Thursday thoughts

My last day at work for a few days and it seems that things are changing a bit.  Technically, this is also may last day (at least temporarily) of doing The Job as it stands.   Following my protest about my failure to become a square peg in a round hole, I am being given something else to do for three months.

I will give this my best shot, of course, but at the same time I am stepping up my search for another job.  In fact, I have an application half-done, for an unusual job that I have wanted to do for a long time.  The only real disadvantage to it is that it might necessitate a cut in salary – but what is the price for job satisfaction?

I’m not going to name it or describe it yet; the superstitious bit of my nature doesn’t want to jinx what could be the opportunity to do something that would really suit me.  Therefore I must put my best words together to give myself a chance of getting an interview.

As ever, there are one or two things about leaving this that I would miss.  My current carbon footprint must be minute as I barely use a car at all.  For nearly any other job I will probably need to use a car again, when now I am driving perhaps once or twice a week.  But in the grand scheme of what I want to do with my life, travelling a short distance isn’t much of a sacrifice to make (with apologies to the environmentalists).

The thing I will miss is the trade union work.  I feel I have started to make real inroads in the last week and have had some very good feedback from managers and other union reps alike, that I am going to be “good for the organisation” and an “asset”.  That makes me feel quite sad, so in whatever time I am here I will attempt to make as much positive change as possible.  Maybe it will be better to come and go like a tornado than hang around there for years.

I’m going north again tomorrow.  It’s quite isolated up there, which I always find a rather strange feeling.  This big-city girl has never got the hang of being in the middle of nowhere and the quiet darkness is odd i the middle of the night when I can’t sleep.

Sleep is still a problem.  Nodding off curled up in front of the TV is never a problem, but going to bed is different.  The dreams are vague and slightly disturbing.  Several times recently I have gone into a dream sequence whilst still awake.  With my eyes shut, I see a fog in my mind’s eye which swirls and parts to reveal a dream image I can step into.  It’s not a daydream as I don’t seem to have control over the images and often the scenes placed before me are unreal, a glimpse of another world that I don’t particularly want to be part of.

Sometimes the moving patterns in this process remind me of a migraine attack and I jerk myself awake to make sure that I’m not having a visual disturbance.

I seem to be in a spate of these at the moment, three within a couple of months and I have lapsed into the migraineur’s common problem of living in fear of an attack.  They are so disabling; the loss of vision and disorientation of the aura, sometimes accompanied by the other odd symptoms, not being able to form speech, tingling in hands and face, occasionally hallucinations, followed by the dreadful pain and nausea that doesn’t readily resolve with painkillers.

In a phase of them like this, I can’t bear to be on my own for a long period, as there have been occasions when the attack has been so bad I have not been able to look after myself.  Some years ago I was trapped in the aura for hours when alone; instead of the normal 30-60 minutes, the visual disturbances continued for over three hours and a trip to the hospital was starting to look like the only course of action.

Migraine is a dreadful thing, so little understood and so difficult to control; it victimises its sufferers and there is still no treatment to stop or avert an imminent attack.  We find coping mechanisms to try and protect ourselves, but that is all, so for the next few weeks, until I get a reasonable space of time between now and the last attack, I will feel distinctly uneasy.