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Thursday 25 August 2011

Steroids are evil, but hairdressers are fun :)

So. It was a bad idea to listen to the doctor and put the steroid cream on my eyes. They reeeeeally didn't like it. Cue another bout of scary alien panda with leprousy type madness, my eyes swelled up, went red, itched and generally freaked out, then rewarded me with a nice big flare up of psoriasis that looks like I took up boxing and feels like I painted acid around my eyes.



The GP (my real one, once I finally got to see him instead of the temporary guy who didn't understand my condition and Did Things Wrong) said oh dear. There isn't much licensed for use in facial psoriasis and you've reacted to pretty much all of it. Not to be deterred, he called some guy in the dermatology department at the hospital and between them they decided to give me something 'off list' that's normally used in eczema, an immuno suppressant ointment with a list of contraindications longer than my arm. Apparently I can't drink alcohol when using it (not that I drink anyway, but apparently you go bright red if you use it then drink!), and have to avoid sunlight on my face since immuno suppression plus UV light = fast track to skin cancer! Sheesh. Thank goodness my moisturiser has sunscreen and I found my sunglasses!

I've had it on my face for two hours now and it's making it all sting and tingle and burn. I'm hoping this is a good sign rather than an ominous sign of impending barrage-balloon-face number 4.

In other news, I now have super duper anti histamines that could choke a horse and make me sleep for England... BUT they kill allergic reactions stone dead without me needing to OD on the regular antihistamines.

Work is, well, quite frankly, shit, if you'll pardon my french. I just found out the last year of work has pretty much been a waste of my time and has to be repeated from square one with a whole new method. NOT my fault, but super frustrating and pretty soul destroying considering how hard I've been working on this project (for no reward, since pay rises are frozen anyway). This is not helping the fact that I am kind of sick of my entire career; science is great but I've been doing it for 15 years now and I'm kinda bored. The corporate bullshit/pressure/hoops to jump through keep getting worse and it makes it even more of a chore. I've spent a lot of time trying to work out how I could change my career for something more enjoyable, but to get enough money to pay our bills, I can't afford to take a pay cut, and there isn't anything I want to do that would pay enough money without me having to stop work and re-train. Really quite disheartened with work right now, sigh.

Dad's tumour is apparently isolated to just the one and they are confident they can remove it with surgery. Massively relieved about this. He goes into the hospital on the 9th September. I'm gonna be super stressed since he's no spring chicken and all that, won't feel better until he's the other side of it all. But at least they think this will be straightforward and TREATABLE.

I get my hair cut tomorrow! Really excited about it, I'm going even shorter with a chin length, angled, layered bob and I'm tempted to try a little bit of a side fringe too. I was tempted to go and get my piercing just beforehand too, but decided against it in the end, think I'll save that for another day.

Hmmm what else. Well the house is overrun with cats, currently we have four 12-week kittens downstairs (though my sister in law will be having two of them hopefully next week once she's moved house - literally just opposite our house, YAY!!!) plus Poppy is currently an indoors cat as she seems to have some sort of URT infection or possibly an allergy (wondering if it's her flea allergy manifesting itself as sneezing and runny nose, her eyes seem ok so presumably not cat flu). Merlin has the upstairs to himself and is wondering where everybody went!

This cute picture is Morpheus in his favourite place, the laundry basket. He spends a lot of time there and the fact that there's a pile of laundry NEXT to the basket because nobody wanted to disturb him just shows how soft we all are in this house :)

Monday 8 August 2011

I'm gonna enjoy this if it kills me

So here I am at the start of my last week off work this side of November; the last week off was terrible and the week-I-was-meant-to-be-at-work-but-was-sick-for-four-days-instead was even worse.

I'm determined this week will be amazing. It owes me one.

