Smoke Free, Wheat Free, Alcohol Free and too much Free time...

My OCD has finally reduced me to this, sitting in front of the PC unable to go outside on my own and having to be looked after for a large amount of the time by my wonderful husband.

Don't get me wrong, I really like our flat - it's warm and safe and contains a large amount of fluffy bears - but staying in the flat for pretty much the best part of the last month is not my idea of a good time. I'm not being held here against my will, I could leave any time I wish - except I can't.

My OCD has reached epic proportions and I seemed to have developed some kind of agoraphobia which seems to mean that any time I need to go out, my husband has to come with me for reassurance and seeing as he works full time it's not always practical.

I never thought it would come to this, I'm under the care of my psychiatrist and my hormone/chemical levels are being checked. I have lost almost 2 stone due to stress and anxiety (which, while certainly not a good way to lose weight has made moving around slightly easier for me).

Anyway, I didn't decide to blog today to tell you all about my woes, not at all, I just thought that with the credit crunch, recession etc that I would discuss giving up my vices.

5 years ago I was a relatively heavy smoker, I guess you could say I was binge drinking a fair bit of the time too - although to be fair, my idea of binge drinking was drinking 2 glasses of wine on a saturday night then nothing else for a week. Perhaps you might have called me a sporadic drinker. I ate chocolate, lots of it - sticky, gooey, moreish chocolate. Essentially my diet wasn't exactly what you would call healthy.

Anyways, in 2007 my OCD caused me great distress and I gave up smoking - as terrible as it sounds I didn't give up for my health or because the cost was starting to get galactically high, I gave up smoking as I was so worried that an unextinguished (is that even a word???) cigarette would cause a massive fire and I couldn't cope with the responsibility of that happening. I always stubbed out my cigarettes and got rid of them but you never quite know if there are definitely out. So I stopped smoking, just like that. Well...I say 'Just like that', three little words that do not in any way shape or form convey the sheer torture of giving up smoking. Now, I know what you're thinking, that being a non smoker is a good thing and I should have felt healthier...but I didn't, not at the time anyway. I craved cigarettes, all I wanted was just one, that's all, I could stop anytime I wanted! Except...except that wasn't strictly true was it - I actually started smoking in the first place attempting to show someone how non addictive cigarettes are! What a fool I was!

I had tried a few things in the past but nothing seemed to replace that craving. Now, before I go on, I really do wish to say that I feel 200% better as a non smoker and I would encourage anyone to give up smoking where possible. However, when giving up smoking I had no way prepared myself for the hacking cough and hideous chest infection that I got just after quitting. For me, getting through the first three months was possibly the most unpleasant period of my life health wise - just to reitterate though, definitely worth giving up smoking. It took about 6 months before the cravings really subsided and after that it's been pretty easy.

I gave up caffeine and anything caffeine related about 10 years ago so I was ok there - the next thing I had to give up was alcohol. Aaah, alcohol - a glass of chilled wine with a meal or the riotous tequila slammer - so good and yet so incredibly bad if I have too much! In order to get through my OCD bad patch I had to dispense with the alcohol altogether in order to prevent my condition from worsening - believe me, I held off the giving up of alcohol for as long as I could but when I was scrubbing my hands raw and crying with the fear of contamination and the sheer anxiety of worrying about the door not being locked, I had to concede that the OCD was back big style and my relationship with alcohol had to stop. For the moment anyway.

I gave up chocolate last month, I suppose strictly speaking that was down to the fact that I couldn't go out anywhere alone to get some and I had sort of said to my husband that I was giving up chocolate so he didn't buy any - bless him.

Also, due to the pain I am still suffering in my abdomen (yep, it's been approximately 10 months now and I still don't have a diagnosis for the pain :( ) I was told to see if a wheat free diet would help, just incase it was wheat intolerance.

Now, before I continue, I just want to say to all those people with wheat or gluten allergies or intolerances - I really feel for you. Going on a wheat free diet was the most complicated thing I have done in a long long time. You see, my main diet has always been rich in things such as pasta, bread, biscuits etc so giving up pretty much everything I usually eat and adopting a wheat free diet for a month was incredibly hard. I lost half a stone purely from lack of food as it was just so difficult to find things that were wheat free. The local supermarkets have a range of wheat free foods, some better than others, but it was just so hard to think about anything other than bread! I didn't think that you could become addicted to bread but there you go, I thought that the wheatful loaves in the supermarket were mocking me, saying 'aah, what's that in your basket there? Wheat-free bread? Hmm, going to enjoy that are you?' when all I wanted was a thick slice of buttered toast. The wheat free bread, whilst trying darn hard to satisfy me was just not enough and I started craving illicit sandwiches in the wee small hours oozing with mayonaise and mustard...

