What I do for now.

I thought I was awfully tired at about ten pm and lied down in my bed with the light turned off, but once I was lying there, all sorts of scenarios about what might be the cause of the trouble with my vocal chord and my larynx started spooking through my head and I could not get any rest. Because of that, I got up again,l despite the fact that Im had taken a low dose sleeping pill  and I am somewhat drowsily sitting here. That is nothing a cup of coffee won't fix, however. There is always a solution for everything.

And by stating that, I have joust soothed my own mind. I should not have to worry anymore tonight and maybe I will not. A lot depends on the cup of coffee I am about to have and how well it straightens my mind. The way I believe in the restoring powers of coffee, I should be doing great real soon.

I know one thing, when I am worried about something, I want to reach out and connect to as many people as I can to get comforted, but also to share my thoughts in order to organize them and get them clear for myself . I think that if I talk about my worries, I will take the spell off them and reduce them to a more manageable size. I am a great one for baring my soul and making details visible so they will no longer hold sway over me. In many ways, I use my audience as my therapist, except that I get no instant feedback. I have to fill in the immediate silence myself.

I am less often reminded of fictional situations in literature nowadays because I read so few novels anymore. I can not compare myself to characters in books anymore and situations they encounter. These days, all my wisdom has to come from real life experience and real people I encounter in my life. Possibly this is a more realistic approach because life is stranger than fiction, but I can only draw lessons from it because I have been so well prepared. People in fiction are much more noble and heroic than people are in real life. Dirt and dishonor clings to them and you have to accept them along with that as well. You cannot reject people because they are human.

I know there are people who are in the pursuit of happiness who reject everyone who is not "perfectly" well put together and whom they consider as a threat to their carefully balanced  "serene" state of mind. I am not one of them. I take on everybody with their own unique faults and everything, because everybody is an evolving entity and they change in their ever evolving relationship with you. It would be strange if the involvement with you did not in some way change them. You can always measure out in what sort of doses you want to allow that person to be part of your life.

Enough of my deep thoughts. They are the effects of the caffeine working. Maybe I should have been a philosophy major who drank a lot of coffee and smoked a lot of cigarettes. I possibly missed my real calling. It is all about where your passion lies. It is a terrible thing to waste.
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Just another day on earth

This morning I very innocently went to see the female GP, and before I knew it, she was on the phone  with the ENT specialist and had made an appointment for me with him this afternoon. In the end, I was glad about that because I did not get the chance to sit around a whole weekend and worry about things. As it is after all, I am doing some of that anyway because I have to go back to the hospital on Monday to have a CT-scan and an Echo made, and if it is necessary, a biopsy will also be done.

Suddenly, everything is taking place in a big hurry so I hardly have time to think and that is for the best. My sister went with me to the appointment and that is a good thing because two people remember more details than one. She was also sharp enough to ask questions that I did not think of asking.

It seems that my right vocal chord and my larynx are paralyzed, but the reason why that is so needs to be investigated because it could be because of any number of things. In the end, it may all come down to my thyroid which I was operated on forty years ago. It is possible that my vocal chords were damaged then, and that I am now suffering from the results of that. It is also possible that there is a tumor there and that it is the cause. Another cause may be that a major nerve is somehow compromised by a virus. Blood work to detect this is being done.

Sometimes, the specialist said, the cause is not found and it's just something you have, and then all you can do is take therapy for your voice so you will learn to talk better.

I usually have the weirdest things go wrong with me. When it comes to my physical health, I have bad luck. That my thyroid would haunt me after all these years is not something I had expected. I thought it had been behaving well these past years. Maybe I am not living a healthy enough life. If the specialist had told me to stop smoking today, I would have seriously tried it. Possibly,, I would have been scared enough. It may come to that yet.

Tonight , the Cowboy and I are watching the soccer match between the Netherlands and Spain. We will be on the edge of our seats. I will not be able to shout.