So... I'm up, dressed, the kid is dressed and on his Xbox, the Mr has gone to work, I have some Bob Marley on the stereo giving us a nice 'chill out' vibe, and I'm thinking about painting my nails. Chill out day today... might put on some DVDs later and have a cinema-at-home with popcorn and ice cream. At some point I need to bathe the fleabag dog and tame the teetering pile of laundry, plus kick the kitchen into shape, but... eh.

I had a good day on Saturday; I went to town to buy blond hair dye for the Mr (which I've since done and he loves, finally worked out how to defeat his 'I go ginger no matter what you do to me' difficult hair colour) and whilst I was in Superdrug I got some new perfume. Also, the guy in the video game shop gave me 1/3 off for no apparent reason (saving me £15, yay) and some random drive-by guy wolf whistled at me in the street. I'm secretly chuffed about that, since it doesn't happen very often, hehe.

Sunday wasn't bad either; my sister in law visited and it seems as though she will very soon swap flats with the woman who lives opposite us... this is exciting news! Sis-in-law is awesome and fun and all sorts of one-woman-girlie-support-network, it's gonna be great having her that close again.

Bad stuff this weekend included DH doing a ton of clearing out in the bedroom: technically a good thing but it stirred up so much dust that two days later I'm still a bubbling, sneezing wreck despite massive amounts of antihistamines. My eyes have decided they kinda enjoyed swelling up last week, so they jumped on the bandwagon; nothing as scary as before but there's red, puffy itchiness that has forced me into using the steroid cream the doc gave me (was hoping to avoid it, I hate steroid rebound).

Overall not a bad weekend; little nervous about tomorrow (hospital results day for dad) but trying not to think about it too much. Now... I'm gonna go and paint my nails!

Thursday 4 August 2011

Distraction

Today is a stressful day.

I'm still off work, in the certain knowledge that when I go to work tomorrow two weeks worth of missed crises will all descend on me at once, keen that I shouldn't miss a moment of the fun and games. I have a £40,000 analyser to try and fix (it needs attention every day and will have utterly broken by now), zillions of people to bleed, an anxious boss to deal with, a ton of other stuff to chase up, two weeks of important but unsupervised work from my assistant to look at (goodness knows what he's been up to; I heard rumours of him screwing things up the other day that have left me in cold sweats ever since). Somehow I have to get everything done and ready for me to take next week off; all in the space of one day. Joy.

My parents are currently up at the hospital where my dad is being put through a barrage of tests; an MRI scan, some other kind of scan I've never heard of, and an endoscope. I was supposed to go with them, but at the last minute got told to stay home instead; I've been pacing the living room for two hours now and trying not to smash anything or scream. I'm so bloody nervous - what if it's really bad? Worse than the really bad I'm already picturing? What the hell am I gonna do if it is?

There's other things too; I'm not going to whine on about them here, same old rubbish with money and vehicles and all that jazz. Oh and the huge flare up of psoriasis from all the stress is a bundle of fun, too. Yay :/

No wonder I've lost 14 pounds and don't seem to want to do anything but hide and sleep these days. If I didn't still have *some* contact with friends both online and otherwise, albeit much reduced these days, my new hobby of blogging (both beauty blogging and this personal blog) and *some* amount of role play, I think I'd be in an even worse state by now.

Anyone got some good luck they could spare? Could do with something good happening right now. Next week's my last time off work until at least November... it'd be nice to at least get through the week without something bad going down...

Tuesday 2 August 2011

Shopping, cooking and mystery...

Today was a good day!

I'm still too deformed to face work; the swelling's gone down a lot but it was replaced with cardboard-stiff eyelids that wouldn't open properly. To try and cheer me up, mum drove me to the shops (I hid my scary looking eyes behind my shades like some kind of celeb, even in the shop... the staff must have thought I was a right poser!) where I bought about a bazillion things in the sale at Peacocks with my birthday money. It's been toooo long since I had new clothes and their sale was so cheap; everything seemed to be £3!