Then there was the matter of wheat free pasta. Again, it tried it's best but there is just no substitute for a wheatful lasagne. So every day I ate my wheat free pasta and bread. I didn't eat any rice either as I was told to avoid that too. Essentially I existed on chicken, a few veg (shock horror) and potato - incidentally, when it comes to potato products, there's wheat in some unexpected places.

Like I said, I really feel for anyone on a wheat free diet as my husband and I only kept to the menu for a month before diving straight back into our old ways. Sadly, it didn't help with the abdomen pain but as experiments go, it was fairly eye opening.

Which leads me to the enormous amount of free time I seem to have at the moment. Recently my role at work became redundant and due to the lack of any other suitable roles within the company I find myself consigned to the unemployment queue of life.

Unfortunatley, as my OCD has worsened to terrible levels and my abdomen pain is still there, the chance of finding a job at the moment is bleak. I have a fair amount of therapy to undergo before I can even leave the house, let alone find a job.

I haven't felt well enough to go outside alone, I've found it difficult to talk to people or see my friends or even communicate at all and I worry constantly about contamination from objects in my flat so, as you can imagine, my life at the moment has consisted of hours of TV.

With all of the other things I have given up, my lack of vices, has led me to becoming addicted to Television. My free time is consumed by repeats of Casualty, Doctors, The Jeremy Kyle Show along with the newer additions such as The Inbetweeners, Torchwood, Psychoville, That Mitchell and Webb look etc. Which just goes to show that my brain always has to have something to be addicted to just to keep me going.

With all this free time and mental issues I have started to become peculiar - yesterday I had to admit to my husband that I talk to my teddy bears during the day, I don't have long existential discussions with them I just comment on the TV to them. Surely that's not too strange though, don't judge me :)

Stress and anxiety can do a lot to the body and mind - I find it extremely difficult to have a shower these days without having a panic attack. The only thing that I can successfully do on my own is go to the toilet, everything else seems to have become a team effort or tasks that my husband has had to take over from me. While I know that at some point I will feel better, things are pretty hard at the moment.

Giving up all the things I have given up has certainly been quite a journey - when do I get to be OCD Free?

Growing old in the time of 'lol'

Perhaps I am just getting old but the other day I realised that I don't think I have ever written 'lol' as part of a text, email etc. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong but I really can't remember a time I have ever written 'lol' - apart from here, and the status updates on Facebook and Twitter where I have mentioned that I have not written it in communication to people of course. Perhaps I just have no sense of humour and that the reason I have not written it is because I didn't find anything humorous enough?

Or then again it could be for the fear of getting it wrong, worrying that it may not mean Laugh Out Loud but something perverse or tremendously bad. Too often I have seen people write down abbreviations only to have to retract them as they were inappropriate to the sentence.

This got me thinking that really, when it comes to the new language that seems to have been created on the internet, SMS etc I am horribly out of my depth. You are reading the thoughts of someone who actually had to look up 'LMAO' through Google to fathom out what everyone was talking about. It just seems to me that a brand new language seems to have seeped into the technological community while I was going for long walks or playing Elite Beat Agents on my DS.

I never really thought of myself as old before, I'm 32 this year, but these days I really do find myself saying things like 'I remember when the only games console I could get was a Sinclair ZX81'. We weren't a rich family, not by any stretch of the imagination but we had that ZX81 for many years. I still remember my Mam staying up most of the night to program a game into the ZX81 which was supposed to be like Frogger but turned out to be a few x's running the length of the screen being chased by z's.

At some point we had a Dragon 32 which I have got to say, sparked within me the adoration of the first truly brilliant game I had ever played - Jetset Willy. Where else in those days could you be chased by hoovers and toilets while clearing up after what seemed to be the worlds most psychadelic party! I never completed it of course, I found out many many years later from one of the producers in my office that there was a major bug that prevented the game from being completed. Mind you, considering I could barely get even a quarter of the way through the game that wasn't going to be too much of an issue for me.

I had a Gameboy when I was about 15 (still have it somewhere - only had two games for it though). And then nothing. For years. I didn't have a games console or anything even close to that until a few years ago when I bought a Nintendo DS. I had a PC and my husband bought me a Nintendo Wii a few years ago but during that time I didn't really play a lot of games. Which may surprise people when they hear that I used to be a games tester. As I said in my interview at the time, I never set out to be a games tester - I love testing software and games had so many interesting facets to test, it was a wonderful opportunity for me. Anyway, I digress...

