Darcy Conroy's Blog: The Narrative Disorder of Darcy Conroy

I tend to post my crafting on Instagram, these days, but it takes up so much of my life/keeps me sane that it’s silly not to post more of it, here. This project, though, I didn’t even post on Instagram until after Christmas, as it was a present for a friend and I didn’t want her to see it (though she did know about it and had a bit of a fitting before it was all put together.

I guess I’m also sharing this one because I’m actually really proud of it. It was incredibly satisfying to make. My friend chose a pattern from pictures on Ravelry (Boxing Day 2017) but I soon saw the in-the-round pattern wasn’t going to produce a garment that would hold its shape on anyone other than the model while standing still (not unusual!). I threw out the pattern and just worked to the spirit of the picture -it was still a cape made with panels of herringbone but I added two more panels and shaped them differently so that they draped nicely, I used tunisian crochet for the connecting sections (with a little hidden crochet to strengthen and stabilise them), and then joined it all together and continued the tunisian crochet in the golden yoke and collar.

I’ve worked without a pattern, once before, but only with the freedom to completely change the garment as I go, and it was sooo satisfying to swatch and play and test stitches from all my yarn skills to try to achieve a specific intention. It’s a robust, striking piece of outerwear to keep my friend warm come Winter (which is approaching fast, here in Oz!)

I’d love to make another one to test my pattern notes and see how long it takes now that I’ve worked it all out – perhaps just 200 hours or so, instead of 400 LOL!

Yarn:

Bendigo Woollen Mills:

Rich Alpaca (40% wool 60% alpaca) in Rich Gold approx 1000m

Savanna (40% alpaca 60% wool) in Natural 800m

Here’s a couple of shots for fellow Oggie fans and process-junkies (I need to work out how to create a slideshow within the WordPress iOS app – any tips gratefully received!)

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Last Spring, which is in September down here in Oz, Superman and I took a drive through country Victoria and New South Wales to spend the Spring Equinox at the Cowra Japanese Garden and Cultural Centre. I was going to blog about it then but I often find myself reading about wonderful events I’d have loved to attend when it’s too late to do so, so I decided to wait until it was a good time for planning such a trip – and 2019 is the 30th anniversary of the Garden, so this is the year to go!

The Cowra Japanese Garden is a huge (5 hectares!) garden designed in 1977 by Ken Nakajima (a name well known to any child of a landscape architect with a penchant for all things Japanese) and is “a copy of the first Japanese landscape garden (Strolling garden) built by the first Shogun Tokugawa in the 16th century A.D, the Edo period of Japan in what is now called Tokyo (Edo).” (www.cowragarden.com.au) The full circuit walk leads up and around a peak with this magnificent view over the whole garden.

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Just how much of an oasis this garden is, and the skill of the garden’s construction and maintenance, is also made strikingly apparent from this lookout spot, by simply swivelling around to see what is beyond the boundary fences.

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Nakajima was commissioned to design the garden by the local community who had developed a strong connection with the Japanese community after World War II, when a Prisoner of War camp had been built to imprison Japanese Soldiers from the Pacific Theatre. In October 1944, over a thousand prisoners made an escape attempt, during which 231 Japanese Soldiers were killed. In the decades after the War, the local Returned Servicemen’s League took on the job of looking after the graves of their fallen foes and a relationship developed which encouraged healing between the communities. The garden was constructed as a “powerful symbol of good will, encouraging reconciliation and peace.”

But the Spring Event isn’t just about the garden. Throughout the garden are positioned practitioners (some from Australia, some from Japan) of various Japanese cultural arts, in 2018 there was KyuuDou (Japanese Archery), Karate, Shibori Weaving, Origami, Metal smithing (no forge, but plenty of hammering), a small Bonsai display, and a Kimono fashion show.

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The large lawn in front of the entrance building (which houses a permanent shop and cafe) served as a theatre, the audience sitting on some chairs but with plenty of space to sit on the lawn and picnic from the food trucks lined up behind it. On the stage there were various demonstrations from those arts with all day displays but also some other performances, including traditional Japanese singing and dancing, sword demonstrations and other martial arts, and my favourite: a Taiko group!

