I’ve had a bizarre couple of weeks.

A few weeks ago my district nurse came over and gave me an injection ‘where the sun don’t shine’, and somehow managed to inject into a nerve. Now bearing in mind that most of the nerves in my body are well and truly frazzled, he managed to find one that works perfectly, unfortunately. For a week after the injection, I was fine, and then the injection site starting getting painful, then hard, and then the pain spread north and south from that point until the pain became excruciating. Remember I’m sitting on it all day, here! I went to see a GP at my surgery, who was very nice but not very helpful, it wasn’t until she called another doctor in, and he explained something about scar tissue hardening and pressing on the nerve that had been aggravated by the injection, that it all started to make sense. Some high-dose Iboprofen later, it was moderately comfortable again, but not great.
A couple of weeks ago I met up with an MS nurse from the specialist MS clinic at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. I exlplained that my right hand/arm has been playing up these last few months, and that originally I thought it was a reaction to the extreme heat we had here in July. However since that spell has passed and my hand is still no better, I told her I was concerned. The nurse told me that she thought I may have had a relapse with the MS and that I should see one of their doctors at the clinic and discuss it with him with the view of having some IV steroid treatment.

My appointment with the doc was set up for yesterday, and he agreed that I’d had a relapse. Then, to my complete surprise, he sent me upstairs, to start the 3-day course of steroids! I was a bit thrown by this and I think I was in shock for the rest of the day, not least because they sent me home with a cannula sticking out of the vein on the top of my hand, which became increasingly painful as I tried to push myself along in my wheelchair.

The upside of the IV steroids, whose job it is to ease the inflammation of the nerves, is that apart from appearing to be giving me some strength and co-ordination back in my hand (HURRAH - but early days yet) they seem to have eased the inflamation of the aggravated nerve in that area ‘where the sun don’t shine’. So, good new all round then!

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I’m in the middle of doing a spread in my Sri Lanka AB, and part of the way through it asked my Beloved what he thought of it, that was my first mistake. My second mistake was gettng mad because he couldn’t read what I had stamped on it, and yelling at him, lots, for not ‘getting’ the concept of what I was doing.

This eventually led to a conversation about who I make my art for. My response was that I make it for myself but that it helps if the people looking at it knew what it was, or what it meant. Sometimes I feel like I need to explain my art to people, it feels important to me that they ‘get it’. But why? Does it mean that because I seek others’ approval, I’m actually making art for other people rather than myself? Surely what I’m trying to do is to express myself in some way, not get other people to ‘like’ what I do? I’m all confused now

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