Day Two Week Two

I didn't have such a great day today.  I didn't recover from swimming as well as I'd hoped and the pain and fatigue severely impacted on the very busy day.

It didnt help that all four fire doors were closed when I went to breakfast, which strained my neck muscles a bit opening them all on my mobility scooter.  Then before I'd even started stretch class I reached for my water bottle and got stabbing pain in the back of my head.  The doctors think it may be occipital neuralgia but I haven't been officially diagnosed or treated for it yet.

I only managed visualisations of the stretch exercises then I went straight into a meeting with the psychologist to discuss my problems with social services.  She thought I'd done everything I could but was doubtful that they would change their decision.  I made another appointment to see her about dealing with stress.

Next was my OT appointmemt. We went through my activity diary categorising all my activities as green for easy, amber for slightly challenging and red for more challenging.  I seem to be pacing my activities pretty well and problem solved a couple of areas where I wasn't. The OT said our next task was to see where I could work in some household tasks to deal with the loss of social services support.  I tried to explain to her that any increase in my activity really sults in an increase in my symptomsbut she still thought I could manage it by implementing pacing and using tools such as a long handled sponge to clean the bath.  I'm not so sure that will be achievable.

I went from OT straight into a physio session. The plan was to have another 5 minutes in the pool but I was feeling too ill to do that.  We talked a lot about mindfullness, the physio said I'm like a swan on a pond, I appear to be calm but underneath I'm paddling very hard to keep afloat.  I thought that was a good analogy.  She spoke about how my sympathetic nervous system was always switched on, ready for fight or flight but Im not sure what I can do about that.

Next was lunch followed by an introduction to relaxation.  I didn't find the class very helpful, I was already very tired and in pain from non-stop meetings all morning.  The OT gave a weird demonstration about an Australian guy living in the bush who walked to the lake every morning but one morning he was bitten by a snake and he ended up in hospital.  When he recovered he went back to the bush and one morning on his way to the lake he felt a pain and completely overreacted thinking it to be another snake bite but it was just a scratch from a twig.  I'm not sure what the moral of the story was but I struggled to relate to it.

She talked about the sympathetic and para-sympathetic nervous system a little bit and then did deep breathing exercises, which I skipped as by this point I was feeling pretty awful.  I had to sit on the floor as the bllod pooling in my feet was getting unbearable from being sat in a chair all morning.

I had a 20 minute break before my functional activity class, which was like a bizarre game of musical chairs.  We used timers to pace our craft activities, so after five minutes the buzzers and beepers would sound and we'd have to stand up, change position or do something else.  It was supposed to teach us not to get so engrossed in craft activities that we forget about our posture and pacing but it just seemed very artificial and unreal, not really something I could put into practice at home.

The final session of the day was goal setting, not my favourite subject.  I don't personally find goal setting at all helpful, I'm a highly motivated person and if I want to do something I find a way of doing it, but this course almost exclusively based on goal setting and making progress.  The talk covered making goals smart, specific, measurable, agreed, realistic and timed.  Unfortunately I was feeling pretty ill and totally exhausted and the oscillating fan was giving me motion sickness so I spent most of the class sitting on the floor shivering because I couldn't maintain my body temperature.

I went straight back to my room and had a bath to try and warm up but I think a combination of the previous week, the long journey, overdoing it in the pool and spending 8 hours sitting upright in the same chair was a bit too much for me.