Tyroids and Singing (by sarah)

Back when covid hit I lost my voice - it was a whisper for about 18 months and the sore throat was horrendous. Of course we knew why this was as I was hospitalised with chest pains a few months after appearing to recover - my thyroid was inflamed, I did in fact have Grave's Disease or hyperthyroidism - it was over active and it had gone there from being slightly under active and the damage thyroids do isn't so much how high or low they are but the rapidity of that change - my eyes ached all the time but I was on medication relatively quickly and there was a lot of other stuff with mum etc going on. There wasn't really time to process it all.

Things improved and my voice came back and it wasn't quiet right, I always feel I have a lump in my throat and I find doing some of the sounds I used to hard... mainly I get coughing fits, and often I have a mild sore throat. Like my soft weirdly wide nails with ridges on them - they are kind of normal shape again - kind of but the ridgedness and softness remain - this is all just part of the corse with Grave's disease but the sore throat wasn't too bad and my voice was basically back so I started singing again - first at the monthly Folk Music Jam sessions, just whispers with the general melee, then I joined a Folk Choir that is lets you sing the part you want rather than being split into sopranos, altos etc... and then I joined a group called The Cryptid's and even wrote songs to make the general public sing!

I've got two project exploring voice coming up and I also got to be the Fairy Cryer and do announcements in my loud announcing voice including support from the actual Town Cryer - I even have my own bell for the role. And then a few weeks ago it happened...

The sensation of being strangled, the weird loud swallowing noise, wheezing and whistling when breathing which both kids hate and if I touch my neck I have like a flesh collar under the skin. The cough is worse, the sore throat worse - ear ache and my levels of tinnitus have shot up... and my voice is wavering, changing pitch and cracking randomly. And I have been blaming everything rather than facing the fact it's the thyroid again. I had been back under the GP's care for endocrine issues and I don't really want to trek back to the hospital but it is what it is. I have been mainly avoiding the Gloucester hospital since mum died and have been doing relatively well with that - I don't want to go to the hospital.

Its weird though because my main thing is that I really want to sing and that is the thing I have latched onto - if I have to have the thyroid removed what happens to my voice?

Eve and May (by sarah)

It is May, the beginning of May, the beginning of Summer - for some the new year begins now, what ever it is a time of new beginnings... except it is also when Mum was dying, it was an end, a birth to the after life maybe... a something and definitely a transition.

Tomorrow it will have been two yrs, we are only just sorting out her room... only just removing the broken stair lift (it couldn't be fixed metal had sheared off of it), only just paying off some of the stuff that needed paying off. We have only managed any of this with help - we found the roof had been leaking and teenagers swarmed the house and like a little chain of ants took ruined carpet and matrices to a small skip we had out the front. We made them sushi and they stayed to play video games and craft things afterwards - I cried because the teddy bear calendar had been moved - it was still in the configuration my dad had set it too. It had to be moved.

The house moves forward, into a new era, it is once more a big house - Jean has wondered off to University... there are no small children... it is strangly empty and yet not as we have a house full of stray animals... but it is different. Mary likes being able to use the computer more - the entertainment centre is back in the living room and we watch films and play games.

My health has not recovered from miscarriage, covid or looking after mum... but it has gotten better just not as much as I would have liked. And if I was angry about womb stuff before hand I am livid now... we had to go private to get teenage periods that were heavy enough to cause passing out looked at treated in any sort of reasonable time frame... and mum... mum who made sure I knew about periods before I had them because she hadn't and had thought she was dying when her's started... was still too embrassed to tell me she was having some problems in her 70's because everything about wombs and sex and often boobs... problems conceiving, loosing pregnancies, still births, abortion, periods, STDs, AIDS, problems both physical and mental after having a baby and even not wanting babies or sex... all of it is taboo still - all of it is not talked about.

And well I confronted her about blood... she had stage 4 womb cancer... with everything else that was happening it was a drop in the ocean of medical chaos at the time but involved us having to make "interesting" medical decisions, she had already had two different types of breast cancer (no really) which she had beat with operations, radiotherapy and the lighter end of chemo. They told us that it would only be pallative for the cancer but that it was initially advancing quiet slow - the treatments for it in the state she was in would likely have killed her but she was still scheduled to go on the lighter side of chemo etc... as she fought off infections it became aggressive and very quickly spreading. It still wasn't what killed her.

