GirlOnTheRun.org

Today has been an incredibly long day, both good and bad. It’s the third day of my week-long holiday and I have come down with cystitis. Bad times. As of recent, my pain threshold seems to have diminished. Cystitis and the consequential burning sensation is a pain my mind cannot handle. So, after a day of suffering and coping on sachet-type over-the-counter medication, I pulled myself together and dragged my heels over to the GP surgery. I’ll say it again, bad times. It is damned typical to fall ill on your holiday – especially when it’s a holiday you’ve been desperately waiting for and need.

But apart from juggling a manic schedule at work, taking work home and getting ill on annual leave, I have taken a leap of faith today as well as hopefully made an investment. I am contemplating taking a serious step in my career after being approached to do free lancing – that step being to seriously improve my skills. I am not sure what skills and how I will improve them, but I do feel that I lack that edge on someone who has the proper training. I left my uni qualification at uni and deeded to try other things – a big risk considering my lack of formal training in any of the disciplines required of me at work.

I have had a long and hard internal dialogue with myself, a pastime that I often partake in and the conclusion is that I am not happy with what I can achieve at this moment in time. I am good at many things, but as I explained to Lex (my fiancé), I lack the skills of an adept in anything. I feel that either I truly lack the talent, or I haven’t explored my full potential. The biggest challenge I face is my lack of patience and short attention span. This is why many projects do indeed get taken on but abandoned due to my lack of drive and confidence in myself.

So, after much musing, I today took the plunge and started over my setup. My old slow PC has been superseded by a brand new iMac. It’s the first step on a long road, I do admit that, and my setup has nothing to do with my output – shiny new kit isn’t something that is going to change that. I will have to convince myself that I am not completely useless even with my lack of formal training (I do keep reiterating that, don’t I) and that self-taught skills aren’t all bad. After all, without some level of skill, it’s going to be difficult to do anything at all, let alone teach yourself a number of transferrable skills.

Well, it is a new year. Since my last post, I have had my birthday (turned 26 you know) and got engaged. As my “fiancé” will point out, we did not get engaged at Christmas. We got engaged in December for my birthday…Anyway, point I am making is that a few things have changed. But not many.

I saw my physiotherapist for the last time in early December, when I got told that not much more could be done for me and that I would just have to persevere with my stretching. “There is no reason why you shouldn’t get better,” I was told. I have now since Christmas had two bad flare ups, one just after my last physio appointment when he (the physio) kindly did some weird manipulation to my L-joints, and now, the week after my first run after a month long break.

I have decided, rather than suffer, mainly from the terrible mood swings caused by the pain, I will go back to my GP and ask for more help. My physio tried to convince me that a scan or xray wouldn’t show anything wrong with my back because whenever I have been there, he has not been able to see anything wrong with me or trigger excruciating pain. During my treatment, I never mentioned or asked for scans. I have been told by everyone I know to ask and demand a scan. I have, so far, not. But my patience is running thin. I have still had no conclusive diagnosis of why I am not getting better despite following training/stretching instructions and attending back classes etc. I personally think there is something mechanically wrong with my hip joint as whenever I run, my old injury flares up after which my back goes. So far, I’ve been told so many different things that I don’t know what to believe anymore.

Diagnosis 1: Early June 2011. Physiotherapist #1 tells me I am hypermobile, therefore my backjoints are too flexible and move out of their normal range of movement, causing pain.
Treatment 1: Exercises to strengthen core.

Diagnosis 2: 2 months late, Physiotherapist #1 calls in physiotherapist #2 for second opinion, who reinforces diagnosis, speaks of “referred pain” in reference to my ever annoying leg pain, and scares the wit out of me by suggesting the only solution in the end might be steriod injections. But we will pursue other routes first…
Treatment 2: I am referred to a back class as no major improvement.

I have meanwhile taken up pilates to improve core strength and posture.

