Progress

Today I took out my vacuum cleaner from the cleaning cupboard for the first time since March 12, 2010. I even used it and cleaned up the living room. It felt very good!

Art by Eugène Jansson  - "Male nude, sitting model" - 1906-1914

The antidepressants I started on shortly after Ars´s death made me able to function well at work, but when I came home I was mostly extremely tired and only able to cope with the most essential household chores.

Since that day I have only been doing the bare necessities to be able to exist, go to work or move around other people. I have been maintaining my personal hygiene, doing laundry and using the dish washer when the kitchen sink was too full or I had no plates or cutlery left to eat from or with. I have however managed to keep the toilet and the washbasin clean - or sort of, my mother wouldn't approve - but no one has been let into my apartment since that day.

Before the depression I was a rather fastidious and tidy person, an inheritance from my perfectionist Lutheran parents. I thrive in ordered and clean surroundings, so the growing clutter and dust around me has not been helpful. Not since I lately started noticing it, which I did not do the first years. So during my last vacation I slowly started on decluttering, step by small step.

Slowly but surely now my home is starting to come back to normal. There is still very much to do, but I have set a generous time limit for myself. Everything should be finished and my home presentable again by mid-December, because then I intend to have a get-together at home with my team at work.

Please, keep your fingers crossed for me!

A Little First Life Drama

Man in doorway, art by Eugène Jansson

You may be wondering why I didn't post yesterday, so this is what happened in my first life.

I got home from work around 4 PM. Suddenly I got a really heavy coughing attack and I could actually feel something rupture under my beautiful belly button. A few minutes later a small swelling appeared under the  belly button. It hurt a little but not too bad, so I went for my afternoon nap.

When I woke up two hours later the swelling was the size of a tangerine and was all swollen, hard and tender to the touch. I tried pushing it back inside without success, so I called the regional medical hotline to ask for some advice about what to do.

The nurse on the other end told me that I most likely had gotten a rupture in a weak spot under the naval and the intestines had pushed through and I had gotten an umbilical hernia. As the hernia was now hard and big it had probably become strangulated. She told me I was in need of immediate care and should go to the emergency at once. I argued with her and told her that I was a reasonably fit man in otherwise good health and and didn't have any bad pains from it and asked if I should really go there, couldn't I just book an appointment with a doctor on Monday and have it taken care of? She then asked me, "Do you want to die?".

I got the message and walked to the emergency at the hospital that is only about a kilometer from where I live. Once I got there my problem did not seem that serious compared to everything else they had to deal with on this busy Friday night. After an hour a lot of tests and blood work were taken, which all confirmed that I was in good health except for the hernia, which by now had grown to the size of an orange.

After the tests I waited around for a few hours more, all the while feeling guilty for being at the emergency ward with something that didn't seem important. At midnight I asked a nurse if it wasn't better if I went back home and made a reservation to see a doctor on Monday. She told me I should stay and would be taken care of in 10-15 minutes.

I was later led to a examination room and was seen by a good doctor of American extraction. He then gave me two injections, a tranquilizer and a painkiller, after which he successfully pushed the swelling - by this time the size of a small grapefruit - back into my belly.

The doctor told me he was going to refer me to surgery and that they would contact me in the not to distant future, meanwhile I should just keep pushing the intestines back inside and come back for help if I could not do it. I could then finally leave the hospital at 2:30 AM and walk back home while i was still a little dazed by the tranquilizer.

I will now answer to the name "Bock with Brock" (The Swedish word for hernia is "bråck", which is pronounced like the American name Brock)