There was genetic testing and a want to stop this kind of thing happening in future - for womb and reproductive system health to stop being shunted to the side. I am sharing all of this with my mum's permission including that though she would never sign a Do Not Resuscitate or ask for no treatment whilst there was hope... she did decided to only take palliative care and go for quality of life over more invasive cancer treatments. I know some people felt this was me allowing mum to kill herself but it really wasn't and all the decisions where talked over endlessly with her and medical professionals. It was also not her only active cancer - she had a slow growing tumour on the adrenal gland.

But all that aside the womb cancer could have been found sooner... and this is the case for many and we don't talk about it... lives are lost needlessly because we won't talk. Before covid I had a set of workshops I had created specifically to try and break these barriers down - the conversations can save lives. Even nurses attending the workshops told me they had suffered and talked about stuff with colleagues or gone to the drs. Stephen Kings mother died because this very thing and that is before we even look at how birth control has been used untested and has its origins in eugenics, or how pain is dismissed as hysteria or aesthetics denied because you managed a vaginal birth so you'll be fine with pain...

This was why I started The Glass Pelvis, and the more I looked the worse it got.

All of this and more is bumbling around my brain - and it is two yrs since mum died, five since dad died and mum basically gave up on life, six since I the miscarriages.

I am a mess, I am still on a crutch... but it is much better than it was... I like to earn medals - you know those race at your own pace type thingies and after mum died I did a Golden Heart challenge with Medal Mad inscribed for her. Then last yr I did the Fogetmeknot medal to remember dad - he always thought he'd be forgotten... ironically or the universe joking with me... I forgot to get the inscription done - Alaric says we can take it and have his name added to it at a shop in Gloucester. I also dragged the family into memorial walks for diabetes, cancer and dementia charities.

This year I have chose Get Lippy 60k in May from the Eve Appeal which is a charity that deals with gynea cancers of which there are five main ones. Womb cancer is of course one of them.

Walking is hard for me and oftentimes painful but there will be dedicated walks for this with live streaming from the me only ones and I am resurrecting my walking group but under the new name Wandering Stars who I plan to walk with on Friday's. I am happy to go visiting country parks and things with people too or do the odd evening if peeps want to join me.

You can of course sponsor me and help raise money for the charity - here is my just giving page:

https://www.justgiving.com/page/sarah-snell-pym-get-lippy--eve-appeal?utm_medium=fundraising&utm_content=page%2Fsarah-snell-pym-get-lippy--eve-appeal&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=pfp-share

Headless, Heedless, Reckless and Restless (by sarah)

I feel a burning restless desire to just do something but have no energy and the thought of choosing anything is hard at the moment. I feel like I am wondering aimlessly - like my head has been cut off. I am just me but who is me and what do I do now? The last few years have just been absorbed with caring and doing and before that just surviving - it has been a rough run through grief and miscarriages and hitting my own mortality more than once and then both parents gone as brackets around a global pandemic. And I am still here looking at my beautiful family knowing it is only a fragment and that they each of them is hurting and fighting their own battles and a chunk of that - what ever they say is my fault weather through my fault be it genetics or circumstance.

My heart isn't just broken, it is pulversized - it is raw meat - it is a bloody pulp that I am not sure can be revived - I want my babies and I want my parents - but I have Al and the kids except I feel I am loosing them - this is only right for the kids they are growing up and I can not cling to them because the ones in-between are missing. I feel that I sacrificed my last bastion of motherhood to look after my Mum and yes I resent that and I know people think I am selfish for even considering more babies. I am just a tattered remnant now - I look at all the things I am supposed to enjoy and I just think "but do I really?" I am doing better with this but still not sure it is not obligation.

