When I'm busy on a writing project, particularly if it's poetry or fiction, one of my favourite things to do is go to a local cafe and spend a couple of hours with a couple of cappucinos and my tablet. Most of my writing time is spent at home, in a quiet room overlooking the … Continue reading All the Little Extras: Quirks of Trigeminal Neuralgia
Today was a lucky day. I found a four-leafed clover. Our garden was a farm paddock before they put a road and houses here, and if we don't keep the lawn under control it swiftly reverts to type and the clover runs rampant. It's the first time I found a four-leafed clover - despite hunting … Continue reading Rundown on a Rare Disease
Our avian wildlife put on quite a show for us on Friday morning. We keep a bag of birdseed by the front door, and every morning pour handfuls of it on the fence outside our dining-room window, so we can watch the birds foraging while we eat breakfast. We always see a swarm of squabbling … Continue reading Watching the Birdies
It's the middle of winter here in New Zealand, and we're already seeing signs of new life all around. It's a gorgeous, sunny day today so I've just had a traipse through my garden. It's heaving with welcome signs of spring, like the purple flowers starting to put out their spears on the hebe shrub, … Continue reading Learning to Live With It
Silence is golden - or so it's said. I wouldn't know. I always thought silence was a utopian exaggeration. An absence of ambient sounds with plenty of space for background noise to make itself known. A fantasy state dreamed up by children-should-be-seen-and-not-heard types as an excuse to punish children who took the 'seen' part of … Continue reading Sounds of Silence: TN and Tinnitus
There's a change in the air. The tropical, coconut lemony smell of summer has faded. The air is thinner, clearer. Last week, the air was thick enough to wrap around us like a blanket - now it's more like a filmy sheer curtain, with a window behind it letting in an uncomfortable draught. Most days … Continue reading Distractions & Diversions
Change. A single, soft-spoken syllable. Yet it's a powerful little creature, reaching into every corner of our lives. Sometimes it's an invitation - welcome and exciting. Sometimes it's a burden - disruptive and frightening. It's a bundle of contradictions: progress and retreat, secret and flamboyant, havoc and harmony. It can bounce into our lives with the … Continue reading Getting a Slice of the Cake
There is a storm brewing. I can feel it in my face - the way my eye burns, a vice tightens on my skull, and one hundred knives fresh off the whetstone slice at my gums. Just for starters. To everyone else in my family, the sky looks perfectly innocent. Perhaps the breeze has a … Continue reading A New Kind of Normal
Dear Healthy Person, Congratulations. You won in the lucky jackpot of healthy genes. You are twenty of me. I think I lost my ticket. I am a twentieth of the old me. You can work, eight hours a day, five days a week. Maybe more. I used to work eight to ten hours a day. … Continue reading Dear Healthy Person…
A constant claim from many people with chronic pain conditions is that nobody can understand the pain unless they have experienced it themselves. On a superficial level this is obviously true, at least in that people who don't have chronic pain conditions, have not felt what it is like to have chronic pain. But I … Continue reading Ten Ways to Understanding
