Shrinking World Maybe, Shrinking Violet Never

Looking at my “Life after discharge from Intensive Care” leaflet and finding it is “normal” to have tearfulness, depression, bad dreams and a Bermuda Triangle of a brain but that doesn’t seem to be helping make it OK on any level at all.

Not only have I lost my dreams for living but my personal independence. I will battle to my last breath in resistance to my defiance being put away in cotton wool in a shrinkwrapped box in a padded chest to be kept safe. I am not the village idiot…I understand…I understand that this experience has probably been worse for those around me than for me but, in the space of 7 days I seem to be sleepwalking into the scenario I have most feared as every part of me that makes me “me” is dissembled, piece by careful piece.

Don’t worry…I can do the platitudes and of course I am grateful for what I have, really grateful and blessed but this loss of independence cuts so rawly after every loss that I have had to shoulder because this is about my very being. I shy away from the word dependent but I am in freefall towards it.

Of course there are solutions (of a kind) to these first world problems of mine but my opportunities to go off wherever I want, whenever I want, however I want, have begun their erosion. It means somebody else always has to be aware of what I want to do and when I plan to do it and for how long, unless I am in my “safe” environment. That is the very same “safe” sitting duck environment where I collapsed.

Surrendering my driving license makes me want to bawl. Surrendering my driving license and then not being able to attend my speed awareness course (for driving at 34mph in a 30mph zone) and being given penalty points on my license makes me bawl in a different way. A bemused voice on the phone at DVLA couldn’t even tell me where I should send my license. Medical? Penalties? or hey maybe it should go to Other – of course, silly me, other – my usual destination. One way to turn bawling to laughter at least.

And…as if this wasn’t enough…whilst other people may dream they went to Manderley…last night I dreamed about cooking dessert for George Osborne at the Waterside Inn (just the two of us)! Then I woke up (really woke up… I think) came downstairs, put on the TV and found myself in another parallel universe with a Welsh language channel blaring. I am just parking those two random happenings today.

Round peg, square hole…I ain’t changing now and I will adapt and move forward, but quietly? Never.

I have, unsurprisingly, left hospital “against medical advice”. Something I can still decide for myself.