Alaric says they just want me to be happy but - what is happiness - all I ever wanted was to feel safe and secure - to not be in pain. Apparently that is not happiness and I have struggled with pain my whole life and I'm no longer sure that I will feel alive without it. What would that be like? No pain? I am sure there must have been times of no pain but my memories are riddled with it. Sitting on the wall waiting for a bus at 17 my back burning, standing doing my shifts at the Union at 21 my pelvis and hip aching, 11 year old me in a Guide game crying because to sit like that made my knees feel like they were being crushed. And I didn't know others did not also feel this. And just to ease it often robs me of thinking capacity as the pain killers space you out but then so does lack of proper sleep.

And I think of my mum and the pain she endured and I get so angry - incandescent and this rage... it scares Al - it scares them and they need me and I can't be there for them and I know this has broken them. There has been so much lose for both of us - during all this Al also lost friends and family members and had to make decisions they never expected to have to make. They said they are sick of me almost dying and they are sick of death - it is eating our lives this bereavement merry go round we have been living. 5 years now - 5 yrs of lose and medical dramas and it sticks in our throats and it is scouring our bones and we are tired. The year before the pandemic Al ran out of leave days to take for funerals - last year they had to have months of compassionate leave to help me look after my mother and it was harrowing - the thing we all found the worst was when she was calling for her mother and reaching her arms up to us like a toddler but it came and went and the week before they discharged her I was hopeful even when they took her back in after the disaster of a discharge - I still thought... it doesn't really matter... things either don't matter or the smallest of things seems so frantically important.

The sunsets have been amazing lately - because of storms and dust and climate change - things that were once rare - specific light and cloud formations are now a regular thing and they are beautiful and breath taking but they are born of turbulence. I vibrate now - it is weird and part of the Graves Disease from my understanding - my whole self just kind of hums and the dreams are bright and real and in those dream I am retrieving my parents from weird distorted gardens or trying to get out of zombie filled shopping centres whilst trying to retrieve children I have left behind and sometimes Mum is already dead and sometimes they sit up after embalming and they have trouble thinking and I see the photos of her from when she was young and I think of the person she never got to be - the person she actually was beneath the damage and that hurts most of all - because she poured those regrets on us in the last year - she told us about her loves and wants and wishes.

I wonder if the vibrations are the after shocks of turbulence - like there has been an Earthquake and the sea floor is still cascading as minute shifts in currents prod the now unstable surface and everything slips - crashing down into the abyssal plain smothering fledgling life that dared to try and exist on the edge. This is my life now - it is a new stage - a phase as yet unseen but I have no idea where I am going and I am not sure I am even steering. Our electric car broke down on Friday and I had to steer as it was pushed round the corner but really I was just making things easier for those pushing I was following directions and I don't even think it really mattered if I'd done it completely wrong. I am on that hummocky bit of the river after the full force of the rapids - but I don't know where the river leads so there could well be more to come or a water fall or slow meandering rivers or back waters that snag and down you.

All I know is the more you love the more pain there is to feel - there is no way around that - no way at all. So all there is is loss really. It grinds you away. Sometimes I think I am just echos of all those I have loved that I still love and that fill my heart and mind - they are there but where am I? What am I? How can I ever be? I have always felt I only really come into being around others - that doesn't mean I don't want to go off and have time alone but there are still those people there for when I return - I am still tethered - but now... I feel like a none person. I had to spend the weekend on my own and I realised I am 41 and no one can remember me being on my own in a building at night - not once - room yes building no... there has nearly always been room mates for a start from siblings to cousins to my nans to my mother to other students to Alaric to the kids to sleep overs with friends - so I went to invite people round for a sleep over and realised it sounded completely in appropriate and so I didn't send the invites and then I had to face being alone. My friend visited for the afternoon after I cracked and asked what are you supposed to do on your own? No really I don't get it and I didn't like it if I hadn't had the animals I am not sure what I would have actually done.

All of this I know is part of the grief but I am also really not sure who the hell I am and I long LONG to run and climb and jump and I know that is realistically unlikely at best - I watch my friends caving videos and I can't even manage weeding my own garden at the mo - for the first year since university I am not growing veg or herbs - I have planted nothing just scattered some flower seeds and bought already growing plants to pot up to try and make things look ok - but they don't because actual work needs to be done and sometimes I can't even get myself into a vehicle without help.

I am so tired but thrumming with energy at the same time - oh I want to go to the skate park and fail at doing stunts - I want to join the armoured combat group - I want to canoe in the canal.

