Up at 5am to drive a couple of hours for a doctors appointment, and people ask me why I’m not going to retire to a rural town, but I digress. My appointment this morning is for test results, because I’m incapable of just admitting that I’m falling apart without an official letter stamped in triplicate and nailed to the door of a church in Germany. Seems living on a permanent knife edge, eating only junk (and all your own feelings), saying YES to all requests, and working at tasks you have no appetite and little aptitude for, will wear you down a bit. And by a bit I mean a version of gastritis that causes pain, fatigue, and on one particularly scary day a bit of vomiting blood. My doctor has officially read me the riot act, and I’m going to need two weeks of drugs and food restrictions just to get back to feeling well enough to run other tests.

I am pretty sure he knew I wasn’t going to slow down without actually being yelled at for being an idiot by a medical professional, or being forced to by ending up in hospital again. So he actually yelled, and tutted, and played the “you need to stop if you want to be around for your kids” card. Consider my card stamped and my leash yanked.

I’ve filled my scripts, cancelled everything in my calendar, purchased a lot of beige food, and put a 2nd water jug in the fridge so I don’t run out of cold filtered H2O. It’s easy to be good when you feel horrible and everything hurts, the hard part is in a few days time when the antibiotics and anti inflammatory drugs kick in and I feel a bit better. But this time I’m going to be good, because it would be nice to be able to enjoy Christmas and not be a tired mess.

Luckily I now have the permission to stop for a bit, permission I was not going to give myself, but now I have a doctors note to excuse me from sport Sir! And by sport I mean work myself into a state of physical and emotional exhaustion several times a week.