Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Stupid Crohns – when will it end?

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Other than being sleepy from lack of sleep this week (and weeks past) I haven’t been feeling too bad this week … well, up until today anyway!

I really thought this Crohn’s flare was beginning to calm down. I was wrong. Today has not been a good day. My stomach, or rather my abdomen, has been in terrible pain all day. I’ve had severe cramping, fevers and oddest of all my feet have been freezing cold, yet clammy to the touch. Yuck, I know.

I was lying on the couch this afternoon, bundled up in a blanket to keep warm. My feet were like ice cubes and every once in a while I’d reach down to feel my foot because they were so cold they felt wet. As if I’d been outside walking in the snow in running shoes or boots with a hole in them … you know how your socks get wet when you don’t wear proper footwear in the snow? Cold wet feet. Uh huh … and my feet were damp. It must have been a result of all the fevers I’d been having, but it’s not a symptom I generally have (cold clammy feet I mean).

I think the abdominal pains are/were a bowel blockage. I have strictures (scar tissues and narrowing of my intestines) thanks to the Crohn’s so blockages happen more often than I’d like. I think it’s resolving now – finally.

I also have absolutely no appetite. I’m not really even thirsty either, although I’ve been making myself drink plenty of water as that’s one of the way I resolve these mini-blockages I get. It’s almost as if I took a handful of appetite suppression pills or something.

I hope I start feeling better by tomorrow. Honestly that’s one of the reasons why we didn’t meet up with our friends husband this evening. However, I expect we’ll be in and out of the hospital visiting our friend who just had open heart surgery several times over the weekend, so I need to feel better.

I just wish I could have at least one day where I felt completely normal and healthy. That’s not too much to ask for is it?





So very tired

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I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping over the past few months and it’s starting to take it’s toll.

I have Crohn’s and I seem to get more abdominal pain at night, so depending upon how much pain I’m in it affects my sleep. Sometimes I get very very little sleep.

Of course, the less I sleep I get, and the more tired I am the more I hurt … it’s a vicious cycle and I just can’t seem to get myself out of it.

I keep thinking that if I could just be knocked out for a few days to a week it would break the cycle of pain and get me back into a decent sleep cycle again.

I never used to have trouble sleeping. It’s a terrible feeling to fall asleep for only a minute or two, hear a noise or feel a pain that wakes you up and then be up for hours again before you can fall asleep again for perhaps as little as a few minutes.

Do you ever have trouble sleeping?

I’m only writing about this now because I’ve just gone through three days with only about six hours sleep. I’m baked!

Do you ever have strange dreams?

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I had the strangest dream the other night. I had fallen asleep on the couch and at about 5 a.m. I woke up feeling very groggy and wondering how I came up with the phrase “The Newfies are watching them.” in my dream. (Newfies are people from the Canadian province of Newfoundland and they are often the butt of Canadian jokes.)

So what was I dreaming about? Well … that’s kind of hard to explain. I guess I was at a zoo or some kind of reptile exhibit with two very young nephews that do not exist in real life. One of the boys took off and ran up this man made rocky area behind a huge exhibit for iguanas and the next thing I knew he was in the exhibit with these giant iguanas (yes, in my dream they were larger than in real life). I seem to remember monitor lizards also being in the caged area too.

In my dream, I couldn’t get into the enclosure the way he had so I ran around to the front yelling for help and that’s when someone told me not to worry because “The Newfies are watching them”. LOL So I ran up to a man, I guess he was one of the Newfies, and he let me get into the enclosure to rescue my nephew, but just then a large iguana ran at me. The odd thing about the iguana was that it had a small lions head.

Yes, my dream was very very weird!

I backed off when I saw the lion headed iguana and as I looked towards the back area of the enclosure I saw my small nephew being held horizontally in the air by a few men and he had about 15 iguanas hanging off of him. I guess they’d bit into his clothing and were hanging on like Bulldogs. When I think about it now that image was pretty funny, but if it had really happened I guess it would be pretty scary for the kid and maybe me if I really was his aunt.

