Packing limbo and the great wall of text

Posted On November 12, 2016

There’s a rather unwelcoming “To Let” sign outside my house as winter closes in. We have given our landlord notice, of course, I guess I’m surprised that the agency were so on-the-ball. I do hope the landlord finds nice tenants to replace us when we’re gone, although I don’t want the stress of strangers viewing our half-packed chaos all over the place.

I’m buried in a lot of stress at the moment because there’s so much to do. I’ve started packing (with a tape gun thing that is actually pretty handy), and accidentally left some things out of boxes after sealing them and ughhhhhhhh. It feels too early to pack some stuff, but I also just want it all done.

We’re not just moving up the road this time, we’re moving 30 miles away, so we won’t be able to come back and forth and sort out anything we ballsed up. Will’s boss and friend are helping us by hiring a van on the day, and so most of our big furniture and boxes will go via that. Will reckons he’ll go off with them. I have to stay behind in Soton to clean everything (ironically I’m the one least physically capable of doing it, but also the only one who will scrutinise rooms enough), use the vacuum hose to get all the fluff out of the corners, sponge-clean the cupboards etc.

So then that leaves me, Eglantine (the vacuum cleaner), Isador (my chair), and maybe even Freya, sitting alone in an empty house, with whatever other boxes we didn’t want to put in the truck, needing a way to catch up with everyone else.
Will said he might be able to ask his mum to help, but that doesn’t actually work if he does go ahead in the moving truck because he won’t be here to also get a lift from her. I’m a bit stuck really, unless everyone is happy to sit outside my house for potentially hours while I wipe stuff down, and even if they did there wouldn’t be room for me in that vehicle, so I doooon’t knooooow.

My planner is currently full of little orange Post-It flags with packing and cleaning tasks written on them, in case I need to shuffle them about. I’m already a bit behind with some of the stuff I’ve intended to do because I’ve been really fatigued and in a lot of temperature-related pain. I had a migraine last night as well, I stubbornly decided to try and keep going even though my vision was exploding in colourful dots (not the usual zigzags and fireworks, admittedly), but did wind up in bed, occasionally on my phone out of sheer boredom, with a Kool’n’Soothe on my head and the feeling of a spike going up through my jaw, again.

Thankfully I wasn’t sick during this one. I tend to get hella nauseous during migraines. I had a bad one back when we lived in the flat on Cranbury Ave, I had to be totally in the dark in the bedroom while vomiting into a bucket. Thankfully I only get 1 or 2 migraines in a 12-month period ?

WALL OF TEXT ALERT. Anyway let’s break this up with some photos.

You may remember that I had a hodge-podge trilingual keyboard. I recently starting learning Hebrew on Duolingo, and it wanted me to start typing in the alphabet pretty much straight away. I do have Hebrew installed on my laptop, but without keyboard stickers it was a bit of an awkward guessing game.
My old ones were losing their stick anyway, so, I ordered some more super cheaply. This time, with English, Russian, and Hebrew letters, and I added French letters back in with marker pen (which has now gone a bit smudgy) because I couldn’t find any to buy with 4 alphabets already on them.

Old!

New!

Dramatic angles for no reason!

I love the white being a contrast, too. I’m really happy with them 🙂

Best.

Freya and my sister.

Will worked very hard on this meal, but I again struggled with the meat.

This is probably quite boring news, but, I recently developed a spontaneous allergy. If you’ve seen my “50 Things About Me” video (I’ve not made a video in a while actually!), you’ll know that I have some quite boring allergies; mould, household dust, pollen, and penicillin. This mainly results in perennial allergic rhinitis, and really aggressive vomiting to the point of severe dehydration, with the last one.

You may also already know that I wear a medical alert bracelet. I forget precisely when I got my simple chain one, but I’d say I’ve been wearing it about a year. Recently I started to get weird scarring and peeling underneath where the information emblem goes, and then I developed pustules under the chain (I googled pustules to make sure I was on about the right thing, and I do not recommend doing that unless you find pus super interesting).
Anyway, I tried to carry on wearing it for a while, and then tried taking it off intermittently or overnight, but that didn’t help. So now I’ve just taken it off. I used to have a bulkier one with a leather strap, and I thought that would have been OK to wear, but it’s only gone and vanished.

So, yeah, I dunno why this has happened. I think there are two possibilities:

Nickel.
I’m not allergic to nickel that I know of, but when I got my ears pierced (at the embarrassingly-late age of 25), they should have put in titanium barbells but instead they had nickel, and my ears were so sore and horrible until I swapped them for titanium hoops. So, nickel can definitely irritate me. BUT, that wouldn’t explain how I was able to wear the bracelet for so long before it suddenly started irritating me.
Spontaneous allergy.
Mast Cell Activation Disorders are one of the consequences of Ehlers-Danlos, and as a result you can literally develop a spontaneous allergy to whatever you’re currently doing, just because your body feels like it. Some people actually become allergic to being in sunlight. Some people become allergic to foods they’ve eaten their whole lives. So, if I did have MCAD, it could explain the sudden allergy to my bracelet.

Either way, I don’t feel great not having a medical alert bracelet on. If I’m unconscious and Will can’t communicate all the complex things going on with my body, it will not end well. Dear Lord, there are so many things that could go wrong for me in A&E.

I won’t do anything about it until after I’ve moved, because there’s too much going on and money’s too tight, but I’ve started looking at silicone bracelets as an alternative. Silicone charity/ awareness ones do tend to melt after a while, and that puts me off, but on the other hand I shouldn’t have the same skin consequences with non-metal.

I found a site called ReminderBand, which sells them in a shape similar to traditional med bracelets, which should be more recognisable. Plus I was able to select glow in the dark filler on the writing, as well as two icons for each side of the bracelet.

There’s so much going on with me that it’s hard to choose what to fit onto the bracelet; there wound up being no room for diabetes and anoxic seizures. But on the rear side I have MedicAlert’s phone number, and my membership number (which I’ve blurred out of the mock-up for uploading here), and when a paramedic quotes this they’ll get the other information, anyway.

They also had religion icons available so I stuck a Magen David in at the end just in case. If I’m unconscious and rapidly dying and staff want to call someone to read prayers, they’ll at least know what kind.

I was pretty uneasy about it not having info about penicillin, though. If they feel they have to make a quick decision before having time to ring the MedicAlert number, and then give me penicillin as a result of that time pressure, it could end really badly.
The same site also sells really thin silicone bands (smaller than the usual ones), so I came up with this:

I think it makes it bloody obvious not to give me penicillin, and also to be bloody careful with any anaesthetic with the suffix -caine (they don’t work properly for people with Ehlers-Danlos, so if they started to perform minor surgery on me because they had given me some it would GO HORRIBLY).
Also I had to spell it the American way to fit the character limit, please forgive me.

Wearing those two together hopefully wouldn’t take up too much room on my wrist, would be gentler on the skin and would also squish-down easier underneath braces. Plus they don’t have to come off for MRIs!
But like I said, I’m not doing anything ordering-wise until after I’ve moved house and have sorted other stuff out.

I guess I’m putting the mock-ups here in case people need to go “No, Letti, this is terrible.”

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