On my way to the doctors last week I heard a group of teenagers on the bus discussing their phones and iPods and it really made me think how far we have come in terms of entertainment. I had a battered Sony Walkman for most of my teenage years and adulthood, it took a lot of coaxing from one of my friends to even get me to look at an MP3 player when they finally arrived. I resisted CD's for a long time as I thought that they weren't as good as cassette tapes. I mean, for crying out loud - I have a Betamax video and about 40 tapes, I remember when the only face cream I could get in my town was Oil of Ulay (and for any young person reading this - nope, that's not a misprint) and I remember when you could go out and leave your door open...

Yep, I think that successfully concludes that I am getting old, in one sentence. I marvel at the rudeness of people on the TV - I remember when the Weakest Link was shocking in terms of insults and I remember when I first saw the Jerry Springer Show and was aghast that someone had cheated on their partner with five other people. I remember when the internet didn't exist, when I had never heard of wikipedia and twittering was something done by the birdies in the trees.

Not that I want to go back in time, goodness no, there are so many wonderful things on this planet that make life so much better. Watching my husband and his brother playing Left 4 Dead on the XBox and listen to my husband telling his brother not to keep running off in the game, only for him to do the same and almost fall off a ledge. Getting massive cramp in my wrist attempting to finish 'Sweet Home Alabama' on Guitar Hero on the Nintendo DS. Listening to 'Don't Stop Believing' by Journey on an MP3 player the size of a match box.

I may be old but the excitement from all the new technology we have now gosh darn it just makes me feel so young again.

Obscrussions

I think I may have just invented a new word today that completely sums up a feeling I often get that is kind of halfway between an obsession and a crush. Allow me to elaborate...

When I was about 17 I attended a Maths class (yes, ok, I got a D in my GCSE maths and had to resit it - in my defence, in the resit I got a B!) and the teacher of the class was a wonderful guy. He had a great sense of humour and a quick wit and I was totally smitten. Now, this guy was probably in his late thirties or early forties and his fashion sense was not his primary concern but I thought he was the best thing since sliced bread. The thing is that, and heres the thing, I had no desire to sleep with him/have any sexual contact etc I just thought that he was wonderful. That's the odd thing about having an obscrussion, you think that the object of the thoughts is fascinating and extraordinary, but you have no sexual feelings towards it/them whatsoever.

Thankfully I don't think that I ever mentioned this strange obscrussion to anyone as they would have mercilessly ribbed me and said 'You fancy him!!!'. No one would have understood that I didn't want a relationship with the man, I was just enthralled by him. Also, I just want to point out that I never did anything about it and I presume that he is still blissfully unaware of my feelings, well...unless he has read this I suppose.

Anyway, that was one in a long line of obscrussions I have had over the years with men, women and objects. It seems that the obscrussions are present regardless of my sexual preference - despite being completely heterosexual I had a massive obscrussion on Kylie Minogue, again - never did anything about it, well, except for buying her singles, albums and wanting to look like her when I was a teenager.

You see, that's the thing, you can never truly convince anyone that you don't want to have sexual contact with the person that your obscrussion is currently based. I used to get the whole 'Oh, you fancy him! You do! You blushed!' when I am still as pale as I have always been, I don't know if I have ever blushed and believe me, I've lived through some pretty toe curling moments during the course of my life.

Having OCD, obsessions are pretty much par for the course for me - intrusive thoughts, obsessing over the tiniest detail, one good reason why I have always seemed pretty competant as a software tester and also, when I came up with this word Io gt so obsessed that I had to write this blog entry - and I have had crushes during my life and so it was difficult to define a feeling that wasn't exactly an obsession or a crush. More like something in between.

I've had obscrussions about the most oddest things - my friend's hair for example...

My friend will remain nameless in this instance as he is, as far as I know, unaware of this strange feeling that consumed me so badly several years ago. I became completely fascinated with his hair - the colour, the shape, the texture. I used to sit in an office near him (oh boy, he is probably going to guess at some point) and every week day I would find myself staring at his hair, wanting to touch it mainly but generally just wanting to look at it. Now, let me assure you that while this gentleman was one of the nicest people I know, I had no desire to be anything other than friends with him. It wasn't an obsession as it didn't occupy my every waking moment or get in the way of my day to day duties and it wasn't a crush as there was no sexual nature to it - it was something in between.

The funny thing is that I go through phases where I become incredibly fascinated with something then I will pretty much drop it like a hot potato. For example, I watched The League of Gentlemen several years ago - I bought the series 1 DVD and eagerly went home to watch it. The very next day I went out and bought the series 2 and 3 DVDs, the Christmas Special and the Live DVD. I bought a T-shirt and for a while it was my hot topic. Then it was Frasier - I watched every single episode, many times, before I dropped that too, in the pit of my discarded obscrussions. At first it was mainly TV shows - Scrubs, Top Gear, Spaced, The Mighty Boosh - then it became TV characters - House (played by the very talented Hugh Laurie), Doctor Who (mainly David Tennant - despite complaining that I 'didn't like the new guy' after Christopher Eccleston I soon found myself buying Doctor Who mugs, watches, going to the Doctor Who museum in Blackpool etc What can I say, I warmed to him), Dr Cox from Scrubs (pretty much summing up my obscrussions on grumpy people in general - also see Edmund Blackadder and Inspector Morse ((I know, I know, what can I say really))).