Instead I plod along with crutch or sometimes crutches and slowly amass the kilometres to add to challenged I've paid to get medals from - I am walking 100 Km for a medal I've personalised for mum but it isn't even a proper charity walk or anything - its just a shiny medal I thought would fit. People like telling me what to do - I am struggling to even want to listen to them - I would say I am running of regardless except I am not but maybe this is the way to go - maybe the river knows - I was after all born of the Muddy Waters, I have the Estuary in my bones - I have found a part of the Severn to sit and be by whilst Mary is in dance and a robin has befriended me and tries to steel my chips - hovering in front of my face and I love the birds there - I see herons and swallows and house martins (well by the houses I do), and I get to see the mud banks and think about how I used to go down on the Thames foreshore with my dad and find bits of broken doll and weird green crabs that didn't belong and needed the warm water from one of the factories to live. I remember the big chunks of chalcopyrite they put in when the docks had gone and I'd planted trees there with politicians helping with the digging and how important I felt planting those trees were even though I had a huge chest infection and shouldn't have been doing anything - I remember my mums students doing an art project on the rivers and waters ways and how it was tied into those trees and then whilst sorting things for the funeral me and and my brother went to parts of it and my friend who works on it told me about the new larger project that takes into account the fens and marshlands and I just remembered my dad taking me to see the wolves in there large enclosure and how the one I liked to watch with their piercing eyes would trot over and look at me though the fencing and follow me as best it could and the walks learning about all the uses for nettles and that I don't think I've taught my kids to identify the trees well enough and that I loved the marsh with its hidden Iron Age footings and the little owl with apparent ears. And I miss all of this.

After Dad died I felt he was some how Old Father Thames - that was how I saw him in my dreams - but I live far from my rivers except it turns out there is a tunnel connecting the Thames and Severn so I felt/feel that that makes them one thing - but kind of not as well - I liked that connection and I longed for the sea and estuary during lock down and I love walking by the rivers and seeing and photographing their multitudes of life - I feel I am part of them - I am the will o whisp that is the marsh light and I am the girl who played in the river and went to the river ever day and who went to get their dad to rescue the kids who did not know or understand the river or when you should not go in. I first found rocks on our river bend and I dream of my river realm regularly - I showed Mary water plants so that they could know where not to tread and at my place along the Severn we were told the tide was coming in - that the bore was coming and so we waited and Alaric got bored and wondered off but me and Mary watched and Mary got excited as the mud banks were swallowed and I realised watching the calm shallows become chopping muddy hills of water - that this brackish world trapped and interlinking two worlds - the sea and the river - this is my world - with salt marsh to boggy patches of unknown depth and the wide wetlands with hill struck island and I feel the boats calling me and the reeds waving and recall why I love Wind in the Willows so so much though I probably am Mole.

The rivers gave me pebbles and pets that were wild from foxes to badgers to ducks to my new robin friend - and I am those cross currents and calm water turned to power churn - I can go against the flow or with - I can choose - but there is life and danger in this.

Recently as I walked down to the river to earn this gold heart with my mums name on it that is probably spelt wrong because I made it but thats ok because I always spelt it wrong I thought about Sabrina or Hefren as my dad called her and of how she is the river Severn and I can help but here the eulogy Alaric created from my mothers own words about the boats and the adventures here and dad had had and hoped to have again - the rivers connected but separate are them and I miss donning a wetsuit and swimming in brackish waters that tend to salt and going in little boats up the river. My brother is into canoeing at the moment and has my granddads boats - I wonder if he too feels this connection with the rivers and I know that sounds stupid but I have always been called to water as to rock and fire.

Maybe spinning around trusting the currents is the way to go and maybe backwaters and rapids all have their place though I would like very much to have my family whole and be picnicking on a sand bank as we used to do.

