Blue sky in sight

I can honestly say I cannot recall a time, other than new motherhood, when I have been as tired - both mentally and physically. While the 3rd term is always a busy one, this one was officially bad for me.

I had surgery at the end of May, and shortly after my return to work I fell ill. At the time my doc and I put it down to a virus, contracted because my immune system was down post-surgery. But I just did not seem to recover. Exams came and went, and I was still under the weather.  Holidays came and went, but I worked through most of it authoring digital material for a publishing house. What shots have taken me a week took nearly 3, because I just wasn't at my best.

Then term started. We were straight into PTL meetings and reports, and then it was preparation for CT Expo, and ballet performances at Baxter, and ballet eisteddfods, and setting matric exams, and marking marking marking (projects and tests and practicals and exams). And in the midst of all that I was getting sicker, not healthier. I went back to the doc, and the upshot of it all is that somewhere along the way after my surgery I had had glandular fever.

My only lasting symptom is the post-viral fatigue. And what fatigue it is! Where normally I would come home and work after the kids had gone to bed, now I found myself falling into bed too. Nowadays I find I can barely move out of bed on the weekends (& my garden is suffering as a result).

But finally, I can see blue sky at the end of the tunnel. I have one last big project - some more authoring -  to finish before the end of term, and then it is holidays for a week. I have never wanted a holiday more than I do right now. If nothing else, this illness has given me new compassion for those with chronic illnesses, and renewed gratitude for health and life. Praise be to God for bringing me safely thus far!

Gratitude day #2

My hubbie is sick at the moment. Because of being an asthmatic, any chest infection becomes a major deal. He has now spent one day in bed, and is struggling to breathe. I therefore took him off to the GP this afternoon, before this turns into something much more serious.

Listening to him breathe (or, more correctly, struggle to breathe) this afternoon was quite scary. He couldn't draw breath properly and so was doing this upper respiratory rapid breathing thing in order to get enough oxygen.

When we first got married I was sick continuously for 9 months with respiratory illnesses - 4 'flu's one after the other, bronchitis, pneumonia and finally pleurisy. It wrecked my lungs and caused my childhood asthma to recur. I remember well those nights, sleeping sitting up because if I lay down I started drowning in the fluids present in my lungs. I remember well how exhausting breathing was, and so I empathise with my hubbie.

[I eventually went to see a homeopath who gave me some Chinese herbal thing with a bizarre name (I think it was "Easy Breath" or "Breathe easy"), sent me to bed for 6 weeks (or I could have chosen to go to hospital, in which case my risk of contracting TB or some other nasty would have been sky high), and told me it would take a year to recover fully. (He was right, in the end.) Those were not comfortable years - either the year of illness or the year of recovery.]

I was reminded, this afternoon, of how sick I was back then, and how my scarred lungs have impacted on my life subsequently. Until your ability to breathe is compromised, I don't think you truly appreciate just what a blessing it is. So today I am grateful for my health. I am grateful that when I lie down tonight I will not be exhausted from the effort of trying to draw breath, that I will not have to draw breath through fluids that feel like treacle, and that my asthma is under control again.

The tap has been opened again

Oh wait! I know what I should tell you about! How could I forget?!?!

This past week, I discovered that our nanny's husband has been diagnosed with TB. Fortunately, he is HIV free, as in SA the two go hand-in-hand in most cases. He's been on treatment for 2 weeks now, so should no longer be infectious. Fortunately, he's the type to be very religious about taking his meds, so unless he has a resistant strain (which I'm not sure about, because neither of them have good enough English to ask the right questions, or explain to us the answers they get), he is well on the road to recovery and should make a full recovery.

Our nanny, his wife, has had sputum tests, and her results should be back in about 2 weeks. She's also had an X-ray, which is clear, but she's got this cough.... If her results come back positive I'm going to take our kids for screening as well. If she's clear though, then I'm not going to worry. Living in Cape Town, our kids will get exposed to it more than once, and probably have already been exposed. So, unless they show symptoms, which neither of them currently do, then I'm not going to panic.

So there we are then. That's our little bit of excitement for the week.

And down they all go...

We are currently living in a house of invalids. Again. Sigh.

