A week and counting

So, this is it guys!  One more week and I start my new role in commercials.  As much as this move has been forced on me, because let's face it when the doctor asks you if you still want to be using your hands in 10 years it's a bit of an eyeopener and one really can't be like an ostrich any longer.

 

It has come at the right time and as commercial teams go it is the best I could go to as they do the financial aspect for contracts such as financial evalutions so I can maintein my accounting professional development and therefore qualification.  I already have a commercials qualification and as you may well have guessed I have worked in commercials before.  It's unlikely that someone has a commercials qualification if they haven't worked in that arena before after all.  I know I like the work and so a forced move doesn't feel as bad as it could have done.

 

I have also been a burden to my current management team, one woman in particular and it has reflected on my mid-year report.  I could raise a grievance and it would be won without a doubt, after all, there is an Equality Law for people like me but as my new team has to liaise with my current team I really don't want to rock the boat and ruin a working relationship. 

 

I think because of the latter it has made the forced move that much more difficult to accept.  No-one wants to accept that their disability is dictating their career path.  No-one wants to admit the pain they are in, let alone want to stand out as 'different' in the workplace because emotions sometimes rule the way you are treated.  We struggle enough, both at work and home, and we don't need to have to feel like we are fighting a battle every single day in the workplace.  Trust me, it is bad enough being reminded of how painful and weak my hands are every time I attempt to open a bottle or sqeeze conditioner out of a bottle; I don't need reminding of it by my management chain let alone have the lack of understanding reflected in my report.

 

However, having said all of that the move to commercials is a light at the end of what has been a very long and painful tunnel.  I am still seeing a counsellor to try and learn how to accept the lack of control I feel but my new manager is the completely different end of the spectrum to my current manager and has already arranged for duplicate equipment to be placed in my second work place and for me to work my hours around the worst of the medication side-effects.

 

So the sun is shining, I am training my replacement at work and then I am off to drive into the sunset that is Sheffield for the first 3 days of my new role. 

 

Life at work is about to get better, I am about to be treated to doggie cuddles regularly throughout the days I will work from home and I will be at home at least 2 days of next week to check that my Beautiful B, who has an arm in a sling and is popping painkillers 4 times a day after an accident, isn't doing any activity that can make her shoulder injury worse.  The pretend nursing bit I wasn't expecting but on the upside I get daughter snuggles throughout the day too.  Bonus!

Not Important At All

This is the second of three posts I had difficulty uploading - written nearly two weeks ago now...

I have had to admit defeat.  It doesn't really matter what is wrong with my hands, regardless of the outcome of further tests.  Medication has only been masking the condition getting worse, whatever that condition may be. 

So, I am now located in a little office, making friends with voice-activated equipment.  So with so many grammatical errors in today's blog, I hold Dragon entirely responsible.  Incidentally, Dragon is the name of the voice-activated equipment.  I may have a tendency to name things but even I am not nuts enough to call voice-activated equipment by a name.

In the real world, in this lovely organisation, one normally has to work 40 years to get an office.  I could consider myself important, but that is as unlikely as winning Olympic 2012 tickets and I feel self-conscious, I feel like I am making a nuisance of myself, I worry that others will think I have an inflated ego, which probably explains why it's taken me eight years to make a fuss.  In reality, I'm scared of my GP.  :-)

My desk will be moved into the room next week (now moved in).  So maybe it will feel more like my office (not yet it doesn’t).  My boss is moving to another site, who vacated this office because I made a fuss, maybe when her paperwork has been replaced by mine it will feel more like my office (yet to occur).

In reality, it may take more than that.  Maybe what it needs is a couple of full-size posters.  You know the ones like full-size posters of Hugh Jackman or Damon from The Vampire Diaries.  I'm not sure that will be considered professional though....

Holidays are coming.....

Okay, I could go all sorts of places with that so firstly lets get this out of the way.......Christmas is nearly here - whoop.  I know Christmas is coming because Next has put out their Christmas ware for sale.  Hubby rolled his eyes when I got excited - just wait until the red votive holders with berries arrive.....

