angharad_gam

The pollen levels have been shocking lately, but I have discovered that if I take anti-histamines for more than a couple of days in a row they start making me feel really sleepy. Actually sleepy is the wrong word. They make me feel like my eyes are propped open with matchsticks. I'm not sure they actually make me sleep more - just want to. Natch these are the 'non-drowsy' anti-histamines. I've never dared try the drowsy-making anti-histamines (which actually double as sleeping pills). They'd probably knock me out for a week.

Thankfully the rest of this week should be coolish and wettish, which hopefully means I won't have to make a choice between sneezing all day and stumbling around like a zombie.

In other news Erin has spent the last three days at a school camp, and the house has been astonishingly quiet.
Also a couple of months ago I got Liam a compendium of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. Then, of course, during the school holidays, I had to take him to see the film. Then he said he wanted a diary, so on the weekend we got him one. Now he can't do anything without writing about it in his diary. He wrote seven pages in the first two days. This is not a bad thing, really, unless you want to get him to do something quickly.

Hey, look, I wrote a whole post without mentioning my phone.

Our garden is in full bloom at the moment. It is very lovely, and I spent a pleasant day outside yesterday with Ashwyn playing various games which involved crawling under said flowering bushes in order to retrieve balls. And now I am so itchy! My eyes and forehead and scalp have been itchy all day, and anti-histamines only help a little (I am beginning to believe the things that say they work better if you take them before exposure to an allergen - the trouble is when it rains and is cool I get complacent and stop taking them and then a sunny day comes along and I go outside to enjoy it and argh!).

We had a pretty mad weekend. Saturday my parents flew in, for a short visit on their way back from a trip to Europe. Their plane landed on Saturday afternoon, when we normally do our grocery shopping, so we had to do that in the morning, except Andy also managed to flood the bathroom, and Liam got up with conjunctivitis and had to be taken to the doctor. Somehow we managed to squeeze bathroom cleaning, parent collection, grocery shopping, doctor visit, the usual Saturday three loads of washing and making cheesecake into the one day. It was pretty hectic.

It was nice to have my dad in the same state for father's day though. We went out to lunch. Then we had Andy's parents and brother over for dinner, a grand total of ten people (which is not much in comparison with 150, but my kitchen  is much smaller than most hall kitchens). I made Indian - lamb korma, potatoes madras, rice, pappadums, naan bread, raita, samosas (with lots of shortcuts). And then the cheesecake (cherry) for dessert.

A busy weekend. Also our house filled up with enormous blowflies. There must be something festering in some secret hole somewhere (a charming thought, but then the kids quite often leave apple cores or melon rinds in odd places, so not entirely surprising) and giving birth to them. Andy sucked most of them up with the vacuum cleaner. But not before they freaked out Liam. He has been very anxious and nervy lately.

Liam is still not entirely well but is being annoying about taking medicine. He freaked out over the eyedrops and ointment for the conjunctivitis, so we had to hold him down to put it in. Now he has a cough but is so disgusted by the cough medicine Andy got that he gets all in a state and practically throws up whenever he has to take some. One has sympathy for one's sick children, but sometimes they try it greatly. I tried making him a honey and lemon drink and he complained that it tasted like metal.

Andy has also not been well. I think he has finally succumbed to the lurgy that has been going around.

Also it was so nice to see the sun for a while over the weekend, but Tuesday's weather brought on a nasty bout of hayfever. Honestly plants, what is it with you? A couple of sunny days and all you can think about is sex?

And then the wind knocked down a tree in our front garden. Fortunately it fell on the lawn. If it had gone the other way it would have taken out the power/phone lines into the house (and also the peas and beans that are just coming up).

I seem to be having trouble finding motivation to do much except play computer games at the moment. This is not at all leftover illness bleh - I've actually not been feeling too bad since then. I think it's probably just a reaction to being so busy for so long, plus the weather. There are masses of things that need to be done in the garden at the moment, but it's hard to go outside when it's so cold and damp. Cold and sunny I don't mind so much. Is it just me or does this winter seem extra long?

Not I'm in any hurry for summer to come along, or at least normally I wouldn't be. I think I just need a little sunlight. Maybe I need to get back on the Vitamin D.

Ashwyn lasted all of one day before we got the 'I don't want to go to school'. In fact we get it almost every morning, but apparently he seems happy enough once he gets to school and is generally behaving himself, and more to the point applying himself. All the more grist for my 'he was just bored at kindy' theory.

Last week I found out at short notice that I was making an Avcon costume for Andy's brother. Actually it wasn't quite that bad. He acquired a Starblazers StarForce uniform jacket and a pair of white flares and wanted me to turn the flares into uniform pants to match the jacket. Andy has a photo which I will try and persuade him to post. Based on this Andy now wants me to make him a Leader Desslok costume for next year. This should not be a problem (it's not a complex costume) but the blue skin and blond hair might be another matter.