So I have really bad sinustis (homeopathic stuff didn't clear it; neither 1st nor 2nd lot of antibiotics have cleared it... looks like a 3rd dose is forthcoming, followed by ENT visit to determine whether operation is necessary). Yay.

Nathan has tonsillitis - 2nd bout in as many weeks. Oh yay. (In other news, his grommets have fallen out and his eardrums are fully healed; that's good, right? Yes, but only if the tonsillitis doesn't mean he needs to have another op to put another set in. Sigh. Yet another waiting game we will have to play.)

Nellie has a sore tummy and is coughing. Joy.

And Graeme... well, he keeps threatening to get sick, and I just keep threatening him back. ;) So far my tactic seems to be working. But no doubt, no sooner are the kids better and me mostly better, than he'll succumb.

WE NEED A HOLIDAY!

The most stressful things in life

Everyone "knows" that moving house is stressful. There's a list, which some quote (rather inaccurately, it turns out) of the most stressful events you can experience in your life. According to the list, moving house only ranks as number 30. Renovating a house, though, comes in at number 28. Being pregnant and having a baby rank as numbers 12 & 14 respectively. You can find the ordered list of the most stressful life events here. It makes for rather interesting reading, I thought.

Some people suggest that when calculating your stress score you should consider events during the past 2 years; others recommend only including events from the past year. A score of less than 149 indicates low stress. Medium stress is indicated by a score from 150-299, while severe stress is any score over 300. I was surprised to find that my score (based only on the last year) is 235. If I include events over the past 2 years (i.e. Zoe's death, and moving back to SA), then my score is 417. Hmm.... so either I am very stressed, or I only have a moderate amount of stress. That's rather helpful. Not. Since I'm trying to keep positive, I think I'll go with the lower score.

Of course, the more stressed one is, the more susceptible one is to illness. Thus far, despite Nellie being ill and despite the a significant percentage of the staff being ill, I've managed to remain relatively healthy. Today, though, I caught myself starting to cough. I was rather alarmed but tried to put it down to a mild asthmatic/ allergic reaction to something I ate. By the end of a half day though, I was already exhausted and tiredness is usually my first cold/ flu symptom. Given the number of meetings and decisions I had to make in the afternoon, I'm feeling shattered now. Hopefully I'm just doing too much. Hopefully I'm not actually getting sick.

Before I can hit the sack though, I've set myself the task of packing the baby clothes and Nellie's currently unused clothing. Either that, or give up by 9pm, whichever comes first. But first - tea!!! Tea is the cure-all and perk-me-up I need. Care to join me for a cuppa?

Suckier and suckier

Today saw two unpleasant pieces of news....

Firstly, that my cousin and her husband are getting divorced. How sucky is that? She has two small kids - one turning 4 and the other just a few months. So now she will have to get a proper job (she's been working part-time from home) and put her eldest into after care every day of the week and find a day care place for the youngest. The news came to her as a big shock, because she didn't think things were that bad yet.

The other sucky piece of news is that my colleague, who's got leukemia, was rushed back into hospital this morning after being home for less than 24 hrs. She'd finished her current round of chaemo last week, but wasn't allowed home because she suddenly had to have 3 blood transfusions. She also has two young kids (8 and 12), neither of whom really understand what's going on.

What a sucky end to an otherwise lovely day. If you are the praying type, please pray for both of them, and their kids, and their families.

Illnesses on our doorstep

Did you know that 42% of the pregnant women in Swaziland are HIV positive? That's what Tertia told me anyway, via Twitter. I'm not sure where she got the stat, or even whether the stat is based on ante-natal clinic attendance. Still, it's a pretty shocking stat.

According to UNAIDS/WHO, around 5.7 million South Africans were living with HIV at the end of 2007, including 280,000 children under 15 years old. This means that 1 in 5 adults is HIV positive and almost 1,000 AIDS deaths occur every day.

In 2007, 337 641 people were reported to be living with TB, and this figure was expected to rise to over 500 000 in 2008. The WHO ranks SA as the 4th worst TB country in the world, and TB is SA's number 1 killer, not AIDS.

When plagues hit the UK and Europe several centuries ago, and everyone was fleeing the cities, it was the Christians who stayed to care for the sick and dying. Today, in SA, we are surrounded by two deadly diseases, which might be considered new 'plagues'. With illnesses like these on our doorsteps, what is our response in the 21st century?