Dear Diary: 29 May 2022

Sitting in the car in ASDA’s car park in Carlisle waiting for my wife to bring the shopping to the car.

We got here around 3.30pm yesterday and it’s lovely. The views are amazing although the courage is a little smaller than expected. I love the single room open plan living, dining, kitchen as whoever’s cooking is right in the same room. Nice little Juliette balcony off the 1st floor main room and downstairs main bedroom with a nice large bed but hardly any room around it. That room however does have double doors out to an enclosed patio which is nice. Next door is a twin bedroom also with no space around the beds, and a decent sized bathroom with bath tub and manual shower over

Unfortunately I’ve not been that good the last few weeks and not sure how much I am going to have the energy to do. The stress of driving here yesterday took a bit too much out of me (even though it was fairly stress free to be honest) and today I am wiped out. We drove into Carlisle this morning (when I started writing this, it’s now 7:17pm) and then I had a short nap before the meeting and then had a 2 hour nap after the meeting and am again laying down now after dinner.

My worst symptoms at the moment are pain unfortunately. I generally ache all over like a flu and have tender points in several places including my heels and balls of my feet which is great for walking.

I can’t sit outside on the patio as I can’t sit on the hard metal chairs there as they hurt me currently. I can’t even comfortably stand and lean against the railings as that hurts my arms too!

The thing that hurts least is laying in bed!

At around 7:30pm or so we decided to go for a walk down the road and walked about a mile or so down the hill there was a small village about 2 miles away but didn’t try to get there as that would have meant a 4 mile walk and I was certainly not up to that. It would have been dark by then anyway and nothing to do at the village at late evening on a Sunday.

Somewhat surprisingly the walk didn’t make my symptoms any worse that I’ve noticed so far and was nice to get out in the fresh air among the bird song and sleep bleating. Still tired when we got back but no worse.

Looking at the chart below I can see one thing stand out: while fatigue and pain are worse than usual mostly due I think to PEM following the journey here yesterday, cognitive dysfunction is less than usual. I think this is maybe a function of not having to concentrate at work at the moment.