Reality vs. expectations.

Taking a Christmas selfie shouldn’t be that a task. More than ever now-a-days because even high tech devices has become idiot proof in so many ways. But our endeavor to accomplish that kind of knickknack at this year’s Christmas Eve turned out to be a parable how even little things could become a big obstacle, if you are struggeling with a very strange medical condition. In the aftermath our little Christmas selfie shoot turned out to be yet another very funny moment, if taken with humor but only after getting through it. Humor has become my strongest weapon against this weird condition I have to deal with for quite a while by now. The love and support of my significant other Silke are the only other means not only to ease my life but to barely get through the day – each day!

 

I’m weird – accepted!

Being different wasn’t much of a deal my whole life. In my early days I didn’t knew it better and at the time I become aware of it, I simply didn’t care because in my mind everything made sense and in most cases I was able to adapt somehow and find a fitting niche for me to function. In my mid-teens I began suffering from heavy migraine. It took quite a while to realise that this kind of headache was different from the common ones.
I don’t remember exactly why and when I was diagnosed with migraine and got told that I might inherited it from my father – not the only condition I allegedly inherited from my father as later occurs, but that’s a whole different story.
Don’t get me wrong, migraine is a big pain in the ass (not literally), but I learned how to get along with it. When the brain pain tooks over, resistance is futile and that’s that. In most cases I have a kind of a not defeatable complete system shutdown and nothing would help but falling asleep and stay coma similar for many hours.
Over the years I got quite a range out of migraine variants. Brain pain on the left side with or without eye pressure, pain on the right, a ring of pain at the top of my head, brain pressure against my skull, a weird feeling of “inflamed hair roots” according with a numb scalp and my latest “asset” is a flicering and colorful flashing visual snow – eye disco – for sometimes up to an hour. That last “asset” is indeed without pain, but shutting my eyes won’t help because the “disco lighting” goes on and that is really annoying and prevents me from falling asleep.
What migraine is at least, it tells you how enormous powerful a brain – a quite weird electro active fat assemblage in you head – can be, it is capable to instill massive and devastating pain out of nowhere and for no obvious reasons for hours, days, weeks, years and even decades. From a technical standpoint, that’s quite impressive!

So why this way too long interlude to a whole other story? It has the purpose to explain that I’m quite capable to suffer through things without getting off track. I’m too stubborn to give up.

 

What is the name of the thing?

In general I consider myself a decent or at least acceptable healthy fella. Okay, I’m off a couple of kilograms from my ideal weight, my back tend to hurt  at times, I have the expected pinches here and there and I run out of breath very shortly, but nothing really alarming for a guy at my age short of turning fifty, with a professional background in woodworking, construction, as a teamster and even a short period of working as a removal man in my mid-twenties.
On Christmas Eve 2013 I had an heartattack more or less out of nowhere. In the follow of that I got a cardiac catheterization with no real outcome beside the knowledge that there was an issue but no comprehensible reason or explanation or even a treatment was given to me. After that I gained weight and I became more and more fatigued by even the easiest tasks. Since then I’m perceived on a ride down a spiral of exhaustion and avolition.
Incongruously 2013 was also the year my mom’s health decreases rapidly and made her care-dependent and I had to step in. To shorten that sidetrack: she died in early 2017 peaceful in her sleep and in her 79th year of age.
And I might have acquired a whole new strange thing: chronic fatigue syndrome (see Wikipedia for that) – Yippie-Ki-Yay!

 

There might no easy way out?

But there has to be a way! Remember? I’m stubborn! After long considerations and thinking we came up with a plan to get me, to get the both of us to a life worth the effort to fight and hopefully a chance to win this uphill battle. This is what this blog is about!

Now you got a tiny glimpse of the backstory to our Christmas selfie fail, which was turnable to some fun we are now able to enjoy and share with you.

Merry Christmas y’all!

Little side note: it took me way over seven hours to grind out this few words and now it’s past 5:20 AM – good morning world from Germany!