Anyway, after ruining that sentence I should probably calm down a little but that's the thing, I get ridiculously passionate about something for a very short period of time then before you know it I have moved onto another obscrussion. I've had these feelings about Gordon Ramsay, Charlie Brooker, Richard Hammond when I have absolutely no desire to even meet them in real life - I just want to see everything they have been in on the TV. I don't want to stalk them, I've got far better things to do with my time, I just have a mild obscrussion.

Now, I don't think that I am entirely alone in this as my Dad is very similar. After my parents divorced I lived with my Dad for about 5 years before I came up to Edinburgh to go to university and during those 5 years I watched him go through a number of obscrussions.

At one point, all he wanted to buy was Bonsai Trees - not the real ones I might add but the cute little plastic/glass ornaments. The small house was filled with them, like a mini fake bonsai forest. Then he was all about the bronze, every ornament he bought had to be bronze. Then it was novelty tea pots, then onyx - he must have been a car boot sales traders dream. Oddly enough after that it became hoovers, then TV's, then computers, until his house started to look not disimilar to something from Steptoe and Son. It was always clean but the amount of junk in that house was breathtaking. This led me to think that perhaps it wasn't just me.

For me, my OCD and obscrussions appear to be totally separate. I get obsessed about numbers and the way songs sound and whether the door is locked or the hob is off (seriously, it takes me about 30 mins to leave the house with all of the checks I have to do - and that's on a good day) whereas my obscrussions appear to be totally different.

One of my biggest fears at one stage was that, when I took my OCD meds I was afraid that I would find out that my feelings for my husband were just an obscrussion or obsession as the meds allude to take away or at least ease the obsessions. The obsessions were eased and thankfully my strong feelings for my husband still remain and are definitely not an obscrussion. I love him more every day.

Even with the meds I still have obscrussions though so if you ever see me in HMV, clutching a handful of DVD's at the till - all starring David Tennant or Simon Pegg, be warned that my obscrussions rage on.

And if you see me staring at your hair, heck just take it as a compliment! :)

The Gas man, the broken washing machine and the obese Wii Mee

Last week was, quite frankly, miserable. Don't worry dear reader, I'm not going to get all depressed on you now - there were some funny aspects admittedly but it was mostly miserable.

It started with the letter from the gas company a few weeks ago...

According to the gas company, who will remain nameless, they had visited our property on many occasions and left cards etc but they had not been able to gain access to our flat to examine the meter for it's yearly check thingie. Now, here's the deal - I have been off sick from work for approximately 4 months and I have been in most of the time (when I haven't been at the hospital having parts of me probed or at the doctors). So either they were going to a totally different property or just very confused. Anyway, they said that they would come round 2 weeks ago. I waited in all day and they failed to show up. I was quite rightly livid and my husband phoned them back and rearranged the appointment. Anyway, to cut a long story hopefully reasonably short, they finally were scheduled to arrive last wednesday.

They claimed that they would phone ten minutes prior to arrival and that it would be between 8am and 12 noon. So at 9am I was still in bed - I still have a lot of abdomen pain, don't you judge me now :) - when the buzzer to the main door of the flat parped loudly. I jumped up to answer it and no one spoke on the intercom, despite my plaintive cries of 'Hello?'. Then there was a hard rap on the door and as I had only just clambered out of bed I was wearing fleecy pyjamas and a huge bright pink fuscia dressing gown and pink furry slippers (attractive huh?) with the most ridiclous bed hair. I opened the door breathlessly, I had gotten a shock when the buzzer went ok and I'm not as healthy as I used to be!, and said the following: 'Oh, oh, thank goodness you've come, I've been expecting you!'

Now, I don't usually get so excited when men come to read the meter but I had spent an entire day the week before waiting for them and I was so relieved! I wouldn't have to spend an entire day wondering if I could go to the loo uninterrupted or start eating without having to discard the food untouched because the doorbell rang etc

Anyway, back to my wholly inappropriate comment at the door...