Death Head (by sarah)

For the last year - maybe a little more I have felt that I am dying - I don't mean the ageing existential dread - I mean the feeling that my blood was thickening and clogging, as if it had hooks and barbs, but that if I was to get cut it would just bleed and bleed and bleed, that my heart was struggling with every beat but that there were so many of them that it might explode with the effort instead. My lungs have been fire, my ribs still hurt to breath as if I am breathing nothing but acidic smoke or drowning. My back hurts in new and unexpected places and this dull ache reminds me of the infected kidneys and sure enough my water works are... not right. My head often feels like it is literally being crushed or that ice water and electricity are somehow being poured into the brain casing. Then there are my muscles - so week, and crampy, twisting into painful shapes if not just the extremities going numb or tingling sometimes changing colour to match. My body feels like it has been shutting down whilst running the engine at full throttle. I actually feel like I am vibrating sometimes, my sternum is sore and even between my ribs... if I cough its like there are bands of barbed wire wrapped around too tight. And my eyes feel like they are being pushed out of my head by thumbs pressing in from the inside of my skull. My bones sometimes feel like they are splitting apart and even my teeth and scalp hurt. This is of course all on top of the pain I already had from old injuries, the chronic pain, migraines and the womb of doom.

It feels like I've been dying by degrees. Not helping this is the fact I do also have the existential dread - I have just had two and half years of everyone dying - so so many friends and family and the miscarriages and the almost dying myself. The spring especially this month is particularly horrendous for anniversaries and rememberings - including dad's and of course my last outing before illness and Lockdown was a funeral - the world beyond my door is filled with death.

But the absolute worst thing about all of this is that I can not dismiss it all as a panic attack - I did that in the summer and ended up being rushed into A&E - I am lucky I didn't have a proper heart attack - I am lucky once more to be alive. My heart really is struggling, I have been quiet sick since the miscarriages and then caught flu and/or covid on top. I have had seizures and my eyes are actually being pushed out of my head by the muscles at the back of them inflaming. My blood is clotting in a non good way and then not clotting when I need it to seal a wound. My breathing sucks - I sound like my dad who had COPD. My poor body is being pumped full of adrenaline so it is running at full throttle and it is tired - I am literally shaking myself apart like a poorly maintained piece of machinery.

I spent most of last year being unable to sleep flat due to my lungs and my hair keeps falling out.

I even got new allergies and warning sighs that my body was trying to reject parts of itself - like during my pregnancy with Jean - then there was the yellow skin - to go with the red blotches and weird blisters.

For 3 months last year - starting around now - I could do nothing much other than survive and since then basic parenting and washing myself have kind of taken up ever ounce of energy. My eye sight and hearing have both been affected and this too is not helping - it makes it like the world has receded from me - even with my new awesome glasses - and that is how ill I have been - I haven't even properly shown the world my fabulous sun glasses. I have been unable to write or draw or even craft - I began making tentative steps back to the things I love doing in the autumn but it seems like such a steep climb. Two weeks ago I attempted and completed my first commission since March last year - I managed it - I am starting to fight back - but it is unbelievably hard and I do not know where the bounders lay between physical illness and say - not seeing any of my friends for a year - most of them more than that as my mobility has been shot since the miscarriages.

The kids are helping me - we have started a family art club but I am feeling like the worst fail parent as my 15 yr old cooks food to feed the family whilst attempting GCSEs and the 10 yr old gets into trouble at school because they are obsessed with death and won't shut up about it. They both thought I was going to die and Mary got to see a full blown seizure and didn't know what to do and went to get help but everyone thought they were just doing a please play with me and so she came back and sat in the room telling me to stop and asking if I was ok and it was awful. And the poor Alaric too - they have had to take on everything -- including the basics of looking after my mum and trying to work and fill in the gaps of homeschool I got too tired to do - and there was a lot of it - I fell asleep in Mary's school club zoom. Alaric had the horror of watching me decline once more and feeling that everything is balanced on them and their ability to work and look after and fix and clean the house.

Alaric is somewhat crushed and I am more than aware of this and can do nothing other than attempt to make occasions out of everything. So today I am making a "Fake Away" of the King of the Golden Archers variety - so nuggets and burgers and milkshakes (yes that is me mucking around with the concept of Burger King and McDonalds!). The kids actually like helping with these events and tend to do their chores without arguing and they also know that these things sometimes get postponed if I am too ill - hell Jean got her birthday cake last week - her birthday is in August though Mary's happened on time - though her cake was rock hard in an attempt to make and not buy when too ill to really cook - she loved it and has been eating it with dairy free custard. This is how I fight back - it is a little lame that is true but then I am a lot lame.

