Good and Less Good

I'm blogging to the tune of: Another Case of Milton Jones. There's some very surreal comedy on Radio 4 at the moment. I approve. Now I just await the return of The Museum of Everything and my life will be complete.

Good things from this week: There is a new addition to my extended family, and she is tiny and beautiful. Also, the wonder that is Camden Council has - rather grudgingly - agreed to give us £300 compensation for the appalling mess they made of that tiny adaptation to our side gate that should have taken them five minutes but actually took five months.

Slightly less good things from this week: I hate change. I really do. It makes me extremely grouchy and causes migraines and chocolate binges and panic attacks. I haven't eaten Opal Fruits since they rebranded them 'Starburst'. I spent a week frantically cleaning and reorganizing after Buffy ended. When I started going out with my Girl, I sat at the top of the stairs all weekend feeling deliriously happy, but nonetheless very confused. It is therefore not all that surprising that for the past couple of weeks I have been feeling quite rubbish. Even though, technically, nothing at all has changed. I have a new diagnosis - OK, not new, just newly discovered, and responsible for all my problems, from pain to anxiety: Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hypermobility type, also known as type III), a rare genetic connective tissue disorder. I already know everything I need to about how this affects me, and probably how it's going to affect me for the forseeable future. So I really should be nothing more than relieved to have the correct diagnosis and some possible treatment options. Except that I'm not particularly relieved. For the first week I was pissed off, stressed out, worried and depressed. Now I just feel stranded. At least when the dx was Fibromyalgia (which I still have, but apparently it's secondary to this 'root cause' thing), there was a possibility that I would spontaneously improve at some point, and that I could at least keep things under control. There are a wider range of possible outcomes from this one. There are also possibliities for treatment, but none of that comes cheap (of course) - and in the meantime, no one's telling me what I should do to help myself, while there seems to be a variety of opinions as to what the prognosis might be. And there's the fact, as I ranted about over at 'Ouch' earlier in the week, that my mother was trying to get me a diagnosis of something along these lines when I was two years old, and that had the doctors listened back then (or even just two years ago), many of my problems could have been prevented. But then, what can you do? I'm working on undoing some of the damage. Progress reports to follow...