I don't know who was more shocked - me because I had said something that could be misconstrued or him because he thought he was going to get molested by some desperate housewife with a pink fixation (I'm neither desperate or fixated on pink, I'd just like to add). To make matters worse, as I had just climbed out of bed and as the door was open, the guy could see right through to the bedroom with the covers pulled back as if I was ready to drag him in! By this point my face was probably the colour of my gown and fluffy slippers. So what did I do in this embarrassing situation my dear reader - did I shut up and motion wordlessly to the meter? did I pretend it had not been said? Oh no, that would have been too easy, I spluttered and said 'Oh no, that must have sounded so dodgy, I'm not expecting you in that way! It's nothing dodgy like that or anything I just mean that...'. Then I did what I should have done in the first place, motioned towards the meter and shut my trap. The rather bewildered man rushed in, looked at the meter, pressed a couple of buttons on his handheld machine and said 'That's fine, goodbye'. Never has a gas man checked a meter so quickly! Now, to be fair, they did say that they would give me 10 minutes notice and that never materialised so you could say that it was their fault I was in that situation - let's just say that if someone needs to do something to the flat, I will be ready at least ten minutes before the start of the period in which they will arrive...or at least pretend I have laryngitis and can't talk!

Which leads me to the second problem last week - the Sickness of the Washing Machine! About two weeks ago, our washing machine was a fairly happy kitchen appliance, washing it's way through load after load of yummy clothing but then it developed some sort of major blockage and conked out. I'm no washing machine expert, everything I know about washing machines could be written on the head of a match, then ignited as I don't actually know anything about them at all. After continually harrassing my husband to phone my dad, who quite frankly eats washing machines for breakfast (well, not so much as eats as fixes but you get the general idea), he finally phoned my dad.

Just as a brief aside, my Dad has been into all things mechanical for decades - when I was 15 I came home from school to find him sat on the dining room carpet with some sort of long metal pipe, scrubbing the inside of what appeared to be the engine of a car. I said 'Dad, what's that?', eyeing the oil which had somehow crept over the poorly laid newspaper onto the axminster carpet (that sounds quite grand carpet but it had been on the floor for approximately 25 years before being desecrated by various machinery so it was, by now, a bit worse for wear). My Dad replied 'it's the engine from the car'. What can you say to that really? I think that when my parents divorced that my Dad thought 'Right, see this carpet? I'm gonna get me some machinery on this carpet and no woman is going to stop me!' and to be fair, as I was the only girl/women in the house, I didn't really. He hauled washing machines out of skips to restore them to their former glory, vacuum cleaners from scrap yards to vacuum another day! Basically as long as my Dad can get something open he can generally fix it - with the exception of my Jem doll with the LED earrings. He cut the top of the dolls head open to fix a broken LED then realised that even if he affixed the top of the head she would still look like Frankenstein's monster and that's just scary for kids.

Anyway so my poor put upon husband eventually phoned my Dad. My husband is very skilled at fixing things but my Dad has eons of experience so I thought that between the two of them they could probably fix it. After much to-ing and fro-ing it was found that the filter and pump were hidden and the problem seemed to be with one of these items. Whilst I am aware of the purpose of a filter and pump in several objects, I'm not particularly familiar with any of the gobbledegook that was coming out of the phone from my Dad or from my husband with regards to how they function in the washing machine. As the problem didn't seem to be easily fixable and the machine is less than a year old, it was decided that an engineer would be called.

This was prior to the gas man incident but I was still annoyed that I would have to spend two days waiting for various workpeople.

Now, as you may have realised, I have OCD and while I'm not wholly fixated on cleaning, I am terrifed of germs and contamination - yep, it seems daft I know and the rational part of my brain agrees with everyone else but the OCD part is a lot harder than the rest of my brain and can generally bully me into submission. The washing machine engineer was prompt and, as he arrived the day after the gas man, I was ready and dressed and watching The Jeremy Kyle Show as he arrived - at least he was on time. The guy came into the flat and plonked his laptop on our clean worktop protector - I visibly flinched, considering the germs/dirt that would now be lurking (I'm sure he is a very clean man but that just does not mean diddly squat to someone with OCD). I had just boiled the kettle to make him a cup of coffee which he declined and he put his coat over the kettle. All I could think about was that something might fall out of his pocket into the kettle and make us all ill or that the kettle would be hot and burn a hole in his jacket, causing a fire and he would have to dangle me out of the window to escape - the kettle is near the window and I would have to run the other way but that's not the point.

He then asked me if I had a bucket, I gave him a bucket but it turned out that it was too deep so, as there was no other alternative, he had to use the washing up bowl. Anyone else would have allowed him to use the washing up bowl and then washed it afterwards but not me, I had to go out and buy a new washing up bowl that very day - I jest ye not - and that was just a riot trying to cart it around on the bus.

He then asked if we had a towel. I thought that he was just going to wipe his hands on it but it turned out he was going to wipe the floor, the inner rim of the washing machine etc which again led me to dispose of the towel later on.