But also the last couple of weeks the feeling I was dying started to lift. Obviously the seasons and things are changing so it could be the sunlight - but then I had the summer last year so I don't think it is that - I think that maybe all the medicine and things are working - I am classified as extremely clinically vulnerable and as such have already had my vaccine - I should have had weeks before I did but I got confused as I am trying to deal with 5 peoples worth of appointments and some of the clinics over lap. Three of the household are taking medicine and three are attending clinics - there isn't a complete overlap of the two groups either. Both kids now count as SEN I think and Jean is being supported by young carers.

A phrase keeps getting stuck in my head the Gloucester themed Beatrix Potter story - "I am worn to unravelling" - I am worn to undone - but the fight is on.

I now weigh the most I have ever weighed outside of pregnancy and that is some feet as I lost a couple of stone during the fever etc last year - so my weight has seriously been fluctuating with a 5 stone difference - I realise part of that is the thyroid meds (as in you can lit chart it to the dosage) but a lot is also my mobility (and maybe too many FakeAways coughs) and I was over weight to begin with.

Part of my fight back is trying to exercise - but seriously it is like trying to run a marathon every day when all I am trying to do is get up the stairs :/ but I am currently managing 3 odd km with crutches or half a km on the treadmill with out. I am using gaming (PokemonGo) and bribes (medals) and do gooding (charity challenges (or rather will be for this one)) to get moving again - before they went back to school the kids did PE with Joe with me and we found another youtube who does work outs to musicals (I found these easier to get into than Joes stuff that is obv aimed at the smol peeps).

This week has only involved one lot of blood tests and a panic at remortgaging - I have turned 40 and didn't get to have my big party but I got a purple coffee machine and though I am worried about the amount of waste it produces I have to say it is currently being my go to when things get too hard and it is like having a coffee shop in my home and mum only really likes coffee shop hot drinks anyway... we are struggling in every way except money at the moment - which is weird and I have to say money has definitely made a big difference and I can not lie about that - I have the home coffee shop set up and Netflix and iPlayer and Prime and Crunchy Roll and an epic gaming set up like we have never had before. But I often think that somewhere there is a me - trying to get through all of this without those things - and I have been in that place and in such a place it was impossible for me to fight back and all I could do was survive with lots of help. And so I want to help others - I have been trying - we have sent food and money to food banks, given resources to scrub hubs and the Hackspace to make PPE etc and I made halloween parcels for friends I thought might be finding things tricky but was too ill to even send Christmas greetings on line 0.o

Its swings and round about - but it is at least something and part of my fight back of me living is trying to make this world a better place.

So I am currently a Death Head but do have High Octane blood and hope a little engine over haul will help with things - it's just a little tricky as it has to be left running whilst the maintenance work is being done.

Recap - I feel/felt like I'm dying - probably because I actually was - trying to do more than survive and get myself as well as I can - have traumatised family due to the almost dying bit and not seeing any friends and family (big issue for youngest who needs kids to run around with and has been very lonely) - focus on family emotions rather than on grades or outside assessments. It is the anniversary time for lots of the deaths of people I love this month and also I will probably be hitting people up for sponsorings for charities to help get me fit because my arse is way too big. Also also all grown ups in our household have now been vaccinated first doeses for a few weeks which is an emotion boost even if it scrubbed me out for a week and a half (nothing like actual covid).

Pan Dumb Moan I Am (by sarah)

This year has not been what I thought it would be - that is often the case but this year more so than normal and this time not just for me. Global events have shaken all our lives to a greater or lesser extent. This upheaval has cost many their lives and upended others, I myself ended up very sick and having a nice trip to hospital in an Ambulance whilst wondering if I was ever going to see my family again.

The pandemic of covid-19 has stirred up feeling in society I had hoped were extinguished with the libration of the concentration camps at the end of the second world war but if I am honest I already know that the festering puss of eugenics was always in a shallow grave and just waiting to pop back to the surface. I am seeing the disabled and chronically ill being side lined and even told to just get on and die by those who are supposed to be our friends and protectors, authorities and work colleagues alike. I am also seeing people going out of their way to help regardless of their own hardships and that is something else - the flip side - an amazing.