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The Garden is open year-round with various events for every season but the Spring Equinox celebration is their most popular and booking accomodation even 6 weeks before was difficult – a group was booking for the next year as we were checking in, so don’t wait!

Big claim, I know, though not unique, either.  I’ve been thinking about Facebook a lot, lately, because I deeply want to leave but don’t want to lose touch with the lives of so many friends and family members who now post to Facebook to connect with their wider social group. I understand why, I do it myself. Facebook is far, far more convenient than multiple phone calls or even emails and, frankly, we can keep in touch with a wider group of people than we possibly could have time to keep up with without Facebook.

As a housebound woman (if in multiple countries) over the last 14 years, I would have sunk deep into depression if it weren’t for my online communities – most of them, now, on Facebook. I’m not anti internet and I don’t believe that online connections aren’t real – they are (ask anyone who’s made a friend or been bullied online!) – but Facebook is just one of the platforms that I believe is dangerously powerful.

The main reasons I want to leave Facebook are:

a) The data theft. I don’t appreciate having to give up my privacy and have my details sold for someone else’s profit (sorry, Zuckerberg, but selling ads using the data is still selling the data);

b) The ease of false news and political manipulation by bad actors is just too destructive to our culture and I don’t want to be part of it;

c) Facebook no longer even shows me what I want to see! I have to jump through so many hoops, each of which gives FB more data, to make sure that I see all the posts that I want to and even after, for example, adding them as close friends and family, clicking the notifications bell, I still have to make sure to regularly visit people’s profile pages – especially if they don’t post often – to make sure I see their updates. Paid ads, though? They fill our feeds whether we ask for them or not!

Reasons a and b can be solved by leaving Facebook but c requires a replacement. I think that can be the WordPress Reader.

Let’s look at the basics that Facebook gives us, that we actually want (even if it’s not done well atm).

1. A ready-made, established platform that is “free”, easy to join and makes it easy to “like”and comment on posts, even if we don’t want to post anything;

2. An established platform that has enough people on it that is easy to find the people we want to find or invite them to join us;

3. A central webpage, or app, with a personally curated timeline that automatically updates with status updates and, sometimes, longer posts that people we know and love, or simply want to follow, want us to see;

4. The ability to easily post our own status updates, photos, longer posts, if and when we wish to;

5. The ability to easily re-post/share those posts if we, or the original person who posted it, wants others to see it;

6. Businesses – Some of us also want to follow the posts of certain businesses, news sources or communities which, increasingly, don’t even have websites or community forums anymore and rely solely on their Facebook page and (data sucking) sales and community tools.

There are likely others and if you think of them, please let me know and I’ll try to address them, but these are the main ones I’d like to address, here.

1. A ready-made, established platform that is free, easy to join, and makes it easy to “like”and comment on posts, even if we don’t want to post anything;.

I’ve been discussing this with various people for a while and the most common concern I hear is: “Isn’t WordPress a blog site? I don’t want to have to start a blog.”

First, yes, WordPress.com is website, running on the WordPress blogging platform (which is a separate thing), where you can start and run a blog (or multiple blogs) BUT, no, you do not have to have a blog to have an account with which to read and comment on other people’s blogs. In fact, here’s the post on the WordPress.com company blog from May, 2006, when the no-blog account was implemented in response to requests for it.

Second, if you ever post anything on Facebook, or Instagram, you are already blogging. Seriously. Short Facebook posts, or just pictures with short posts on Instagram can be said to be “micro-blogging”, but blogging it is. It doesn’t feel like blogging because Facebook rarely shows you your Facebook Profile page and it feels like you are publishing your thoughts into a stream of content from all over the place, rather than on a page or website that is devoted only to your musings, but you are actually posting to your profile page – and that’s a blog page but with a whole lot more information about you than you’d have to give to WordPress (set to private or not)!