Diagnosis 3: Physiotherapist #3 diagnoses me as having a very stiff lower back compared to my very flexible upper back. Physiotherapist #3 shows me on a plastic skeleton that my bottom two back joints are rubbing together too much, causing friction which is causing scarring and inflammation.
Treatment 3: Need to open up those two joints by stretching to reduce the inflammation.

Diagnosis 4: Physiotherpist #3 is questioning whether I have some form of nerve trauma/hypersensitivity as no major improvement. Pain is intermittent which explains the first signs of improvement then relapse.
Treatment 4: Acupuncture for 5 sessions to try and temporarily block pain signals.

Diagnosis 5: Not much more can be done. Something’s not right still.
Treatment 5: Carry on doing the stretching. Open appointment but physiotherapist #3 is also moving on to next hospital. Come back if necessary and go back to GP if no improvement in 6 months.

6 Months! I have lasted a month. I am booked in to go see my GP on Monday and I don’t really know what to say to him. I am currently resorting to ibuprofen and heat patches to get me through this week alone. I have throughout tried my utmost to follow instructions and stretch as much as I can. Nothing has so far helped and it’s getting me down that I can’t go back to running because of it. I am now anxiously awaiting my appointment when I can vent to my GP and hopefully get some more investigation done.

The past few weeks have been hell to put it lightly. The other half unintentionally humiliated me at his brother’s wedding which set the tone for what has been a hellish week and some. I am now on holiday, trying to chill out and get to grips with my emotionally unstable situation.

On the plus side, we think my physiotherapist has cracked it with the latest diagnosis. On the minus, I’ve been in agony since he had a play with my L5, trying to separate it from rubbing against the sacrum. But finally, last night, I had an ok nights sleep. He has instructed me not to do too much any one day but to spread out all the things I have to do over a multiple of days. So I’m pottering around, doing chores but not really getting anything done…

I have taken up my running again, leading a beginners group with my friend. Perhaps I bit off too much too soon but I’ve not been running properly since March. The ever expanding backside is a telltale sign that I am not doing enough (and perhaps eating too much). Admittedly, I have a terrible relationship with food. I eat too much and I am addicted to the feel-good-factor of tastes. A recipe for disaster. I have somehow managed to plateau weight wise, so I am not putting “too much” on, but I am hell as not losing any. Which is what I would like to do but simply cannot get my head around actually doing anything about it. I try, each week to start planning and reduce my portions etc etc, come the afternoon it’s all gone to pot and I’ve overeaten again.

I do think I am trying to fix too many things at once. I want my back to get better, I want to run again, I want to lose weight, I want to save money (new bed&mattress, things for our home etc), plan this plan that. I have in a way set up myself for failure by trying to do too much simultaneously. But I have been known never to do things in half measures. Perhaps this is the first problem I need to tackle.

I will use my foray into blogging as an analogy for my life at the moment. My attempt to refresh this site has so far failed. I had a grand plan to refresh, redesign etc etc and blog frequently and…and suddenly I found myself in a situation I didn’t like. I have not learnt anything since I took my epic hiatus from webdesign. The web has evolved, leaving me behind in prehistoric times. And this realisation put me in a rather bad mood, unsurprisingly. The easy option – bugger it all. No new layout, no blogging.

I think of myself as being a fairly intelligent person with the ability to grasp most things. I seem to, however, lack the basic level of patience to learn something vaguely more complex. My old skills seem to be crumbling but rather than sort it out, I would instead lament my lack of skills and wallow in self pity. This is what is inherently wrong with me at the moment. There is an air of failure around me and a lack of willingness to do anything about it. This state of apathy-cross-upset is being fed by my back pain. It makes me cranky, depressed, lethargic and most importantly it gives me a feeling of hopelessness.

I get the feeling that emotionally, I am simply incapable of anything but resent at the moment. The smallest things will upset me; I feel miserable from seeing others’ happiness. I resent it. Is this the green eyed monster talking? Perhaps. Who wouldn’t envy people without pain? Who wouldn’t envy people who are moving on with their lives when they are stuck in a rut themselves? Resentment – this is what the last few months have been like, triggered by nothing else than my constant back pain, if that can be called a trigger. Oh and the fact that everyone else seem to be moving on with their lives progressing. I am not.

