It’s usually my anxiety that wakes me up, but this morning (Monday), it was my son shaking me awake. Unfortunately, I was in the middle of a bad dream, so in response to my son lovingly shaking me, I screamed the flat down like a fox in the middle of the night.

Thanks to the nightmare and my medication still swimming far too enthusiastically through my bloodstream, I was completely out of it. I did, however, somehow manage to ascertain that there was a housing employee in my flat who my son had let in – and who had DEFINITELY heard me scream.

My son had assumed it was the surveyor who didn’t turn up last Tuesday.

I originally had a choice between Tuesday and today for a surveyor to come and check the windows, kitchen and bathroom. I chose Tuesday because I had a doctor’s appointment today. Nobody came on Tuesday. You can read about that here.

So, despite having only four hours of sleep, when this housing employee turned up I was actually relieved. I’ve had a lot of anxiety about the missed appointment and have heard absolutely nothing since, despite repeatedly emailing.

I asked him what he was here for.

“There’s a problem with one of your windows? Not locking?”

“Umm, no. I was due a surveyor appointment last Tuesday, but they didn’t show up.”

“Well, that’s weird. It was the surveyor who sent me, but this was raised in May. Can I check the windows anyway?”

“Sure. Wait – May?”

By this point, I was completely confused and extremely sedated from not sleeping enough after taking my medication, so I couldn’t work out whether the situation made no sense or my brain was simply failing to process whatever the hell was happening.

He proceeded to check all of the windows.

“Well, that’s very weird. Everything is fine. My day just got infinitely better – I thought I had this big job to do.”

It had made my day infinitely worse because now I was going to have to operate on four hours of sleep and go to a doctor’s appointment, but I didn’t want to take a crap all over his delight at presumably getting to run off to Greggs instead of fixing my completely functional windows. But, at least one of us was having a good morning.

After he left, I tried to go back to sleep. Instead, I lay there somehow completely sedated and VERY AWAKE at the same time, because my body had switched on every available EMERGENCY SYSTEM when my son shook me out of my nightmare.

And in that horrible half-drugged, half-alert state, my brain was being extremely loud about one question:

What the fuck just happened? After an hour of this, I admitted defeat with the going back to sleep idea and went to make coffee.

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Thoughts From Waiting Mode

The Americano pod coffee, intensity 10 (I am INTENSE), made with my Dolce Gusto machine was very much needed, but two of them did precisely nothing. I was absolutely exhausted. I thought it might help to move around, drink my electrolytes and more water, and generally attempt to drag myself out of zombie Rhio mode.

It didn’t really work. Every time I stopped for a rest, I started feeling extremely drowsy.

However, the chaos of my living room and kitchen spurred me on. After writing in my last post about WeeGee’s birthday, and about grief making me feel guilty for having days where I don’t achieve anything because I’m “wasting the days she didn’t get to live,” I made a considerable effort to spend the weekend doing a lot less.

This resulted in absolute chaos, which the housing employee has now witnessed along with my screaming. If chaos doesn’t motivate me to clean, shame DEFINITELY will.

I spent most of the weekend dyeing my hair, straightening it for the first time in weeks and playing Cyberpunk 2077. It was really chill, except for one dinnertime mad dash to Asda because I had run out of my entire allotment’s worth of salad vegetables that I NEED to have on my burrito.

I was not going to have a sad burrito bowl made from whatever I had left.

I wanted it to be BOUNTIFUL.

My hair looks so much better now too. A few weeks ago, after a failed attempt to dye it blue-black, I used a colour remover and then put a non-permanent colour over it to give my hair a rest. By this weekend, most of that colour had washed out and it looked DREADFUL.

My grey hairs aren’t really grey or silver either. They’re mostly completely empty or white, so when my roots grow out they make my hair look like it has thinned far more than it actually has. Having the colour back makes it look so thick again when I put it into a ponytail, and it has made me feel a bit more confident about myself having hair that I actually like.

Cyberpunk 2077 was so much fun, but also quite difficult.