I am holidaying again - at home but it is a holiday away from work and I desperately need that for more reasons than I was spending all hours there lately.

One main reason was that they have some semi-stupid rule to help manage their annual leave policy that you cannot carry more than 10 days over into a new leave year - I had 14 plus more flexi than you can shake a stick at.

The other main reason was the sky man - no he was not cute, though he was 7 foot tall so I had a crick in my neck when he went after his recent visit - because besides doing all sorts of wonderfulness such as rewiring the phone lines to the virgin phone line so that the sky boxes can send their whizzy messages back and forth and replacing satelitte dishes and various accessory parts he wanted to replace my HD box. 

....Now understand, the HD box, only throws a wobbly every now and again but he was concerned because it is a babe in terms of age and he was concerned that it's wobbleness was wobbling in a way he had never heard of before. Nevertheless, I refused to let him replace it because I had 76% worth of programmes to watch on it, the majority of which are not in HD format so you can imagine the number of programmes I wanted to plough through.

Being the nice man that he is, though I suspect it is also some kind of service Sky offer, he gave me his card, told me to watch my programmes and give him a call any time in the next month and he would come and replace the box and give me a further crick in my neck - after all I am just slightly taller than 5 foot nothing.

So that is what my aim is this week - not to clean, I must not spend the week cleaning and doing jobs that my brain tell me must be done.  I must sit still and watch TV and clear the planner.  That is my mission.  Granted so far I have watched the majority of it while completing the biggest cross-stitch pattern I could come across just to keep me in the seat but so far it's an achievement.

The back garden furniture is calling me on a regular basis to attack it with a hammer and screwdriver so that it can be broken down in small enough parts to be taken to the tip but so far I have avoided it.  It helps that it has rained most of the weekend to be fair.

Avoiding the visit to the GP with Beautiful B and the hair appointment that will take 4 hours today because I am greyer than any other 39 year old with thicker hair than most of the western hemisphere population, oh and the hospital visit on Wednesday to have my manky hands and arms electrocuted, I don't have much planned in the way of other activities.

So I may get the majority of it watched.  Might be worth spending the following weekend clearing the sky planner in the bedroom too so he can replace that seen as it randomly turns itself on and off - usually when I want it to record something.  Now either that is not normal or it is the electronic version of a woman with PMT.

Total Frustration.....

So I've been on a keep fit kind of thing for a while, kind of since I saw that girl on the bike whose legs I used to have and want again (sometime not long after my first post).  Another incentive was that being a sad little accountant, one day I sat and worked out the calories in a full fat can of coke, multiplied that by the average 5 cans of it I drank a day, multiplied that by 365 days a year, then divided it by the number of additional calories you have to consume to put on 1lb in weight I would put on 57 lbs in a year!  Some days it helps to be a bit of a geek....

Anyhoo, I am doing rather well and so far have dropped 4 and half stone since October.  Helped along by 5 classes of bodypump (weights to a music class basically) a week, 2 step classes and a ton of time in the gym....and the 3 mile walks with Hubby and the fluffers. 

As sad as this may sound, I love the gym - I may sometimes not love getting there, in fact in the early stages I instructed Hubby to "make" me go unless I was ill (under my instruction of course because Hubby finds it difficult to insist that I do anything being the loving hubby that he is).  I go for an hour and come back 3 hours later stuffed to the brim with all the happy endorphins that exercise releases. 

So when you are forced to have to stop it gets kind of maddening.  Makes one stir crazy even.  10 years ago I developed Repetitive Strain Injury (or RSI as it is more commonly known) - being a touch typist since I was 14 probably had everything to do with it.  So my right hand and elbow were sore but as my mother never went to the doctor until she was dying neither did I.  When I did go I got the rollocking of my life for leaving it so long that I couldn't feel the last 2 fingers on my right hand.  Anti inflammatory drugs were prescribed and have been taken for 10 years (which drives me insane enough - I mean who wants to take drugs their entire lives.......)