Signing up is easy, free, requires much less personal information than Facebook and allows you to start curating your timeline without starting a blog. If you want to start a blog, you can, of course – a basic blog is free (with less obtrusive ads than Facebook) and all you will need if you just want your posts to come up in your friends’ feeds as they will only ever see the content in the reader so you don’t even need to bother with themes and colours and graphics etc. – unless you want to, of course!

Note: You can start as many blogs as you like using that WordPress account/profile and make each one as accessible and/or searchable as you like – you can even make your blog accessible only to those with the blog address AND with a password – or variations up to that amount of security.

Which brings me to:

2. An established platform that has enough people on it that is easy to find the people we want to find or invite them to join us.

“But everyone’s on Facebook, no-one has a blog anymore!”

This is the second most common reason people think leaving Facebook is an exercise in futility and, while hyperbolic, it’s a decent point. Lots of people do still have blogs but they are certainly out of fashion. In fact, I just did a clear out of the blogs I follow and found sooo many blogs that hadn’t had post for a year or five, but those people are very active on Facebook. So this one is up to us. If we want to get Facebook’s claws out of us, then we have to make an effort.

But isn’t WordPress.com just another big platform, like Facebook?

Yes and No. First, I’m advocating for a mass move to WordPress.com Reader, which is a feed reader, not just WordPress.com – you can follow any blog in WP Reader, you can only follow Facebook pages/groups/profiles on Facebook.

Why not advocate for any other feedreader? Because the reason Facebook flourished wasn’t just by keeping everyone inside their platform (though that helped, even if it was immoral, imo), Facebook flourished because they are a platform. WordPress makes it really easy to use the Reader to read any blog but also to make your own posts using the seamless interaction of the Reader and Platform.

3. A central webpage, or app, with a personally curated timeline.

This is what my WordPress Reader from the iOS App looks like on my iPad:

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And this is it using the Chrome browser:

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On the menu on the left of both screens you can see that the “Followed Sites” is highlighted and that’s what you’ve got: the latest posts from ALL the sites you follow – not just some of them according to an algorithm, not skipping some because you haven’t gone to directly to their page in a while, just the latest posts from the sites you follow.

The rest of the menu options achieve various things:

“conversations” – this is where you can find all your comments and the conversations you are part of;

“discover” is a selection of posts from the WordPress.com platform curated by the WP.com team

“search” searches for content on the WordPress.com platform only

“my likes”shows you a timeline of the latest posts you’ve “liked”, very handy!

Under all those, you’ll see “tags” and this is something WP has over Facebook, and is, essentially, what hashtags on twitter developed from and used exactly as you would use them on Instagram, except the tags are hidden from view (much nicer!) You can see there, that most of my current tags are medical/spoonie related and I use these to browse all posts on the WordPress.com platform that the writer has tagged as such.

You can add blogs from outside the WordPress.com platform to WP reader by clicking “manage” in the Followed Sites section and pasting in the full blog/RSS feed address of the site you want to follow, then clicking the site when the search brings it up underneath. For example, in the picture below I have added the blog feed of The Majority Report with Sam Seder (they still use feedburner!):

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And it now appears in my Reader timeline:

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You can get more info on feeds here.

4. The ability to easily post our own status updates, photos, longer posts, if and when we wish to.

Posting on the WordPress app or website is really easy – unless this happens:

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Where was I? Oh. Right. You simply click the “+ write” logo either at the bottom of the App or the top right of the webpage (where you will be offered a list of your blogs from which to choose) and type and insert pics away. (For detailed help, click here).

Here’s a kitten-free, screenshot of the app’s writing page, on which I am writing this post.

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It really is easy to pick up – and, remember, you had to learn how to post to Facebook, too!

5. The ability to easily re-post/share those posts if we, and or the original person who posted it, want others to see it;

This is something WordPress beats Facebook in, hands down, and for one reason: you can share it outside of the platform! You can share anything you see in WP Reader (unless the original poster has the privacy of the post set against it) anywhere you want – a private email, paste the link in Messages, Twitter, Reddit, even Facebook. Facebook keeps you trapped in Facebook (except for email which they know most people think is inconvenient and so no real competition.)

