nixsight

Running late again today, and this is also probably going to be a short one, because my wrist is killing me.

I’ve a couple of posts I want to write over the next few days, very specifically one about gaming that has been stewing in my brain-pan, especially since I completed Shadow Of The Colossus today, but that will have to wait, because the blinding pain I’m suffering seems mostly brought on by keyboard antics…

So while I’m on the subject, I thought I’d take you on a whirlwind journey of my body, and the various things that are, or have, been wrong with it.

Measles/Chicken Pox (5-10)
I’m fairly certain that I had both of these during my early school life, although I can’t remember specifics.

I do remember a very clear few days that I had off school – I think when our family was living in a 3-storey house in Orton Malborne, Peterborough (which used to be a nice area, but god knows what goes on there now).

In memory, I was laid up in my bedroom, which was at the back-most corner of the topmost floor, and the remoteness of my room gave the odd feeling of being visited by family in my sickbed, despite the fact that my mother at least must have been there all day.

But the thing that I remember specifically about this period of sickness was that I had a TV in my bedroom, and at some point I watched at least one episode of Star Trek – The Original Series. I couldn’t tell you which one, but there’s something particularly strong and otherwise complete about the memory.

Hair Lice/fleas (treatment only – several times during school life)
Not much to say on this, beyond that I don’t think I ever actually had hair lice, and I always found it strange that the treatment for a long-shot infection – that was, to my mind at least, probably more uncomfortable then dangerous – seemed to be for the potentially infected child and their entire family to douse their hair in a substance that smelt extremely flammable, and wonder around the house with it soaking in for half-an-hour.

Remember, this was when pretty much everyone’s parents smoked.

Accidental Sliceage (10-16)
Three separate occasions here:
First, I’m at home sick from school with goodness knows what almost symptomless ailment that I had probably built up out of nothing… my mum is out somewhere for a short while, and will be back soonish, and I’m building a model airplane while I’m sitting cross-legged on my bed.

So I’m at that awkward point where you have to separate the radio antenna from the plastic frame that all the parts come on – the word for which I once knew but have forgotten – and I’m having to saw at it with my little craft knife. Both parts held in different hands. Over my lap.

Within a few seconds, the top-most centimeter (at least) is embedded in the soft flesh of my thigh. Oddly, the thing I’m most worried about, as blood starts to gush, is that my mum will kill me if she finds out what I was doing, so I rush to the bathroom, and, holding the cut closed, I hold it under a fast running cold tap, until I’m fairly certain that it won’t bleed any more. And I spend the rest of the day holding it closed under the covers.

In memory, that cut was really damn deep and nasty looking, but it occurs to me now that it could have been much, much worse…

The second cut was simpler, and I think the first cut was the deepest:
I was holidaying in Cyprus without my parents and sisters, but with family, at around 14 years old.

We were walking from my aunt and uncle’s place near Ayia Napa – before it was a cut-rate Ibiza, when you could still find a beach without tourists shagging on it – to the sea. My foot sank into a sand-dune, and I got a sharp pain, like something bit me. I pulled it up, and saw a horrid, dramatic looking gash, where the inside of my foot, an inch lower then the thick veins at the side, had dropped on some broken glass buried in the sand.

There was blood everywhere, but my uncle seemed unconcerned, and I dimly remember him getting me down to the beach, half-leaning on him, and making me get into the water. The cut looked worse under-water, but to be fair, it didn’t bleed any afterwards.

Finally, something mundane. I was cutting a large potato in half, while on cleaning/peeling duty at my parents chip-shop, and I wasn’t paying attention while using a new knife.

The knife sliced clean through the potato, and clean through the tip of the middle finger on my left hand. My dad took me to a doctor when the cut wouldn’t stop bleeding, where they used sutures – the cut not serious enough for stitches – and I’ve still got the scar today.

See also: Embarrassing sex injury (22ish)
Not going into too much detail about this. It involved bleeding where it shouldn’t be, is apparently a much more common injury then you’d think, and the nurse thought I was very brave to take it to her the morning after.

Toy garage related injury (unknown)
I used to have this toy garage.

It was one of those ones with a ramp round the outside. You rolled a car into the lift at the bottom, turned the crank, and the car rode up to the top, and if memory serves was pushed out so that it rolled down and round the ramp.

I think it was Playmobil brand – heavy toy, heavy, solid plastic.

We had this chest freezer. I was playing on top of it, and thought it would be easy to jump down off of it, but hadn’t factored in the proximity of the garage. I fell on the side of it, and the ramp broke, which gives you some idea of how hard I hit it, and stuck itself in my outer thigh.

The skin didn’t break, but there was an impact bruise which, once it set in, was severe enough to change the superficial shape of my thigh, and I still had a deep dimple there years later. One of those scars that you get used to, and then you don’t notice it fading till a long time after it’s gone.

Shortness (ongoing)
I am just below average height now, but when I was a kid, I was short. Teeny tiny. Quite a little guy.

