The 10th & 11th; I am the sky.

The 10th of October.  I live on the floor now. 

Nights are the same, coughing until I fall asleep, then in the morning I'm okay until it starts again. Today, I got a blog post written up, but not posted before it was necessary to lie down. 

Rosemary came for lunch and she arrived to find me on the ground, which is always fun to explain. I got up to eat, but the rest of the afternoon has been face down. I watched an episode of How to Get Away with Murder on my phone, and listened to James Arthur speak very eloquently about mental health on Radio 5. 

It is something I have long struggled with, having been diagnosed with depression at fourteen, and it has varied in severity over time. I have been medicated since I was eighteen, which helps for the most part. I still have days under the heavy cloud, sometimes they stretch into weeks, months, but they end. I know they end. And I'm forever going to deal with the demon that is anorexia which really took hold when I got "better" from cancer. I was in treatment for over a year before I decided I wanted to change. You can have all the support in the world but if you're not ready to stop self-destructing, you won't. I still deal with its voice, I worry about my body, how I look. But I know that is not who I am. I am the sky.

The 11th of October. 

I am so tired. I had about three hours of sleep because I was just constantly coughing, and I had to get up at seven because I had to be at hospital at nine. 

It was for my lymphoscintigram in nuclear medicine so we could finally find out if my lymphatic system is the problem in my right arm. I got called through about half nine, having alienated everyone in the waiting room with my cough. I had two injections of radioactive dye in the webbed spaces of each hand, then I had a series of x-rays to see how quickly the lymphatic system would dispose of it. Each scan took five minutes in which I had to be completely still, with my arms stretched out in front of me on the bed. I had six in total, twenty minutes after the first, forty minutes after that, an hour after that, and an hour and ten minutes after that. The final one was me standing up with the machine moved to scan my body. We were able to discern that the right side is not functioning properly, because the dye was long gone from my left arm, but had got stuck in the lymph nodes near the elbow on the right. So now I'll see Andrew again, and we'll make another new plan. 

We finally got home at two, had lunch, and now I'm on oxygen because I'm so drained, my sats are dipping. 

What is this rib doing? It digs into the floor and it HURTS.