If you do want to share something within the WordPress.com platform, you have two options:

If your source is coming from outside the platform, you share it just as you normally would be TO your WordPress blog as a post with a link, just as you are posting it to your profile page when you share on Facebook.

If you want to share someone else’s blog post – say your friend is having a book launch and you want to share the news: that’s when you use WordPress.com’s wonderful re-blog button. This creates a post for your blog, where you can make a comment, but embed’s the original post in a truncated form which requires the reader to click on to get the full post. I love this feature because it lets me share great posts without feeling like I’m stealing content – there is no doubt who originated the post! (Note: it is easy to make it so that no-one can reblog your posts, I notice most people seem to block that, these days, but I think that’s a pity because it helps the Reader platform grow – it’s the principle Facebook used to grow.)

And finally:

6. Following Businesses and Communities

Whether you think it’s sad or not that Facebook has captured the internet life of so many people, the fact is that it has. So many businesses have chosen to do away with any website at all, let alone a blog, and take advantage of the sales and community building tools Facebook provides. And it’s fair enough, really – they’d be stupid not to, considering the wealth of targeting data Facebook collects and allows businesses to buy from them, in the form of targeted advertising.

It’s a tricky one. I love my online communities and they are ALL on Facebook, now. For example, a few months ago I paid to access a series of educational videos and access to a community based on a gardening blog I’ve been following for a while as we wait and plan for our house to be built. They were quite open that the community for which we are paying an access fee is actually a Facebook group. For this reason, I almost didn’t purchase the product but I know that this is the way the world is going and it was a really cheap, one-time, life-time membership which has already become a monthly subscription for new members.

What to do? I’m still working it out. I don’t want to be targeted by businesses that want to profit from over-consumption. I also want to stop being a conduit to all my friends for any business that wants to profit from them. But my communities are important to me. So I have an idea that I could “unfriend” actual profiles of people and only follow businesses and joins communities/groups. I’d keep in touch with those people either by persuading them to come to WordPress Reader and/or make their own blog and/or send my posts as emails and just email back and forth to individual responses, which is inevitably what happens when people subscribe via email. It’s surely not a bad thing to return to letter writing, even if by email, but it would be more time consuming – my friends with children couldn’t possibly keep up!

So, again, it is all down to us to make the moves. What do you think?

Would you/Have you considered leaving Facebook?

Would you consider starting a blog on WordPress.com, in place of posting on Facebook?

Would you at least sign up to WordPress.com to use WP Reader and comment on others’ blogs?

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All the way back in 1994, barely two months into my Honours year in Philosophy at Monash, I had to withdraw due to illness. My teachers and tutors had, they told me, been concerned as they watched me descend into exhaustion, and were relieved I was willing to take a break and care for my health. I told them I’d look after myself and be back next year and all but one of them met my proclamation with cheerful agreement. The one teacher who did not was new to the Uni, at the end of the previous year. He had been brought in by our wonderful Professor to fill a gap in the department in Greek Philosophy, which was my passion. This new tutor and I had been working since the end of third year, over Summer, to develop my Honours thesis question and make it one that could grow into a PhD thesis – I wanted to be a scholar of Greek Philosophy.

Perhaps it was because he knew me fairly well, by then, or perhaps he recognised what it took doctors three years to diagnose (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis – or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) but he gently told me not to put pressure on myself with future plans, but to focus on the now, on getting better. He could see that my “I’ll be back next year” was an an attempt to time travel to the point when the nightmare of watching my whole future darken before me was over. Then he told me a story of how one of his favourite professors, in the States, had once said to him (through a plume of smoke from a cigar, apparently) that no-one should be allowed to do philosophy before they were fifty and had lived a little! I chuckled with him and understood that the point was that “it’s never too late” but, of course, being twenty-one, I inwardly rejected the idea.

Twenty five years later, I’m forty-six – which is close enough to fifty – and goodness knows I’ve lived some life, and I’m returning to Philosophy at Monash, if from a distance.