My dream ended with me outside the cage again, trying to get back in, but being blocked off by monitor lizards.

I still have no idea why I had such a strange and vivid dream. It occurred a few days ago and it’s still with me. I thought that maybe writing about it might purge it from my mind.

Chris and I used to keep an iguana and several other lizards (I think we had 14 in house at one point) as well as box turtles, but the only reptilian pets still present in our home are the turtles.

I don’t have the slightest fear of iguanas or monitor lizards so I don’t know why I dreamed of them in a frightening scenario. My only guess as to why the lion headed iguana appeared in my dream goes back to the one year that my big male iguana, Napoleon, went into a very bad breeding season and he literally chased us around our apartment for two months! However, other than that one brief period he was a complete sweet heart for the whole 10 years that we had him.

As odd as my whole dream was it’s the line “The newfies are watching them” that gets me the most. I have several friends from Newfoundland and Labrador and I rarely ever call them Newfies. It’s just not a term that I use.

That was certainly the strangest dream I’ve had in years! At least that I can remember!

Do you ever have strange dreams that stay with you for the whole day or even for days afterward? Dreams that you can’t really connect to anything in your life or at least not to anything in your recent past?

Yet another sleepless night and day

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Yesterday I was in a daze. I didn’t sleep all night. I only fell asleep at about 7:30 in the morning when my husband was getting up to go to work and he accidentally woke me up when he was leaving for work at 9:30.

I couldn’t get back to sleep at all. My stomach was crampy from the Crohn’s disease. So no matter how much I tried to sleep I just couldn’t. I ended up being in a fog most of the day and then at about 5 pm I started to get a bad headache. By 7 it was a migraine.

There was no way that I could write any posts on my blogs yesterday. They would have been gibberish.

I don’t know how I did it, but I didn’t fall asleep until 2:30 this morning. I guess when you’re overtired you just keep going, even if your brain is aching and not functioning well. LOL I think I finally fell asleep during an infomercial for exposed acne treatment or something like that.

The good news is that once I finally fell asleep I slept until about 9 am, and then I managed to fall asleep again until about noon today. I felt so much better after that long sleep.

I don’t sleep much and my sleep habits have gotten a lot worse over the last two years or so since I’ve been off on medical leave. Four to six hours of sleep is about my average per night so getting nine or more hours of sleep in one day is the equivalent of two days sleep for me. No wonder I feel so much better today, eh?

Do you ever have days like that where you haven’t slept or you’ve only had an hour or two’s sleep?

Spinning my wheels these days

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I’m so confused and disorganized these days and it’s just getting worse.

I have too much on my plate. Too many sites to manage and too many projects that I’m getting involved in. If I were making enough money I’d almost say that it’s time to hire someone to help me out, but that’s not an option at this point. Either that or quite everything to seriously consider one of those silly Jewelry sales manager jobs in Europe that I keep getting offered from job sites that I listed my resume on in the mid 90’s!

About a month ago I joined two membership sites that train you to market your websites and help you along the way. By this I mean they are set up with a variety of options to help you get traffic to your site as well as backlinks and even content. The sites are great, but most of their tutorial material is in video format and video’s don’t do well on my laptop – they keep cutting out. Not to mention that it’s difficult watching long videos when you have a puppy that constantly wants attention or a husband who wants to watch TV around. Plus, I find that if I’m given the choice of reading directions that would only take me five minutes to read or watching a 30 minute video I’d rather read a tutorial.

So I’m busy creating new blogging and website projects and trying to learn these two new systems at the same time and it’s just not working for me. I’m sure lack of sleep doesn’t help. I haven’t slept well in months so I’m living in a fog these days and if you’ve ever been seriously exhausted you probably know it’s very hard to learn something new or to get organized when you are practically brain dead.

I’m sure I’ll get my act together in the near future, but in the meantime I just feel like I’m spinning my wheels and not making much progress.

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