I don’t know where to start to change things. My main passtime occupation has been sorting out my back. “Sort one thing at a time, the fewer things to focus on, the better,” I thought. Three months later I have seen 0 progress and I have done EXACTLY what I have been told will help. Pilates, core strengthening, prescribed weekly back classes. Nothing, no progress. I have out of sheer “luck” seen a different physio and been told I have a different problem than I thought I had and to expect another 8 weeks before I see any progress. I am at the end of my tether. I have put on the brave face but I am about to snap! Would I ever dare say any of the above to anyone in real life? No. All they get is the brunt of my bad mood and assumptions regarding reasons for my bad temper. The smallest of irritation is enough to put me in a mood where I am incapable of thinking straight, everything is personal and it puts me on the offense.

I hope I can carry on blaming my back pain for my bad behaviour and mood. Because I doubt either will end soon. I could do with something good happening to me once in a while, something that will lift my mood for more than an hour. Because as it is, anything positive is quickly forgotten about.

I always thought of myself as a city girl and settling into a small town life has always been tough for me to swallow. It’s on occasions like today that I realise that actually, small town doesn’t equal bad. Coming to London to sort out my passport application has been a lonely experience. Granted, I have come alone but in London, everything is about number one.

I consider myself a fairly polite albeit brutally honest person. TMI is my slogan if not motto. But I feel my kind and gentil nature is wasted here, where every expression of politeness serves a grander purpose than just being nice. This is an awful generalisation I know, but it is the overall feeling I get.

But I get it. In a city its a dog eat dog world. Millions of people compete for the same job, same lifestyle and same life situation. Hardened to survive, these native landowners have got no time to be polite. They treat each other how they are treated, like they are the lowest of the low or with contrived politeness covering up a hidden agenda. I have a feeling this is what I would have become should I have remained a city-girl.

You get the London effect in scale in smaller cities and towns, there’s no doubt about that. Usually us country bumpkins blame the big cutting slickers for fainting our small towns in one way or another. But it’s just the fact that we are forgetting to care for each other and we forget that there is something grander than us.

…and new beginnings. Welcome to my new abode!

GirlontheRun.org was born sort of accidentally. A few weeks ago I received an email reminding me that my domain name ashke.nu was expiring. At the ripe age of 25, I am now responsible for my own finances and economical situation, therefore I felt that forking out 60€ for domain name seemed…well, excessive. When my dearest mother was paying for it, it of course didn’t seem too bad, I mean you get 2 years for 60€! … Talk about daylight robbery.

So the day of the expiry keeps creeping up on me and suddenly I get a slight panic as I realise that I need a new home for my teenage dream websites that I am too emotionally attached to to give up. I’ve spent a significant amount of man hours on these things, insignificant as they are. So a new name was born to reflect my new life, considerably different from the teenage dreams I had a decade ago when Ashke.nu was born.

Whilst my websites have slowly become musty and decayed, it really hit me that the death of ashke.nu would be the end of an era (10 years I – read Mum – paid for it to stay online). I decided that I would give it one more go. From high school student to college and from university now to working life, priorities have clearly changed. I don’t have the gazillion hours to spend geeking over my desktop anymore. Facebook and Twitter have allowed us all to micro blog about what sandwich we had for lunch and what colour our vomit was after a night of excess (yellow, FYI, I’ve never been so sick in my life). Who needs a proper website anymore?

I feel slightly sad, and slightly optimistic that maybe, just maybe I will have something again to feel excited about. Running has been my vice for the past few year but since my injury in March I have been unable to have a proper run to let off some steam. This blog…this is going to be my journey to recovery – mentally as well as physically.

It is official. You are cordially invited to join me on this epic road of self-discovery. I will run again. I will blog again.