Gardener's Whirled

Four facts led to me being crashed today
(Four facts that show why pacing is such a challenge!): 

1. This weekend was one of the sunniest of the summer so far.

2. Mum comes to stay at weekends when she's free, to take a bit of the strain by helping with things like shopping or odd jobs around the house and garden that I can manage with a bit of help on a good day.


3. My neighbour was away for the weekend. Meaning I could stumble around her garden grunting, groaning and intermittently slumping with pain and weakness without being overlooked or causing concern.

4. I was ambulant with mild to medium M.E. distress that day after a relatively rested-up week.


These four circumstances meant I felt I had to take advantage of the opportunity to tackle a job I didn't even manage at all the last couple of years. Cutting back the lilac tree with the extended loppers.

It's a job which, pre-M.E. collapse, or in a period of remission, I would attack with relish and pursue till the tree was clipped back to within an inch of its life!


This weekend, picture the sun shining, my tiny Mum holding the little step stool that gave me the extra inches height needed. Thus I could theoretically reach the upper branches, Mum cheering me on,  holding things when my arms and legs gave out, fetching and carrying to save me vital atoms of energy along the way.

As they often appear to, when strength is lacking, things contrived to hamper the process. An illusion, but no consolation when you're wheezing, trembling and dizzy with effort and your calf muscles are jerking like a weasel in a wind tunnel!

The long string with a toggle on the end like the toggle on a duffle coat from the 1970s, that runs the length of the extendable lopper  handle, managed at a crucial moment to hook itself high in a cleft branch. Of course it did! Things had been almost finished enough to allow me to lie down and try to recover!


What little strength and coordination I had left in me was rapidly frittered away in futile attempts to retrieve the rope from the upper twigs with various articles: my walking stick, the pole on which the clipper head is mounted, the Y-shaped stick used for hiking through the countryside that I bought at a country fayre when I still enjoyed the prospect of using it on rough roads!

Eventually with the last iota of ingenuity and brute force in my defiant, stubborn body, I half dragged, half willed away the recalcitrant twiglet holding the rope aloft, and the whole thing fell back towards earth to a place I could reach.


I finished the job. Or it finished me. It was a fine line dividing victor from vanquished.


Shattered, I was pathetically pleased with myself. The lopped limbs of the lilac were like battle spoils or captured chess pieces.

Lilac tree-  0. Me even with M.E.- 1! 

 


The coffee Mum made me when I was finally able to stagger, half blind with hypoglycaemia, nauseous and shivering with exhaustion to a more horizontal position, was sweet indeed, not with sugar but satisfaction.

I haven't recovered yet. Not anywhere near. To be honest, today I can hardly string a sentence together without mistaken words or forgotten threads. When I can sit to type, everything has to be checked and rechecked and squeezed out reluctantly from my crashed brain. I woke constantly in the night with twitching limbs on fire, rolling around on the familiar burning bundle of my own internal organs, as it seems. My ears are ringing, nausea stalks me, my eyes feel blow-torched. 

But this debilitating cocky disease will NEVER keep me down.


They Might Be Giants' new album 'Join Us' came out this week. I have had it on almost back-to-back continuous play since its release, when as a member of their first "Instant Fan Club" the band sent it to my inbox as an mp3 download last Monday. This and the grin-inducing privilege of seeing my my name among the other 1000 lucky fans in the digital artwork!

The opening track is the whimsical, mock-defiant "Can't Keep Johnny Down". I sang along with such relish that time, fresh from my wrestling match and ten rounds with the lilac. Singing like a madwoman, beaming and thankful even though my neck glands were already feeling swollen and stiff with pain from my efforts and my hands shook imperceptibly guiding the cup to my lips in between phrases.


M.E. often appears to submerge my best efforts, my rallies, my recoveries under a tide of payback as it temporarily sucks me under the quicksands of neurological meltdown.

Maybe I was extra blessed that my old neighbour was away as I sang with all the strength I could still muster:

And they can't can't keep Johnny down!
They haven't yet built the man that'll keep old Johnny down
And they don't don't know what I've seen
Thay can't know what's in here and they can't keep Johnny down! (c) TMBG

For me, M.E. keeps trying and periodically getting the upper hand. But it can't crush my spirit and it never, ever will!