Now this is when working for the government comes in handy - being covered under the Disability Discrimination Act they had to put measures in place to help me at work and they did in spades - specialist keyboards and a mouse (which looks like a nice gaming joystick from my younger Atari days), specialist desk, document holder and......voice activated equipment.  The latter of which I stopped using when I left a benefit processing management role because I felt better and....well, it is kind of embarrassing to talk to a computer in a room full of people and I ain't nothing if not good at getting very self-conscious peeps - that's why there aren't any photos of me on here.

So, everything was going swimmingly.....except for the hand that hurt when I write for more than 3-4 minutes but who needs to write much when you have a keyboard...right?

So you all know where this is going, don't ya?  Yep, a huge flare up and a discovery that not only is it as bad as it was in my right hand but worse as it now affects my elbow, hand and wrist and also my left hand and elbow.  Seems I may have been unknowingly doing more damage while the drugs have been working their magic for 10 years.  So much so that I am to be referred back to the hospital as the doctor is concerned at the speed of the flare up.

So I have had to give up practically everything I do.  Now those of you that know me may think I am strange and you would be right.  In particular, I am okay as long as I can cope at one place, either work or home.  At the moment I am coping at neither which drives me kind of nuts and I have frequent little meltdowns where Hubby has to dig deep and find the real reason for the meltdown rather than the thing I happen to be having a meltdown over at the time such as the washing up not being done or pots being left in the sink. 

Writing makes me cry with pain now, my hand feels not too bad in a morning but is a git by the time I get home and driving is horrendous after a full day at work.  To top that I cannot play games on the computer at home, something I do to switch off from the daily grind at work, can't cross-stitch (yes I know that is supposed to be an old persons kind of thing but it is relaxing OK and some of mine are pretty good I have to say), can't iron, can't prepare vegetables and cleaning I can do but only if I accept that pain is on its way (and lets not tell Hubby about the latter because he would stop me doing it and as neither he or Beautiful B feel the need to clean even when you can write your name in the dust it would drive me over the edge....)

So not coping at either, as you can see which kind of makes me a bit mental.  I am kind of annoyed at myself because while I haven't felt the pain I knew that pain in my hand when writing was not normal but continued to ignore the voice activated equipment at work so I am thinking I have kind of brought this upon myself.....and I am nothing if not good at beating myself up about things - in fact, I make a habit of finding things to feel guilty about.

It's a lesson I needed I have to admit.  Nothing else was going to make me realise the damage I was doing and this has made me realise that being self conscious at work is a necessity if I want to be able to do the other things I love.  Family and being happier at home will always come before work (especially after finding such happiness with Hubby and Beautiful B and deciding that career thingy is not all its cracked up to be) and now I know that the only way to get back to being able to do the things I love at home is to do what I should at work.

I've had to give up the gym for 4 weeks.  Bodypump is off the menu for I don't know how long and potentially always will be as the repetitive action with weights is probably not the best thing for RSI.  I'm hoping that I might be able to get back to it once or twice a week within the year.  Bodycombat (boxing, karate etc moves with aerobic exercise) is also not allowed because of the repetitive punching moves - a shame as I enjoyed pretending to kick someones head in once a month - which makes me sound kinda scary but I am not honest.

I've found myself getting short-tempered, especially these last few days.  PMT aside, yesterday there was no reason for it, work had been pretty good and Hubby was being wonderful to me as ever, Beautiful B is as beautiful as ever and no she wasn't doing all her jobs but that is nothing new so that wasn't messing with my head, baba fluff is sleeping through the night....so, I took myself off to the gym and did a step class.  I had a tearful moment when I saw my bodypump trainer and explained why I couldn't come to class (yes, I LOVE that class) and my step trainer "felt much better" at the end of the class when I wasn't writhing about in pain at the end of it. For the record, I refuse to give up Step - I would literally have to be in a wheelchair as that class rocks! 

Those happy endorphins were back and yes this morning my right elbow is aching already so I need to be careful but I have decided I am just going to have to be more inventive when it comes to what exercise I can do in the gym because there are only 2 step classes a week and my happy endorphins tell me that is just not enough.....

So I'm kinda conscious that the last few posts haven't been my normal nutty self and frustration is a lot to do with that so I apologise and now that I am back to the gym even if on a restricted schedule, normal service should resume.