He kept pouring the dirty water from the washing machine into the sink caring little of the splashage onto the freshly washed plates and cutlery that resided in the drainer. The clean washing up sponge was hurled into the mini sink (that I never touch because it is too disgusting for some reason) in a cavalier fashion meaning that it too, like the towel, had to go. Essentially I was in the middle of an OCD nightmare that only lasted for 30 minutes but believe me, felt a lot longer.

Needless to say, I had to scrub the entire kitchen once it was over and go out and buy a new washing up bowl, drainer and new sponges. The 'contaminated' items are now languishing in our kitchen, hoping to be revived and used for other household purposes, preferably not by me.

Anyway, last week was also the week that I decided that enough is enough with my weight. I used to be so slim but now, well I wont tell you my weight but my BMI is now almost 37 which is pretty bad as things go. It's quite odd as about four or five years ago I had anorexia nervosa. I struggled with the cruel eating disorder for several years and at my lightest I was about 7 stone 6. I've always had a strange relationship with food and just over a year ago I gave up smoking which in many ways was a good thing but for my weight it was a huge mistake. I'm sure that not all people who give up smoking put on weight but I ate for Scotland - chocolate, crisps, mainly chocolate - I became orally fixated (yes, go on, have a chuckle).

So, combined with the terrible abdomen pain I have, I have managed to acquire 4 stone within a year. That would be impressive if the weight was diamonds or gold but as it is fat it is not nearly as welcome.

I decided that, even though I can't do much exercise because of the pain, that I would use Wii Fit for the Yoga to at least tone up. As someone who used to do boxercise and could easily get into the crab position all those years ago I kind of thought that it would be a breeze. I was so wrong.

Aside from the fact that when the Wii Balance Board weighed me and told me I was obese, it also made my Wii Me obese so not only is my podgy body right under my nose, it is now staring at me from the TV screen as I exercise - Nice. I know that this is to motivate me and I have indeed lost a pound in the past week, it's still very depressing to be told that I have a Wii Fit age of 44 (I'm 31). Thankfully I don't cry easily! Actually...actually that's a lie, as I'm off my OCD meds I cry like a baby at the merest hint of a polar bear on the TV but anyway, at least I didn't hit the ice cream feeling like a failure.

I've been doing the yoga and some of the muscle exercises and I do feel better for it but I have to admit to cravings for chocolate, cakes, mainly chocolate and often a cigarette!

All in all, last week was fairly depressing and I was hoping this week would be better but after forgetting my PIN number at the ATM this morning I'm not sure that's going to be the case.

Also, the boiler needs fixing...

Loneliness - Deal or No Deal?

My dad has been single for ages and he said he isn't lonely, he claims he potters along quite merrily on his own thank you very much. Still, it doesn't stop me worrying about him or wondering if his protestations of non-loneliness are entirely true. I just got married last year and so am still in the sickeningly in love stage but I still have quite a few friends who live a solitary life.

One of my friends is single at the moment and he claims that life is terrible without human contact and he is desperately looking for someone to share his life. He's tried some dating sites and so forth but with little luck. He said that it's just difficult to know where to go to meet people.

This got me thinking. Place to meet people, human contact...Perhaps the answer is to apply to go on Deal or No Deal!

Now bear with me, that may seem like a mad statement but lets face it - you get to meet at least 21 other people on the first day alone and you may have already seen them on the tv (I'm not sure if you get to watch the programme just before going on it?).

It sounds as if they all get to spend time in the hotel so you would be with all the other people and you could go out for a drink - you all have the same reason for being there so you have at least one thing in common and each time you open your box in the game you may get a hug or a kiss from the player - so there's the human contact right there!

Plus, as one player leaves another enters so there will always be a supply of at least one new person per game. Out of all the contestants there, surely not all of them are married and even if they are they may have friends who are single and lonely and want to meet someone.

Also, to add to all this good stuff you may win a nice amount of money to go for meals etc with your new friend - if they are a contestant too they may have won a large amount of money too and so you may be able to rule out the whole golddigging worries. Even if you can't find anyone on the show, your face is being beamed out to millions of people in the UK, surely the TV time alone is enough to give you enough publicity to get your message out there.

All this and you get to meet the lovely Noel Edmonds! Really, what more could anyone ask?

To sleep, perchance to stop obsessing...

Current biggest obsession: Scrubs (TV show)


I have had raging insomnia since I was about 14, possibly longer and I suspect that unless something drastically changes in my mind - I'm never going to be rid of it. It's like a stalker, constantly mocking me and shaking it's head as if to say 'If you didn't like me, you could get rid of me any time you want' - sort of like a crazy ex-boyfriend (don't worry, that never happened...or perhaps it did and I'm just too tired to remember).