Over the years, things have levelled out, and I’m no longer dwarfed by other people my own age. But when I was a kid, and in my early teens, it was kind of a real problem for me, and I begged my parents to take me to the doctor and get me hormone treatment or some such.

I think I was measured and tested over a period of months, but ultimately the doctors told us that I was just too tall to be considered abnormally small, so they couldn’t give me the treatment. This may, or may not, have stuck with me.

(I have a sneaking suspicion, actually, that the clinic we went to is right near the old converted building that is now a restaurant bar, where my sister’s Pre-Wedding meal was.)

Short-Sightedness (ongoing)
I wear glasses.

I started wearing them in my mid-teens, which was older then my sisters. Actually, I think I was the last in our family wearing them. This was, mind you, after a year of complaining to one of my teachers that I couldn’t read the blackboard, and being told persistently to move nearer to the front.

I actually don’t mind my glasses – if I did get my eyesight fixed, it would probably be so that I could wear cheap sunglasses, or vanity specs at will, like Doctor Who, and my friend Oke.

There’s something relentlessly positive and cheerful about it being called “short-sightedness”, isn’t there? It sounds like a celebration of something good about one’s vision, but actually, rather then a description of the only part of your eyesight that works proper, like.

See also: Astigmatism
I apparently have wonky shaped eyes. It is a curse, which years ago meant that I could only get really expensive contact lenses, if I wanted them. Luckily, the thought of regularly sticking stuff onto the lens of my eye made me feel a little sick in my mouth, so it didn’t matter.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (ongoing)
The absolute only interesting thing about this is that it has provided me with one of my favourite medical stories, which involves an innappropriately cheerful Doctor/Nurse team, and a Dalek up the bottom.

IBS is a ridiculous condition, in that it isn’t a condition at all, so much as a cluster of similar symptoms. So if a doctor tells you that you have IBS, they are basically saying “well, your guts are fucked, and we have NO idea why.”

Mild Depression (rarely – triggered by circumstance, perhaps 3 or 4 times between 16 and 33)
Bill Hicks once said something about being able to empathise with homeless people, something about it only taking the right girl, the right friends and the right… something else.

Anyway, I can relate, is what I’m getting at.
(Must get a tape player… my Hicks is all on tape…!)

See also: Anxiety Attacks

Persistent Cold Symptoms (ongoing)
I seem to have had a blocked nose and sore throat for as long as I can remember…
Apparently, this is not unusual.

See also: Snoring
I snore. Girl One sleeps light.

Needless to say, we are trying to address the situation.The last phase was getting a surgeon to attack my face with a chisel. This has had mixed results.

Which are, basically, that I still snore. But now I can talk about the time that a surgeon attacked my face with a chisel.

Athlete’s Foot (once or twice during early 20s)
I had a bit of dry skin on my foot the other week. It reminded me of the persistent cycle of infection/treatment that I was in for much of the early nineties, for Athlete’s Foot.

I will always remember being amazed by how dramatic looking the condition was, compared to how relatively minor it actually is.

I swear, it looked like Hicks’ face after he got alien shotgun spray all over it.

RSI in wrist (ongoing)
The simple reason for this is that I work with computers at work, and then play with computers at home. And that isn’t likely to change any time soon.

Anyone choosing to connect the fact that I have spent many years of my life single and with an internet connection, and that men who are single with easy access to pornography are known to masturbate fractionally more regularly then all other men, with the fact that I suffer from this terrible and debilitating condition, shame on you. Blame the victim, why don’t you?

Pulled back muscles (occasional – ongoing)
Bad posture, what can I say.

I once got a black eye from my schoolfriend Sagar Roy, because of a pulled back-muscle – well, and because some of our classmates were reprehensible twats. But that’s a long story.

Kidney Stone (22ish)
This was the first time I ever stayed in a hospital. I loved it. They gave me opiates.

It manifested on a Friday morning as a really bad stomach ache. I felt like I was dying. I went to my doctor’s surgery and asked if it might be possible for someone to see me, and the receptionist was very rude, saying that if I was on my feet it probably wasn’t an emergency.

A couple of hours later, a friend drove me to casualty, and apparently my skin was translucent green. Casualty was packed, and I went to the loo while my friend checked in at reception. The second I came out of the toilet, I was triaged into examination ahead of everyone else. Because apparently the symptoms of kidney stones are almost identical to those of appendicitis, and that can be fatal if not treated quickly.

Bloody receptionist.

My friend Liz sent me a note saying “I knew you were pregnant – you are pregnant in the kidney”. I swear, I don’t know how some people manage to say things like that and make them sound cute rather than twee, but she managed it.

Liz is, coincidentally, pregnant herself at the moment. But not in the kidney – I’m fairly certain that she’s pregnant in the womb.

Real flu (32)
Wow, real flu is really gross. And it keeps you in bed for days, stops you eating or drinking, and makes you actually feel too ill to read or watch TV or anything.

I am never claiming that I have flu when I can still function ever again.

OCD (undiagnosed)
You already knew this, right?

Hypochondria (undiagnosed)
Wait, what?