Up .. etc

Well, back from the hospital and the butterfly diary. I've been out for about a month now. Things aren't easy but you just have to get on with things as they are. My breathing's bad .. as is the pain at times.

Still, I get out a bit .. my main shopping I need help with. I can't carry it though am not too bad if I support myself on the trolley as I wheel it round the supermarket .. it's the carrying that is the hard part. Without the trolley I can't move very far without becoming breathless.

So, I have to have help. Sometimes I'll walk over to the small Tesco but I have to rest up a few times. Waterstones is excellent. I have mum's stick to use .. found it in the flat and it supports me a little. She would never use it .. but then I guess she had the choice.

Done half me pills and I suppose I should go and do the rest. My marking them off is a bit more complicated now .. as I'd get thrown off track if the phone went. If you've two pills in the hand and you're meant to be taking three .. did you just take two out or have you taken all three out of the packet and swallowed one? A friend of mine back in London said he found it hard enough to remember if he'd taken the one pill he has a day .. let alone trying to remember taking the amount I do!!!!

So now my pill taking sheet doesn't just have one box to tick next to each medicine. I put the name of the medicine, then how much of it I have to take, then there are two boxes to tick off .. one for when I take the pills out of their containers and one for when I've swallowed them. I also write down the time I took them so that I don't take them too close to each other and me pill sheet is divided into breakfast, midday, tea and supper with the pills I have to take then listed under each heading. And I put the day and date at the top of the sheet so that there's no mistake there too.

I don't have to take the steroid sparing drug an hour before food anymore according to the label on the bottle and I didn't in hospital either, possibly because I'm not on so many steroids now as the steroid sparing drugs have taken over their role and I'm not taking so many of them at once in the morning as I was before the steroid sparing drugs had kicked in. It can take quite a while before they do.

Better potter off and sort the rest out actually. Right, all done and ticked off for the morning.

I have started meditating again .. though only yesterday evening. Twenty minutes then and twenty minutes this morning. I read that forty minutes at a time is a good idea but for now have decided to do it this way. Actually felt the relaxation coming in this morning. So, there you go. Just using a mantra to clear the mind.

I'd got some angel cards from The Works and had pulled out a card to meditate on a little while ago. It'd been Raphael which is an archetype for healing. I didn't get round to meditating on that though.