Life meanders along

The Cowboy is making downtown unsafe, or so he may be, but I think he is just sitting on the outdoor patio of his favorite cafe having a good glass of beer and watching the world walk by. It's his favorite pastime at the end of the afternoon and only the thought of dinner makes him point the bike in the direction of the apartment again. We usually eat dinner late, so I never have to rush, and we never eat anything complicated, so I am done quickly. Tonight we are eating pasta with asparagus and a baguette, although the baguette may be a bit stale by now. We may be able to hit each other over the head with it if we feel so inclined. 

The weather was lovely today after we had a night of rain and thunder. It didn't get too hot outside and I have managed to keep it cool inside the apartment. Tyke has been able to do more than just lie in front of the fan and keep himself from being overheated anyway. Gandhi is smart and sleeps in the guest room where it is always much cooler, but of course, Tyke wants to stick close to us. 

I saw the manual therapist this morning and he manhandled my back quite good and it hurt. But when I got home, I immediately took a painkiller and anti-inflammatory medicine and have felt pretty good since then. I am going to run out of them, of course, and not get any new pills from my GP and then we will have to really try to figure out what is the matter with my back. I have two more sessions of physiotherapy left that are covered by my insurance and after that I would have to pay for them myself. Being the less financially comfortable person that I am, I don't think I will do that.

I have been instructed not to do any bending or lifting and to be careful and I am really trying to remember that, but it is tough because I am so used to taking care of everything. I automatically start to do all sorts of things and take the pain for granted. The Cowboy now has started to reprimand me when he catches me doing that. 

The Exfactor comes by every once in a while and I can't believe what two different people he and the Cowboy are. They are as opposite as black and white in all ways and really represent two totally different sides of me. I prefer one to the other, but can live without either one. I disagree with both of them on lots of issues. I think men are strange creatures and nothing much more than big boys emotionally. It is amazing what they will do to please a woman. I always hope to see them grow out of that behavior, but it runs deep. 

I have gotten so used to sitting in my easy chair with the iPad, that sitting at the computer table is hurting my back, so I have to cease writing this immediately. At least I have gotten you up to date a bit. 

Come rain or shine

We have had some, should I call them, outstanding thunderstorms, one of which the Cowboy and I were caught in on our bikes and I really thought that we were going to get hit by lightening out on the open road. I later heard on the news that the chance of that happening had actually been great, so I guess we had taken our lives in our own hands. I was smart enough, when I could, to lead us into the smaller streets to make the chance of it happening as little as possible. I wasn't even worried about getting wet from the rain because we were dressed for that. It was the lightening that concerned me. 

We had met my niece and her boyfriend for dinner at a nice enough restaurant that I had picked out myself because it also served vegetarian food. My niece is strictly vegetarian and those dishes looked very appealing on the menu. I had not seen my niece and her boyfriend since Christmas and they both looked their same youthful, beautiful selves. Besides being full-time students,  they also do modeling work and their photos can be seen in the latest fashion magazines. Needless to say, they are a sight for sore eyes besides just being very agreeable people who also speak English very well, which is nice for the Cowboy.

I ate everything on my plate, despite the duck breast being too tough and the vegetables being undercooked, but that was because I was hungry. I think everyone else's food was alright because I heard no complaints. I think now that I should also have picked a vegetarian dish and I will the next time. The Cowboy had the menu that was translated into English in the most hilarious way by the chef himself and he had to ask me for an explanation several times. The chef apparently did not have a good grasp of the English language and had translated too literal. This was very amusing.

I still have a sore throat and still talk funny and can't make myself understood well, which is very frustrating. I also still have a cough and this hurts my back when I get a spell. The best thing I can do is not talk too much, but that is difficult when you are around people. I have been drinking a lot of cola light because it feels good to my throat to drink it, but because my throat is swollen, I also choke on it regularly and spray cola all over the place. I am a regular circus act. 

Morning has broken like the first morning, and I have to get the show on the road.

