As you may have noticed I have been quite for a couple of days. The kitchen has been the reason – it needed to be organised. Last week James put up shelves in the kitchen that looks awesome. Yesterday I powered on through and got the kitchen back to a level of organised cleanliness that makes my brain give a sigh of relief.

The downside to all this is physical activity = pain. An increase in activity = an increase in pain – you can see the logic. The realisation came to me that my entire life is a balancing act of these two things – pain and activity. Activity can be physically challenging (like yesterday) or mentally challenging (like going to a social event). No matter what I do or how prepared I am, I always get bitten with physical or mental pain afterwards. Planning my life around the fallout after the activity is exhausting.

Pain tonight I would say is a solid 7 out of 10 – which means little sleep and uncomfortable, painful waking hours. I’ve been a good patient – I have taken medication to manage the pain which has lowered it to from the 9 it was previous. Was having a clean and organised kitchen really worth it? Yes. Mentally, the kitchen is now organised which has quietened the OCD and anxiety chatter in my head that have been itching to sort the house out, especially with Xmas coming up. Physically, I am in much more pain – the kind of pain where no matter how you position yourself it still feels like fire and twisting hot pokers.

Anyway, well in a few hours, I have another dental appointment as my jaw remains locked shut and my dentist wishes to see me every two weeks until resolution. I am struggling to see the usefulness in these appointments. They are formulaic – I walk in, then say my jaw is still stuck, the dentist will replies well there isn’t much I can do, you’re doing all the right things, keep doing what you are doing and you’re on the consultant waiting list, then I leave. What part of that dialogue is in any way useful? How has it moved me closer to a solution?

Yes, I’m grumpy about this – I called the consultant at the hospital’s secretary to gather some more information and apparently, an “urgent” appointment takes anywhere between 8 and 12 weeks to be allocated. 8 to 10 weeks – an “urgent” appointment. To quote Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride – “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”