I did briefly find a cure, my OCD medication makes me flake out - I don't so much as fall asleep as pass out - but due to the other meds I have had to take for my pain recently, I have had to come off my OCD medication. As a brief aside, I had completely forgotten how bad my OCD is until I came off the meds. How I had laughed at what I considered my silliness when I went onto the meds - now the checking, the constant worrying and the downright scary handwashing is back with a vengence.

Anyway, a few nights ago I spent most of the night staring at the TV, begging my mind to let my body sleep - sort of like a hostage situation. Parts of my body were saying:

Body: 'Please, we beg you, we'll do anything you want...'
Brain: 'Reeheally?' (Sort of a cross between Jim Carrey and Dr Cox from Scrubs)
Body 'Anything! Just let us rest!'
Brain: 'Even though you are sore, you'll still wash hands everytime I have a random worry??'
Body 'Erm...I guess so, the hands are pretty sore though...'
Brain: 'Silence!! I will have no quarrel! Do you accept the terms?'

Even though that isn't an entirely real scenario it wouldn't have helped even if my body agreed as my brain was in full party mode. I tried everything get some rest - trying to remember all of the cast of The Bill in the early days (I just want to point out that this was a dangerous move as the last time I did this I spent the night not being able to sleep and two days trying to remember the name of the geordie lady - it was Liz Wroughton), trying to count sheep - nothing helped. All that happened was that my brain alternated between singing 'Take me ridin' in my car car, take me ridin' in my car car' from the recent Audi car advert and a snippet of Scrubs that showed J.D and Turk singing 'A surgeon and a doc above it all' on a fire escape. All. Night.

I've done everything over the years to encourage sleep - lavender on my pillow, no caffiene ever, relaxation tapes. Incidentally, the last time I did a relaxation tape I was in a flat where my bed was right near the window with no headboard and right at the moment where the lady said 'Relax your head' I brought my head back to the pillow and rubbed the curtain resulting in the curtain rail falling and hitting me square in the face. That's perhaps a poor reason to abandon the tapes but I just got to thinking that perhaps relaxation tapes are just not for me.

I can't relax, it's just something I don't know how to do - I'm constantly fraught with one worry or another. When I smoked I spent most of my time worrying that if I stubbed out a cigarette and put it in the bin like a good citizen that the cigarette would spark back into life and would ignite an aerosol in the bin causing the bin to blow up as a pregnant lady with a pushchair with quadruplets walked by and I'd be responsible for their demise. Believe me, there's no surefire way to quit smoking than to have OCD. The above scenario never happened but it was certainly enough to make me worry incessantly.

People have asked me to try acupuncture for my insomnia. Now, I try not to be cynical about things, too much, but I just can't see how needles in my face etc can make me sleep. Unless I have a sort of reset button like you see at the back of some MP3 players to switch me into 'safe mode' or to reboot me entirely. Surely that wouldn't be good, like a phone when you restore factory settings, would I forget peoples contact info or memories that I have enjoyed?? Even if the acupuncture did work I would just worry that there would be a needle hole that would remain open and that some sort of infection would finish me off and that worry would probably keep me awake anyway.

I wouldn't care but when I do sleep, my dreams are totally kickass at times. Except for the zombie dreams - I am a huge zombie fan and this has led to some pretty interesting but terrifying dreams over the years. Freud apparently claimed that dreams are wish fulfilment - if that's true I am one sick little puppy. I'm fairly sure that I don't want to be devoured by a zombie, or anything else for that matter.

Perhaps one day my insomnia will go away or I will become more relaxed. In the meantime I'm going to avoid any catchy tv tunes and Scrubs...nah, cancel that last thought... :)

My MRI and why can't hospitals be more like Scrubs...

I had to have an MRI this week and let me just say this, it wasn't at all what I had expected...

Firstly I had to sit in the waiting room and drink a bizarre cocktail of what tasted like blackcurrant gone wrong and aniseed - 1.5 litres of the stuff! Now don't worry, it is not the same for all conditions, apparently different MRI investigations require different potions as I found out. What I had was a contrast agent.

Anyway, as I sat in the waiting room drinking my mutant gunk, I was joined by two elderly gentlemen, one of whom was with his wife. Both men were drinking what appeared to be water but, judging by his reaction while gulping it down, it was obviously some kind of concoction too. Someone asked if they could have some of my drink but I had to decline with the comment 'I don't think that's allowed'.

The wierdest thing was that while we slugged our liquid down, we got chatting in some sort of amiable way, held together by our need to find answers - It was like being at a really strange cocktail party. It started as one guy was complaining about having to drink what we thought was water and I said 'Hey, it could be worse, you could be drinking this blackcurrant nonsense'.

