Exhaustion

After blogging about my reasons for voting yesterday, I went out for a meal with friends before returning to watch the election results. The friends in question have little ones the same age as J-cub, and we usually meet with them in tow, so it was a welcome relief to be able to finish a sentence (and eat a meal) without being distracted or drowned out by screams every few minutes.

Having been put on different antibiotics yesterday morning to try and clear my sinus infection, I spent the day feeling like my body was slowly shutting down. It didn't get really bad until I got home from the meal, when all my skin was raw to the touch, and I was hit by such bad muscular aches and pains that I could barely sit still. As I've previously mentioned, I've struggled to sleep over the last week, not even feeling tired at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning. Ideal behaviour for election night, but last night the strongest wave of exhaustion hit me at around 11pm, and I struggled on through the first few results, but fell asleep at midnight and slept a deep, dreamless sleep until 10am when I was woken by waves of nausea rolling over me.

When I got up, the aches and pains still abounded, and I felt heavily sedated, barely able to move or talk or form a thought.

Jamie got all the information leaflets from all my current boxes of drugs, and cross-referenced them to see if there was any reason why I should be feeling as I did. I suddenly remembered the steroid tablets which I'd stopped taking on Wednesday, and started to look up their side effects.

Corticosteroid drugs such as prednisone and prednisolone are commonly used to treat asthma, allergic reactions, rheumatoid arthritis, and IBD. Steroids such as these do have serious drawbacks such as steroid withdrawal symptoms such as: fatigue, weakness, decreased appetite, weight loss, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, and diarrhea. Speak with your healthcare provider prior to tapering off steroid medications.

I had only been on a 5-day course, but according to everything I found, you should never just stop taking them, even if it's only a short course. The GP had mentioned nothing about tapering them off, nothing about withdrawal symptoms, and the advice on the packet just told me how many tablets to take a day.

Happy that I wasn't about to expire from the combined effects of all my medication, I went back to bed and slept for a further 5 hours. Then came downstairs and carried on sleeping on the sofa.

At around 7pm, the time when J-cub is supposed to go to bed, I started to pick up. J-cub however, started to go down. He's been coughing and crying and generally unhappy since, is adamant that he can't go to sleep, and is now bouncing in his bouncer watching In The Night Garden. At 10.20pm. Doesn't he know that we want to watch Lost?

I promise I'm going to stop talking about my illnesses soon, I'm sure it must be very boring but it's just all-encompassing at the moment. Being ill and trying to be a parent is much harder than being ill ever was, pre-baby. Unless you have a partner around to pick up the slack, you can't just lie in bed and try and get better, you have to struggle on and on, never getting the rest you need and so never getting back to proper healthiness. I'm so thankful that Jamie was off sick today too, with the same sinus infection, otherwise I don't know what I would have done.

It's so hard to have this little shouty face looking up at you, begging you to pick him up six thousand times a day, when you hurt to your very core and can't even bear to roll over in bed because it hurts so much. He seemed to be very aware that I needed to be treated gently today though, and when he came and climbed onto me for a cuddle when I was lying on the sofa, he put each of his hands on each of my shoulders, and gently patted me better.