Then I came home and discovered some lovely nail mail had arrived: Zoya Breezi and Orly Sapphire Silk, plus a mini selection box of four polishes from the Essie Brazilliant Collection: Super Bossa Nova, Brazilliant, Meet Me at Sunset and Smooth Sailing. All birthday presents courtesy of the 'ebay voucher' my lovely friend sent me on Friday :)

There was one other parcel too: a Dove Summer Glow facial moisturiser-come-self tanning lotion that I didn't order and have no idea why it's here. It could be an ebay mix up with someone sending me the wrong thing; or possibly I won it in a competition from the Superdrug website (though I don't remember entering one for facial tan but you never know). Oddly, it has no return address and no accompanying note either. Very strange.

I've also been busy attempting to fix my immune system and skin. If you hear rattling when I walk, it'll be the multivitamin, vitamin B, vitamin D and Selenium I took this morning. I also cooked myself dinner: boiled potatoes, peas and Quorn fishless fingers.


I was too tired to make anything pretty and I wanted comfort food; this reminds me of dinner as a kid (only back then it was actual fish fingers).

More later; for now I'm off to play with new clothes and paint my nails :)

Monday 1 August 2011

In which I wake up and discover I turned into a leprous alien panda (warning: not for the squeamish)

I really must have words with my immune system; it's not behaving itself recently. First there was the infamous superglue fumes (we think) lip allergy a month or so ago:


As if that wasn't enough, my body has now decided to torture me further with this lovely sight, which greeted me in the mirror this morning:


Scream? Panic? Swear a lot? Yep, I did all three. Then I hovered outside the doctor's surgery until he arrived and panicked all over him, too. He thinks I've become allergic to the Psoriasis cream I've used for years, and which I applied under my eyes last night. Apparently it's not life threatening, but all I can do is put emollients on it and wait for it to go away.

DH is freaking out, worried that people will think he's a wife beater. Feel quite sorry for him, actually - it really does look a lot like someone gave me two black eyes.

Every time I lay down it swells up even more. By lunchtime it was so swollen the skin cracked and started peeling off like I had some kind of leprosy. I couldn't see because my eyes were swollen shut and that's after TWO antihistamines.

Oh, joy.

Think it might be time to start looking after myself a little better; if my immune system is this screwed then something's not right. Bring on the healthier food, vitamin pills and -gasp- early nights...

Tuesday 26 July 2011

Feed a cold

So my birthday started well; but it ended in disaster - that cold I thought I was brewing? It exploded into action about an hour after I posted yesterday and I spent the rest of the day feeling like I was going to die.
I ended up spending my birthday night asleep; crashed about 8 and woke for half an hour at 11, then crashed again. Fun.

Somewhere in a lucid moment I did at least manage to do some cooking; my Mum raised me with the saying 'Feed a cold, starve a fever' (is that a real saying or just one she made up?) so whenever I get a cold I feel the need to stuff myself silly. Enter my bleary-eyed creation: spaghetti with bajan seasoning, olive puree, spinach and black beans:

The bajan seasoning was home made and contained enough garlic to kill a whole room of vampires; I ate it, then passed out for rather a lot of hours, and woke up this morning feeling a lot less diseased. Guess Mum had a point, eh?

Monday 25 July 2011

New Blog!

So here I am, with my brand new blog fresh out of the wrapper and now I don't know what to say!

Other than it's my birthday!!! I'm sitting on my bed watching my 7 year old play on the Xbox, listening to music and making this blog. It's very chilled out and would be just about perfect if I hadn't just broken a nail, the downstairs didn't look like a bombsite, and I didn't also feel like I was brewing a cold, but hey, it's close enough for me!

I'm feeling happy today because I have the week off work and it's sunny outside! Maybe I'll actually get to wear some summer clothes this week!

I'd better tidy up a bit. But first, here's an appropriate song for today... Happy Birthday to me! (Hopefully without any actual massacres, of course).