I had to deal with waves of anxiety and guilt about wasting my life. Yet it was also a shared activity. My son loved watching me play and actually drove around for a while. We were laughing at my TERRIBLE driving and at my habit of stopping in the middle of stealth missions to take screenshots in photo mode.

WELL, the view of Night City was amazing. Or there was that time I found the perfect neon lights against gold wallpaper. Obviously the mission could wait.

Spending all this time on myself, having fun in my FAVOURITE game and deliberately slowing down actually helped me eat better all weekend. I wasn’t expecting that to be one of the consequences. I was still overcome by sadness for WeeGee at times. Anniversaries, birthdays – all of it is so difficult when you’re grieving, even when you desperately want those days to be meaningful or special.

I think slowing down actually gave me space to sit with my grief instead of trying to do enough to justify the day, and that had knock-on effects on my ED and recovery too.

Cyberpunk is particularly special to me because it came out the same year WeeGee died, and Night City is where I initially hid while trying to deal with my grief. Playing it now, having moved further along in my grief journey – I really wish there were another phrase because I still HATE the term “grief journey,” yet somehow continue to type it – has felt different. Almost cathartic.

Cyberpunk has this strange ability to show you what you’re feeling, even when you’re playing it specifically because you’re trying not to feel those things.

In any case, despite my anxiety – which was quite bad all day Sunday because my OCD had decided I’d written down the wrong date and time for today’s doctor’s appointment – the weekend was a much-needed rest.

It was almost like taking a virtual holiday to Night City.

After I’d finished thinking about ALL OF THE THINGS while tidying up a little, it was finally time to leave for the doctor’s appointment I was still convinced I had the wrong day and time for.

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Why Am I Seeing A Doctor?

I thought I was going to a medication review, which is usually a blood test and a weight check by a nurse. The latter of which I was DREADING because it was happening right around the time I’ve been eating better, and also because I HATE being weighed there with my clothes and shoes on.

At home, I weigh myself in a T-shirt and shorts. I didn’t want to see a BIGGER number than the one I see at home. My ED wouldn’t cope well with that and, frankly, I’m currently doing better, so I don’t want anything unnecessarily upsetting Corrupted Clippy – which is what I call my ED.

However, when I punched in my date of birth to check in, the screen said I was seeing a GP.

I sat down and told my son, who had lovingly come with me despite his own tiredness due to this morning’s randomly generated housing side quest.

“I have no idea why, but it says I’m seeing a doctor.”

I immediately started to panic again. Despite the screen having just confirmed that I had the correct date and time, I then started panicking that the machine wasn’t working and somehow I’d miss my appointment even though I WAS LITERALLY SITTING THERE. My brain is INCAPABLE of solving one anxiety without instantly generating a new one.

When I was eventually called in, the doctor also seemed a little unsure as to why I was seeing her for a medication review. She was really nice, though. She authorised my medication and ordered the blood tests I’d been expecting.

Then I randomly ended up spilling about perimenopause. I didn’t mean to, but it just sort of came out.

I’m increasingly convinced that perimenopause is at least contributing to why my anxiety has become so dreadful and why nothing seems to work anymore, including two very sedating medications. I told her about all of the other symptoms I’ve been having too, and she was actually really lovely about it.

She started telling me about the non-hormonal things that can help, and I knew where this dialogue tree was going because I already do ALL OF THEM.

“Oh, you mean fish oil, magnesium, vitamin D, strength training, protein, 30g of fibre a day – that kind of thing?” I asked with a smirk.

“Yes, exactly.”

“I already do all of it. Despite the fact recovery information says not to do any of it, that your body HEALS ITSELF and KNOWS WHAT IT NEEDS. OH, and I forgot creatine. I take that too. That actually helped quite a bit. I take 8g because of what I’d read in the research around creatine and perimenopause.”

“Oh really? All of it? And how did creatine help?”