Also I think I am becoming a fan of Chap Hop:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eELH0ivexKA&feature=fvwrel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iRTB-FTMdk&feature=relmfu

I used to pride myself on not being allergic to anything except myself.
But in the last year or so I have come to accept that 'I don't normally get hayfever but...' is actually now 'yes I get hayfever, bring on the anti-histamines please'.

And now...

Andy bought a bottle of moscato on Monday. I suspect it was a cheap one. It was also a very sweet one. This is relevant because cheap wines and sweet wines tend to have higher levels of sulphites, which are otherwise less often added to Australian wines than to European ones. So I had a glass on Monday night and my throat swelled up. Not a lot, just enough to notice. I wasn't sure whether it was the wine, or some side effect of the endless cold I seem to have had since Canada. But then on Tuesday night I had another glass of the wine and same deal.

I think I may have become allergic to sulphites. Yay!

No more cheap wine for me.

Also I recently acquired a mediaeval city building and trading game called Anno 1404, which is a bit addictive. It's very hard to imagine in a week and a bit I shall be cooking for Midwinter. This is probably not a good thing.

Quack!

No, I have a cold. I starting feeling stuffy yesterday shortly after I got up and now I'm feeling stuffier. You know the way some colds are little sniffles that make you feel a bit rotten and snuffly, and others are total mucous monsters? This one is a mucous monster. Fortunately I have some Codral, and there is a pharmacy just around the corner anyway. Hmmm...I wonder if Canada still has cold medicines with pseudo-ephedrine in them, as the 'new formula' stuff with pseudo-epephrine in instead has never seemed to work as well to me (here's a hint pharmaceutical companies - just because the name sounds the same doesn't mean it does the same thing!)

The colleague who was on the same plane from Sydney as me is also sick, so I'm guessing this is an example of irreparable's plane crud. Yay!

However I did manage to actually have three fairly square meals yesterday and between the cold and the codral (or possibly finally beginning to acclimatise) slept three hours when I took an early minute from the conference and six last night. I also spoke to a conference attendee from NZ who was having the same sleeping problems, which made me feel rather more cheerful and relaxed about it.

So some of you may recall I mentioned last year I was going to see if progesterone (the mini-pill essentially) would help me not be bleeding all my essential nutrients out every month. And actually it did seem to reduce the level of bleeding. So that was good. And it didn't induce any of the other side-effects I was concerned about (weight gain, depression, loss of libido). All well and good. Sadly one of the less common side effects has rendered it rather less than useful. I think it has been giving me ovarian cysts.

I had a large ovarian cyst after I stopped breastfeeding Ashwyn, and aside from being rather painful (an understatement) it disrupted my menstrual cycle to the point where I was basically having periods almost all the time with only a small gap in between. This is not a common symptom of ovarian cysts, but then my gynecology seems to be set to 'if in doubt bleed'. This time round when I started having periods every other week I thought perhaps at first it was just stress (because stress has that effect on me too - made exams a fun time I can tell you). Then I started getting a familiar pain in the general ovary vicinity and thought 'hmmm, I have been here before'.

Ovarian cysts are a rare side effect of taking progesterone, but from my previous history it seems like they are a thing that my body does when it gets a bit confused about whether it should be ovulating or not.

So this is what I was doing before Christmas. The way to fix the bleeding every other week problem is, funnily enough, more progesterone. You take a massive dose of progesterone for 10 days, and then have a good solid bleed (always seems to come back to that) and then everything resets itself.

Except apparently if you are still doing the thing that gives you the cysts it seems like everything resets itself, but then goes back to bleeding every other week again. So massive dose of progesterone again (and this stuff does have side effects like breaking out like a teenager - tolerable - and week-long insomnia - not so tolerable), and then cold turkey on the whole lot.

And back to my normal, gushy self. Anyone want to guess what my iron levels are right now?
There are other hormonal options, of course, but I'm a bit put off by this experience, particularly given my thesis that this is something that's going to happen if I try and suppress ovulation. So we'll just try being normal again for a while and see if we can manage it with tranexamix acid, iron tablets and perhaps the odd course of iron injections.

Speaking of normal, it's only really in the last twelve months that I have come to realise how abnormal I actually am in this respect. For years it has never occurred to me that pads/tampons come in packs of 12-14 because that's how many most people use at one go, or that the 'most people lose 6-8 tblsps' wasn't just 'ha! doctors what do they know?'. I figure I probably bleed three to four times more than most people, though it varies a bit. This has slowly increased over the years, particularly since I've had the kids, but it's always been pretty heavy.

*sigh* only fifteen or so years until menopause...