wine and my family. OK, and a decent day out having lunch and looking at works of art. 

Lockdown has seriously diminished those pleasures (as it has for all of us) and I had got to thinking coldly and somewhat calculatedly that if things did not get better, I would in all likelihood get my affairs in order, sell a few figures to cover funeral costs and 'check out'. Just like that...

I've quietly made my wife aware, and then yesterday after one of the worst nights in the last 6 months, I was in the car with my wife and mother-in-law, feeling like I'd reached the end of my tether. My M-I-L is not an easily shocked woman, but even she was a bit distressed, because she knows that when I put my mind to something, it's a question of when rather than if, it comes to pass.

Well, last night was spent playing a family game of Elder Sign, followed by a tuna sandwich, red wine and an hour of Old Grey Whistle Test. Bed was an amazingly late 23:30, and all night there was a truly awful smell of burning grass, which I assume was the hill, behind our house, being set alight by either a stray cigarette or some arseholes trying to barbecue a squirrel. Either way, the smell of it pervaded my dreams, but I was only awakened 3 times (as opposed to an average 12 or so) and I awoke reasonably fresh at 6AM with - wait for it - none of the usual pain, which I remarked on to the memsahib, before making a couple of drinks, letting the dogs out and going back to bed to listen to Radio 4 until 07:30.

Then it was up and showered, dogs fed, work for the week sprayed up ready for Monday, two parcels packed and booked, a breakfast of devilled mushrooms on toast with orange juice and coffee, with a chaser of fresh bread, butter and 'Bon Maman' blackcurrant preserve.

After that I sorted my Scots Covenanters to go to the painter and knocked up a quick set of painting guides.

Then it was 1PM and I retired to my Chair with the Call Of Cthulhu Keeper's Book, bagged 20 or so pages and then fell asleep...

I 'awoke', went to the door to ask the memsahib why the large orange excavator was making a whole in the recently resurfaced front garden (it was a gas main problem *) and then went back to the chair and 'fell asleep' again.

I 'woke up' still in the chair, but in my parent's house, wherein my Mum was dusting and mucking about in the kitchen as we chatted, about what I cannot recall. After a while I felt what seemed to be the movement of an obstruction in my throat and made my way at some speed to the kitchen where my Mum watched with some concern as (and I apologise for the description) I spat out orange goo, the colour of a really good egg yolk, my head on the cold stainless steel of the sink edge, coughing as the last bit left my mouth.

And then I woke up in my chair, back where it should be in my own living room . I coughed lightly, looked at the clock to see only 70 minutes or so had elapsed, although it felt like 5 or six hours  and I could not place what day it was. My wife walked into the room and the first thing I asked her was 'was I coughing?" to which she answered that it had been just that one a moment or two earlier, and she confirmed it was Sunday, before going out to the garden.

Well, I sat there for ten minutes or so, before going to make a drink and tell my wife what had happened, together with the sense that I no longer had the slightest inclination to 'check out' and the sense that after the strange visit to my Mum's house, I felt very definitely purged of 'something'.

Then it was off for a bath and another read of the COC rules whilst I tried to make sense of it all. Well, I have no reasonable explanation, but I feel a different person, so I thought I'd share it publicly, rather than keep my own counsel this time.

Draw what you may from it, but it has totally reinforced my pro-life and pro-living position. If you are in a similar place to where I have been, don't despair. We get one ride on the ferris wheel of life folks and it's over all too soon.

Keep your pleasures small and simple, and indulge yourself in them. If you believe that there's 'something' out there, hang onto that believe because it's sure as eggs are eggs, the only thing that I can point to for this transformation I've undergone. Trust me, I've dabbled in some arcane shit in my time, and there's been a few times when I could not rationally discount something I saw or experienced, so I just accepted it as an alternative reality. Don't lock such things out, because at the very worse, you get wryly smiled at when speaking about it, and at best, you may just save yourself from yourself.

Now...

The one really good thing I did 'bag' yesterday was a 1st edition of The Rim Of The Unknown by Frank Belknap Long, published by Arkham House. I also contemplated a yellow Victor Gollancz edition of The Shadow Out Of Time by H.P.L, but I couldn't justify the expense of both, when there are entire nations starving .

Keep fighting the good fight!

TTFN

(* - I think the gas leak was actually my 6 year old Scottie, who was somewhat flatulent and the closest of the 5 to where I was sleeping)