The man to my left with his wife proceeded to explain that he had a cyst on his kidney that no one could find for eight years. He explained that now he can't eat eggs but that he still has them 'every day of my life'. At which point his wife interjected with 'No you don't, ooh you liar, you don't!' to which he replied 'Of course I do woman, I had some this morning for my breakfast!'. It became quite comical as everything that he said he was not allowed to have but he did have became a bickering match with his kindly wife who said 'You don't have that!!'.

Just as everything was starting to get more unreal I realised that I had finished the 1 litre of contrast agent and everyone hoorahed and said 'there you go, you've finished, stop moaning'. This relief was dissipated quickly as the nurse came back into the waiting room to give me the other 500ml. Now, I try not to moan, I really do try, but I just couldn't finish the whole lot - sat there in the strange pub like area with a mangled polite smile on my face due to the taste of the liquid - try as I might I could only manage 1.3l of the stuff and that was an almighty struggle.

By this point I felt sick and immensely sorry for myself when several things started to make me feel a bit less pity for myself and a bit more pity for the two gents beside me.

The guy on the left had just finished telling me the kidney cyst story and the pills he had had to take when the gent beside me piped up with 'When I had cancer, during chemo I had to take medication that was so toxic that I wasn't allowed to touch it as I swallowed it!'. I'm not sure how that works exactly but it sounded pretty horrific. At this point the guy on my left said 'That's pretty bad but I have a heart murmur too'. Sympathy seemed to shift in the room and I noticed some of the other waiting patients drawing forward, poised for the disease-off that was sure to follow...

The gent to my life swigged back his gunk disguised as water and said 'Well I have diabetes and when I had this stuff last time I had a blood sugar level of 2.2!'

They both looked at me as if I were either a referee or that I was going to come up with a disease so horrific that it would trump all theirs and leave them reeling.

I cleared my throat then said, possibly rather pathetically, 'erm...I've had a pain in my pelvis for 4 months and the MRI is hopefully going to find the cause'. Bang! like a game of poker it didn't seem as bad as their diseases and they went back to challenging each other.

Sadly I was removed from the room to have my scan before they got to the real climax of their apparent disease off. I was taken into a room and told to remove my clothes except for my pants and socks - mmm, attractive huh? Then to put on a gown that fastened at the back - is this for a purpose or just to make it a bit more embarrassing if it suddenly flies open?

I sort of imagined it would be like Scrubs, perhaps I just watch way too much tv or perhaps it's just that in real life things are never as funny as they are on the tv, but it was all very clinical and not jokey in the least - which is a shame as the only thing I wanted to take away the fear was a bit of a laugh.

They took me into the MRI room wehich actually seemed quite cheery and I gave them my CD. They can play you a CD while you have the scan and they put kicking headphones on you which makes you feel like a DJ (Well, it made me feel like I a DJ but I'm quite sad and have an overactive imagination).

My glasses and hair band was removed but I got to keep my engagement and wedding ring on as they were made of platinum and I was placed on a bed, poised to enter the enormous machine.

All I can say is that I am really glad I am not claustraphobic as there felt like there was only about 4 inches between my nose and the top of the scanner. I was basically in a tube. Now, I have many fears in life and I spend a great deal of my waking life worrying about a variety of horrible scenarios and just before the lady wheeled me into the MRI machine she said 'it may be a little warm in there after a while but it's fine as there is a fan at the top of the machine to keep you nice and cool'. To anyone else this would have been immensely comforting, but to me with my diseased mind I thought 'How close to me is the fan??? But my hair is now loose, what if it gets stuck in the fan!!!'. I then thought 'oh no, what if the fan is at the top of the tube and the bed gets pushed too far and my head gets sliced into pieces by the fan like a meat slicing machine!!!'. Let me tell you, Not Going To Happen!!!. After a mild 30 second panic attack in my head I managed to lie still in the machine with panels placed on my abdomen, presumably to aid the scan.

All I can say is that, it didn't seem like it always does on shows like House. I sort of expected a bang bang bang noise but to my panic soaked brain it sounded like the sound of a dot matrix printer or a photocopier of sorts. I spent probably 30 mins in the machine - most of which was divided between the fan worries, fears that I actually might be claustraphobic and then realising that I'm just not, listening to Nina Simone quietly singing 'I put a spell on you' and wondering if the printer noise was actually the photocopying of my body (As if they might scan me, take out the bad bits and then send the copy out as me and leave me in the tube forever...until the fan got me.

As it was, they pulled me out of the machine after about 30 mins and told me to get dressed and go home - not so much as a 'Mind how you go' or anything but with a 'Your doctor will get your results in about 2 weeks'.

So now I wait...