“After a fair few months of taking it, I noticed improvements in memory and cognition, and it also seems to help me cope better with sleep deprivation. Which is very handy when you’ve spent the night being RIDICULOUSLY soaked by your own excreted hormone water…”
[Continues giving an unsolicited PowerPoint presentation on every journal I have read about creatine and perimenopause.]

“Oh. Well, since you’ve already tried all of that, after the blood tests – I’d like to rule out other possible causes for these symptoms – we could potentially discuss HRT.”

I felt like I had entered a secret cheat code. With my brain still half in Night City, it reminded me of the “Skip Ahead to Phantom Liberty” option in Cyberpunk 2077 when you start a new game.

SKIP AHEAD TO HRT DISCUSSION?

Apparently YES.

Honestly, though, I’m quite nervous about HRT. I don’t have any ideological opinion about taking hormones, either for myself or anyone else. I believe in best interests when it comes to medicine, and clearly taking HRT is in a lot of people’s best interests. My son is on testosterone. It was DEFINITELY in his best interests to take it because he’s now more himself than ever.

I have, instead, RIDICULOUS anxiety about personally taking HRT because of all the messages I absorbed about it growing up.

I was REALLY hoping all of the things I already do would make everything better. That’s partly why I’ve done ALL OF THEM. And they have helped somewhat – ESPECIALLY together – but I’m still having life-altering symptoms of perimenopause.

At least I don’t really have to think about that decision right this second. My blood test is tomorrow, and after the results are back I can see the lovely GP again and talk through what comes next. About that anxiety, though…

The other reason I need blood tests is because the last time I had them done, I had abnormal liver enzymes and anaemia. They told me to come back in three or four months to have them repeated.

It has been FAR longer than three or four months. Weirdly, I wasn’t particularly anxious about that at all.

At the time I put both abnormalities down to everything my body was going through with my ED and refeeding. I was still rather underweight, although gaining weight, and I also had pretty bad refeeding oedema. Refeeding is incredibly stressful on the body and can in some circumstances be incredibly dangerous. There were other possible explanations floating around too, including medication and the fact I’d recently started strength training.

My brain apparently looked at all of that and went: Yeah, probably one of those. And moved on. It’s fascinating and ANNOYING as heck what my OCD does and doesn’t latch on to. I have zero choice in the matter.

I’ve been dealing with DOMS in my abs for four days and my OCD has repeatedly tried to convince me that it’s actually a serious medical condition, and that the fact I think it’s DOMS is merely setting up the opening act of a Chicago Med level medical disaster. If you’ve seen the flesh eating bacteria episode, that’s pretty much what having OCD is like.

Actual abnormal blood tests? Meh. Probably fine.

After having such a bad run with my mental health, I just felt like I couldn’t deal with one more thing. It’s also part of why I haven’t been to the doctor about perimenopause before now.

So, in the end, it was BRILLIANT that I saw a GP today instead of a nurse. AND… I also didn’t get weighed. YAY.

After the doctor, we grabbed some Greggs on the way home to deal with my insatiable didn’t-sleep hunger.

Which, by the way, does my head in EVERY SINGLE TIME.

My body screams EAT EVERYTHING GREGGS SELLS IMMEDIATELY instead of, you know, letting me go back to sleep earlier and fixing the actual energy problem. Apparently being awake for four extra hours has convinced it that we have burnt an entire bakery’s worth of calories and must replace them as a matter of urgency.

We have not.

The sausage roll was delicious, but didn’t touch the sides.

So, for the rest of the evening, I’ll mostly be horizontal, playing Cyberpunk and trying not to turn into a human vacuum cleaner. I will also definitely be resisting the urge to eat an entire tub of nooch, because I imagine that would turn me radioactive yellow and make tomorrow’s blood test so questionable that they might have to consider whether I’m a lifeform of unknown cheesy origin.

So tomorrow, I’ll go back and finally have those hopefully noochless blood tests.

I am going to be EXHAUSTED.

It’s just as well that weekend was quieter.

“Iron gleams bright in NIght City,
Where your appetite wears you out till sunrise….
…It’s a danger pretty, here in Night City.“