I had investigated Monash before I’d even applied to Uni Melb, but found that their M. Public Health was very much a clinically focused degree and required biomed pre-req’s I didn’t have. Any other degree at Monash would require going all the way to Clayton (2.5 hours by car, each way, from near Ballarat) and their online study website offered very few degrees.

What I hadn’t realised was that studying “online” at Monash is a different thing to studying “off-campus”. A bunch of their undergraduate and graduate programs have an option which is listed in the handbook as: Off-campus (Clayton). This means that the degrees are handled by the on-campus administration, not their Online arm. One of those degrees offered off-campus is a specialist Master of Bioethics.

I discovered this on the Friday after the Tuesday of my disastrous attempt at attending campus at Uni Melb, when the class that I missed, because I was collapsed and near-blacking-out on a pile of cushions in the Disability Space, was, in fact, Bioethics.

I had a long talk with myself about whether withdrawing from Uni Melb after one day of trying was “quitting”, and decided to trust myself. After twenty-five years living with chronic illness, I can feel the difference between activity that will become easier with practice and activity that will trigger Post Exertion Malaise, worsening all my symptoms and rendering me “recovering” for weeks, if not months. I applied for the M. Bioethics that Friday night, marked my planner to follow up in 4 weeks and, so as not to get my hopes up for just one option, continued researching degrees through Open Uni and Deakin’s Cloud Campus.

I admit, I wasn’t doing a great job keeping my hopes in check, so it’s probably a very good thing, indeed, that the next Wednesday (last week) I received an offer! Though I didn’t apply for it, because I thought it had been too long, Monash offered me credits to exempt me from foundational ethics subjects, because of my Philosophy Specialisation all those years ago. Those credits just happen to equal a semester-worth, so I wouldn’t even need to lose any time because of my failed attempt at Uni Melb. Of course, me being me, I’ve asked whether I could refuse the exemption and use the credits to take two subjects from the Master of Journalism, in research and investigative journalism, instead. I’m waiting to hear, and will be happy either way.

The Centre for Bioethics is, like the School of Population and Global Health at Uni Melb, allied with the World Health Organisation but focuses specifically on my area of interest and so, I hope, should put me in an even better position to join the conversation on how doctors, researchers, patients and the wider community approach chronic pain and illness. I hope to bring not just my experience but to bring a voice from the #spoonie community I have belonged to for the last twenty-five years – watch this space because I’ll be reaching out!

Meanwhile, here’s a little video on the Master of Bioethics at Monash

In my last post I noted that what worried me, and my medical team, most about my returning to university after 25 years was how my hypotension, migraine, osteoarthritis and CFS/ME* would respond to the physicality of getting in to Uni. I also said that I had plans and solutions for everything I could imagine might go wrong, and that I would be honest about what worked and what didn’t. So here goes:

Nothing I could plan was going to be enough. I won’t go into the detail of my near-collapse on Orientation Day, but it led to me seeking out help from Equity & Disability to get between the buildings. I discovered that they had mobility scooters (for trial) and booked one for my first day of classes, a week after Orientation.

It still wasn’t enough.

I simply cannot get through a day without somewhere to lie down, multiple times a day, to stabilise my blood pressure and/or allow my migraine emergency meds to knock me sideways and do their work as I sleep. And Melbourne Uni has no support for such a need – for any student who has a medical issue, let alone a chronic one.

Now, before you leap to the same conclusion I did (that such a requirement is too much to ask), the image below shows what James Cook University arranged, last year, for a student who has the same medical profile as I do – except that she is a little better off because she can still drive, if she rests beforehand.

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You can see that that is a screenshot from the ME/CFS Australia Facebook Community and, while it was the most comprehensive support reported in the thread, it was by no means the only University that provided for a chronically ill student a safe, reliable place to rest.

It’s astonishing to me but even the head project officer at Equity and Disability hunted around and confirmed that, except for a room with a single bed in it provided and paid for by the Student Union (which was occupied when I needed it), the only medical support University of Melbourne has for its thousands of students are their security guards with first aid training. If your issue is beyond their skill and/or you cannot move under your own steam, they will call an ambulance.