All about food

The Cowboy is going to Rotterdam today with my sister to see the sights and to visit my nephew who goes to university there. I will not be tagging along because of my bad back, but it will be nice to have a day all to myself, and I will be looking forward to the stories they have to tell when they get back and to seeing the photos. Downtown Rotterdam was heavily bombed during WWII and this area has been rebuilt in many innovative ways with all sorts of interesting architectural highlights and objects of art. So there really is something to see there. I will have to tag along with my sister some other time when my back is better. 

Yesterday, after another trip to the grocery store, the Cowboy realized how much money he had spent on food shopping over the past week and was a bit surprised, to say the least. Of course he had been buying things indiscriminately of price and by whatever took his fancy, which is not the best way to shop. I am making him smart about store brands and pointing out to him that we don't always have to have an overabundance of food and that some things do go to waste. I think he will be more frugal now, but I do have to help him be so. He is a typical American when it comes to buying food and thinks that buying a lot of it is the same as eating well. I do hate to throw things out and very seldom do so myself.

We will be taking out my niece and her boyfriend for dinner on Monday evening at a restaurant that serves the most interesting dishes, including vegetarian ones. I have looked at the menu online several times and am still undecided about what I am going to order because everything looks so appealing. I suppose I will know at the "moment supreme" what I will really want to eat. My niece has been to this restaurant before and really wanted to go to it, but had not let me know that, and I picked it out because it looked like a place that I thought we would all enjoy. So it is serendipitous that we end up going there.

We had hamburgers yesterday evening on freshly baked buns from the "warm baker" with responsibly raised beef. The tomatoes we added to them had been sitting on the kitchen counter in the afternoon sunlight and were ripened just perfectly. We had slices of Gouda cheese on them and the Cowboy added everything but the kitchen sink to his. To say that one hamburger made a meal would be an understatement. It had been ages since I had one and I thoroughly enjoyed it. For once I did not feel bad about the cows. Hanging around with the cowboy relieves my over exaggerated sense of responsibility. 

It is early in the morning and the sun is about to come up. The birds are already giving quite a concert. I do love this time of day. I think I will open the blinds and sit in my armchair to watch it become a new day. 

Preventing sleep from happening

In order not to go back to sleep prematurely, I have had two cups of coffee and two rolls with Gouda cheese. I thought they would pep me up enough to be able to sit here and enjoy the wee hours of the night, but I am having a hard time not drowsing off over the keyboard. I know that an intellectual pursuit always revives me, so that is why I am now writing this blog post. I am not making the claim that this is like literature or anything, but it is sort of a literary challenge for me. Especially if I have mind fog and am about to keel over from lack of sleep. 

I do pick and choose my challenges and I like to live on edge only within certain boundaries of safety. I don't make it so hair raising that my life is on the line. I am not really that brave and foolish to create chaos and irreversible damage. I may have done that unwittingly in the past, but I am a wiser woman today. A wiser woman makes for a dull woman, I realize that because a lot of the drama is missing in my life nowadays. 

I say, thank goodness for that, but I still have the automatic habit when I just wake up, to quickly check with myself to make sure that I have not done anything foolish in the last 24 hours. Like a drunk trying to remember his behavior when he was under the influence of alcohol. 

I saw the manual therapist yesterday and because my back was not in too bad a shape, he managed to get it pretty lose and it felt fairly good after the session. We both were under the impression that we were making progress and I made a new appointment for next Wednesday. Everything went well until I had been home for an hour and slightly bent my back to look at something that was lying on the sofa. I heard a crack in my back and felt a bad pain, and knew I was back to the very beginning and would have to start over again from scratch. 

I now think, though, that the manual therapy may not in fact be helping and that we still need to find out what exactly is wrong with my back. I am now undecided what to do. Should I go to the next therapy session, or should I go back to my GP? Should I be referred to an orthopedic specialist? 

It is a problem that I really don't want to be faced with, but it is the reality. More than anything I am ticked off that this is happening and I feel frustrated. I don't deal well with my body letting me down.