living for the weekend....

Well, that was over all too fast. How long until the next one starts? Are they always this far apart?

Who the hell decided that?

Why did we listen?

(like the deserts miss the rain)

If you'll forgive me, I'm going to indulge in a little moan now.

As I lay wide awake my bed at a quarter to five this morning, I could feel myself getting angrier and angrier. I had initially been awoken by C's alarm, but was increasingly disturbed from my slumbers by the tiny little noises she made as she got ready to leave to catch the early flight to Paris from East Midlands Airport: the shower, the last minute packing, the phone call to the taxi company to make sure the car was on its way. The final straw was when she put the hall light on and came in to ask me where my wallet was so that she could borrow £20 for the taxi.

"It's where it always is"
"Where's that?"
"In the kitchen drawer"
thump-thump-thump down the stairs. pause. thump-thump-thump back up the stairs
"It's not there"
...and then silence when she saw it sat in the doorway to the study, where I had tossed it when emptying out my football bag from last night.
thump-thump-thump down the stairs, bang of the front door, clank of the lock and the realisation that she's left the hall light on.

We go through more or less the same routine every week, and usually it barely bothers me and I'm able to drift off back to sleep fairly easily. Today though, I got angry, and once I was angry, I found it took me ages to get back to sleep, and barely managed it before my alarm dragged me out of bed a little after seven.

I have no wish to make C. feel guilty about this, but I found myself wondering about my life. My wife is away from home for between two and four nights every single week, as well as the odd weekend. I know it's not easy working away for that amount of time, and I understand that hotel rooms and business dinners rapidly become very tedious, but this has an impact on me too. I spend most weeknights rattling around the house on my own, with my Sky+ box filling up with programmes that I can't watch until my wife gets back. I cook meals for one and I stay in and I talk to the cat. I've got friends in Nottingham, so undoubtedly much of this I do by choice, but even if I was out every night, that's still no substitute for spending that precious downtime with the person you love. And anyway, half the time that there's something on in town that we could do together, we either can't plan the time that far in advance, or she's already committed to being away so we can't go. I actually quite like spending time on my own, and I think a little bit of time apart is good for us, as I often need time to decompress from work without needing to talk to anyone about it. I'm not great at smalltalk and I like being able to potter about and do my own thing. Well, it turns out that I require that space for approximately one, maybe two days per week. Much more than that is too much alone time, and for the other nights I'd quite like to have my wife around, thank you very much.

I think all of that time apart affects our relationship a little when she's back in the country too. Not surprisingly, when she gets back, C. will be keen to spend some time with me and some time at home with her husband. I've been at home all week already though, and I find that I've adjusted to being on my own and that it consequently takes me a little while to adjust to having someone else back in the house. This means that, as she gets closer to me, I seem to unconsciously want to keep my distance a bit as I need time to readjust. I also find myself feeling irrationally resentful of this person appearing back into my life according to their own timetable and seemingly, in my head anyway, expecting me to drop everything and to spend all of my time with them. It doesn't work like that. Not for me, anyway. My life goes on during the week and sometimes at the weekend I like to catch up with the things that I might not have been been able to do during the week. I might want to go and see my friends or to go to a gig, and yes, that might mean that I leave my wife at home and go out on my own. My life is not governed entirely according to my wife's schedule.

Except that it is.

The day before she goes away, she spends the evening in a mood as she contemplates being away. She goes to bed early and has often been asleep for a couple of hours by the time I get to bed. She then gets up early and inevitably disrupts my sleep, leaving me tired and grumpy the next day. She often returns late too, missing dinner and sometimes not coming back until after I've gone to bed. This means that even if she's only away for three nights in a week, two of the remaining evenings in the week are essentially gone too. That leaves two nights a week that we spend together properly.

Is that enough?

I hope so, and the last thing I would want her to do is to compromise on a job that she has worked very hard to get and is doing very well in. I love her and we just get on with it, but it's hard sometimes and just occasionally, on days like today, I feel a bit grouchy about it.

End of moan.

just try and stay positive....

I've got a lesion on my spinal cord. It's just tucked up on the left-hand side of my neck. It might have been there for years for all I know, but it only really came to my attention in the late summer of 2005. At that point, it started to interrupt the transmission of nerve signals down my body, causing sensations of numbness, pins and needles and weakness in various different parts of my body. After a few months, I was diagnosed as having Transverse Myelitis. There's no treatment and there's certainly no cure, but at least now I know what this is called - although I prefer to call it the WTs... the weirdy tingles.

At the point at which I was diagnosed, the specialists I was seeing lost interest in me. They will only become interested in me again if I develop new symptoms as a result of having more lesions appear on my spinal cord or in my brain. At that point I'm worth having another look at, but in the meantime I have to try and put it all to the back of my mind. I do my best. New symptoms may never appear, but the old symptoms have never gone away and probably never will. Since that summer in 2005 I have been desperately trying to ignore the feeling of pins and needles in both my hands, the numbness in my feet and thighs, the weakness and muscle wastage across my arms and shoulders, the distant sensation I get when I do something as simple as scratching my side, my cheek or to the top of my head. Most days it works. Most days I barely think about it at all. What's the point? It's not as though I can do anything about it, is it? I occasionally feel a bit sorry for myself when I find I can't do stupid things like carry a heavy box or wear a heavy bag across my shoulders because I'm simply not strong enough any more. In the main though, I just get on with it.

It flares up sometimes though. I don't know why,but on some days I wake up with a stiff neck and the buzzing seems much more noticeable in my hands; my arms feel heavy; I can really feel the loss of sensation in the soles of my feet and I have a burning sensation in the muscles of my legs. They're not new symptoms and so presumably they're not medically interesting...but they upset me. Sometimes I wonder what new symptoms would feel like. How would I recognise them? When you already have symptoms from the top of your head to the soles of your feet, how do you know where the worsening of an old symptom stops and a new symptom starts?

Yes, I still have the use of all of my limbs and I know it could be a whole lot worse than it is.... but on days like those - days like today - I find it just that little bit harder to fight off the frustration and to stay positive.

and if the ground's not cold...

I saw this picture on the Guardian's "24 hours in pictures" feature.

In sub-zero temperatures, a baby Japanese macaque monkey soaks in the warmth of a mountain hotspring at Jigokudani in Japan.

I know just how he feels.

That expression on his face? I get that most days when I'm braving myself to get out of the shower and to get ready for work.