To call an ambulance for a chronic condition which the patient knows how to treat and requires only a safe place to lie down, is a terrible waste of Paramedic resources. Further, sitting and waiting in an ER would only exacerbate my conditions, as I would be rightly triaged as non-urgent – probably until I fainted.

And so, as I pay my spoonie dues for daring to venture out twice in as many weeks (the sheer gall!), I must face facts. Though my intellectual capacity has returned with the removal of my diseased uterus and the pain it caused, my remaining physical issues mean that I cannot attend campus. I have deferred for twelve months while I consider my options.

A UniMelb course planner did suggest that there are ways for individual students to study some subjects by distance, though not for many of my course’s subjects because they have group components. Nevertheless, studying from home does seem to be my only option but it needn’t be a lesser one. While being the only student Skyping into a tutorial would be a disadvantage, being one of many students in an online forum or video conference puts one at no disadvantage at all, so what I need is a course designed to be delivered 100% online, of which there are many!

I leave you, now, with the image I stopped to snap as I was turtling my way back to return my scooter for what I suspected would be the first and last time. It really is a beautiful campus. Thank you for all your support and watch this space!

First, WOOOOHOOOOO!!!! I am now enrolled in the Master of Public Health at The University of Melbourne – or UniMelb, as its domain has caused it to be known since I was last at University, 25 years ago! [image error]

I got the offer for the Masters in mid-December but I couldn’t bring myself to write this blog post until I was sure that I was actually enrolled, because a part of me still struggles to believe this is happening. Just eight months ago, I was writhing in pain for three weeks of every month, and considering my diagnosis of migraines and POTS and their treatment, which allowed me to get into a car without taking anti-nausea drugs, a miraculous change in my life. Which it was – and continues to be – but ooh, boy, it doesn’t come close to the cessation of chronic pain.

I still have pain from the osteoarthritis I’ve had in my spine and hips since I was 20, but it’s not layered on top of the vicious beast that was my adenomyosis-riddled uterus and its adhesion to my bowel, so the arthritis pain is manageable with nothing more than regular paracetamol. Paracetamol! Not even with codeine, let alone oxy’ or tramadol!!

But I digress, if you are new to the blog, or missed my post in which I wrote about finding a new purpose in turning my fiction writing skills to non-fiction on women’s pain, and my plan to apply for the Masters of Public Health, you’ll find it here.

With the hurdle of application and admission cleared, I now move to the harder and most interesting phase – getting it done!

The idea of study after so long doesn’t worry me – perhaps it should, lol, but for now I’m working on the basis that my intellect will turn up for me. If it doesn’t, I’ll deal with it, then. I’m not making it easy on myself, as I’ve also decided to do a concurrent Diploma of Languages in French – those of you who joined my blog when I was living in Japan or Thailand will know I have a lifelong desire to become a polyglot (fluent in at least four languages) – so I’ll get to do some interesting subjects taught and assessed entirely in French, in a couple of years. I’m sooo excited!!

The other issue that has crept up on me only in the last few weeks is the fact of being around other people. I have been lucky that, as an introvert, I have no trouble spending hours, even days, in my own company, but it does mean that being around others – even though I enjoy it, very much – is draining. Not to mention, that after so long spending every day with just Oggie and the TV to talk to, I’ve allowed my habit of automatically correcting the pronunciation of words out loud (which I developed while directing audiobooks) to run amok and I’m sure I’m going to do it in a class at some stage!

What worry me most are the issues that my remaining medical conditions could create. Both my GP, and my Specialist at the Austin hypotension clinic are supportive of this new direction, but have been at pains to remind me that, though I might feel like Superwoman without my pain, I must still take it gently – something I’ve never been good at. My Specialist has also told me to expect setbacks, probably even big ones, but that I will recover faster, now, and to reach out to him to adjust my meds to manage that. Which I will do.**

And so, like the hyper-vigilante, over-intellectualiser that I am, I have spent the last couple of months finding solutions to all the issues I could foresee being a problem as a sufferer of chronic illness(es). Of course, there will be unforeseen issues, surely, but the way I’ve always handled my anxiety is to plan, plan, write lists, and plan – it’s what works for me.