Lock down has been hard on people especially mothers who have had their support networks basically made illegal whilst meeting and laughing in a pub by mostly men is absolutely fine. This stark contrasts and contradictions plus back peddling and muddled thinking define the crises here in the UK, especially as the year has drawn on and floods and storms have added to the stresses. Unemployment and employment shifts have abounded with backs fluctuating between being magnanimous and strike you whilst you are down.

Erosions of human rights especially LBGTQ+ community have begun with barely a whimper from anyone outside of the community thanks to the manufactured war between the different types of feminism and rainbows. It is a mess and a wedge driven too deep by those that once added balm to the cuts and bruises of the general bigotry of life. Allies now fight.

Many of us have lost our jobs, or in my case my entire industry - it is not a good time to work in events.

And in all of this pain and stress and confusion people were sharing memes about how Shakespeare and other such artistic heroes created and made master pieces whilst in quarantine so that's obviously what we should have all been doing - and they meant it well and mainly it was them kicking themselves up the back side but others were seeing it as duty to create and record the goings on and were telling others off for not doing so. But people where (and are) dying and we couldn't even attend the funerals except by weblink and it stank and hurt and was not... just not something that was conductive to creation for many.

I have written very little this year - I have started to loose count of the people I have lost, I keep forgetting people are now dead and that is horrendous. I missed a funeral because I couldn't get zoom to work - it is laughable and I did laugh until I cried and then I laughed and then was in a weird sob-laugh state.

And that's another thing - I was asked to perform and take part in the fantastic online array of performances and events but... I have little to no voice, I am horse - I can not sing or read out loud to the kids even so there is no performing for me - no live streams or recording my poetry for youtube. Nope - just lots of sipping various beverages and brews in the hope that they might in some way help. Add to that that I just did not have good enough tech until the middle of last month for the preferred ZOOM to work for me :/

The virus affects eyesight as well - as does the extra autoimmune system disease it has left me with so I have had to learn to adapt to even worse eye sight than I had previously - my glasses can no longer correct everything and I risk further damage before this is over. I have premature ageing of the eyes and a host of other issues. But my new glasses have made it so that I can sit at my computer again and work.... half a year into the illness.

And tentatively I have started to create again but I am not looking at producing more than normal.... oh no I keep having bouts of being poorly again or having to home school the kids due to them having a temperature and waiting for tests or isolations/lockdowns happening and I have my elderly mother to look after - no I am facing the fact that I missed a lot of the writing challenges - I started and aborted them and yet I feel I want to at least revisit those as they are normally important project drivers for me.

As such I have lists of things I can dip in and out of but I do not need to complete anything.

Fevers and Graves Disease have made my normally vivid dreamscape into living visions or hallucinations with beautiful landscapes and narratives that would make epic films. I have begun trying to record them but only have vague notes from the worst of it as I wasn't entirely conscious when they were really bad. Also until this month I had written a few poems this year - as in under ten and generally composed on twitter or facebook as they had just started as comments on the political situation.

I have been tagging the art and poems with ArtFromMyCovidBed and yes I am still spending a lot of time there and I hate it, I want to be up and running but getting up the stairs leaves me panting and coughing and gasping for breath and it is ridiculous.

My mantra is this is a pandemic and the only thing you have to do in quarantine is SURVIVE.

Having said that I am now just beginning to create again and I have lots of ideas that have been brewing in the nightsweat insomnia that plagues me and there are now a number of political and pandemic based poems. These I hope to weave into a few related collections mixed in with some of the art and stories spun from the fever dreams. They may just be chapters of a larger work or collections in their own right. They are:

Pan Dumb Moan Am I

Pan Ick

Pan Damned It

These will be specifically themed on the pandemic and on going crisis, where as Art From My Covid Bed is just any art I have produced during this recovery period.

I like these titles as there are rings and knots of meaning to them - but that will have to wait for another post.

To the world in general - Health, Hope and Happiness <3

(this piece was cross blogged from my poetry blog Turquoise Monster)