I won’t go into further detail about those solutions, today, as I want to test them before I write about them, but I will write about them – honestly – in case it may be of help to those of you with similar chronic conditions and may be considering, or in the midst of, University life. Just as this blog focused on how to live in Japan as a “trailing spouse”, when I lived there, it will now focus on how to attend University with chronic, largely invisible medical conditions. I can only hope it will be tinged with the same joy as my Japan experience.

As always, wishing you courage and creativity in all you do,

Darcy.

**(If you live in Melbourne, or are willing to drive to Heidelberg, and would like to know who my Specialist for POTS is, feel free to email me at darcyruschena@gmail.com and I’ll tell you what I know about his particular interests etc.)

This post is for all my lovely friends but especially those of you living with #chronicpain, #chronicfatigue, #endometriosis, #adenomyosis and assorted debilitating, often invisible, conditions.

On the 1st of Jun, 2018, I finally had the hysterectomy I had been begging for for over a decade to address the severe “period pain” which has stolen between 1 and 3 weeks of every month of my life for the last 30 years. That’s YEARS lost, jobs lost, opportunities interrupted, my wedding day spent in agony and unable to dance.

Inside, my surgeon found:

* one felopian tube wrapped around and adhered to my uterus;

* that lump of uterus and tube adhered to my bowel.

After surgery, pathology on the uterus found:

* on the outside of the uterus, 2 “miscellaneous, benign lesions, haemorraging (probably where it had been adhered to my intestines and recently ripped away);

* within the muscle of the uterus, adenomyosis (like endo but inside the muscle, so nowhere to expand or escape as the tissue attempts to shed each month);

* 7 fibroids, 3 of them haemorraging (my last two “3 week periods” had, in fact been these continuing to haemorrhage)

In the weeks and months as I’ve recovered from the surgery, I have discovered that even on my “good week” each month, before the surgery, when I thought I was not in pain, I was wrong. Only now that I’m free of it, have I noticed that I brace for pain with every sneeze, every step, every cat jumping on my lap.

Whatismore, the IBS I have suffered for decades, been medicated for, asked family to adjust meals for, the reason I missed out on travelling to so many less accessible areas of Japan and Thailand – or anywhere without a known bathroom – has disappeared.

And here’s the real kicker: that chronic fatigue I’ve been suffering on and off for 25 years? That I had to drop out of Honours because of and then spent 3 years being poked and prodded and drained and tipped upside down to make sure it was definitely inexplicable? Yeah – that’s going away. I’m waking up refreshed! I still get tired quickly, but when I nap I feel awake afterwards! Seems being in constant pain from your UTERUS STICKING TO YOUR BOWEL is fatiguing. Who knew?

So, finally, to my point. I know that as some of you read this, you’re relating to the story, and you’ll understand why, over the weeks since the surgery I’ve also discovered that I’m angry.

Several weeks ago, I read an article in the Guardian in which the journo writing it shared her story of years of period pain and finally getting treatment; it was EXACTLY THE SAME as mine. I groaned, I paced, I shook, I cried. I couldn’t stop crying.  At the 5 hour mark, I called Beyond Blue (1300 22 4636) and a wonderful woman on the other end listened and gently told me that I wasn’t just angry, I was grieving.

She was right.

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When we hung up, I had stopped crying, had a plan to get help (I’m okay

At the ripe old age of 45 we have decided we have finally found somewhere we want to put down roots, here in regional Victoria

“Handmade Plenty” is my theme for the next 5 years

Today’s tapestry breakthrough! Though the butterflies I made following @rebeccamezofftapestry video (see below) were working beautifully individually, I have so many colours on this autumn landscape that they were getting tangled (and freaking me out a little with messiness) But I didn’t want to use (or spend on) bulkier tapestry bobbins. I had a packet of little, plastic embroidery floss bobbins and they seem to be the perfect solution! They are nice and flat to slip through on each pick and happily hold about 10 wraps on the Mezoff butterflies scale