3187 March Mayhem: Hand Therapy, Head Spins, and a Furniture Fiasco

Well, I kicked this month off with something new: Hand Therapy (why not?). My therapist—nurse? I’m honestly not sure of her exact title, but her name is Cat, and she’s great, even set me up with a little toolkit for my hands. We’re talking sexy compression gloves, therapy putty, and this rubber sheet contraption that helps you open jars and bottles (which, let’s be honest, is low-key genius). The whole session lasted about an hour, and I left feeling hopeful… and a little like I’d just enrolled in hand rehab bootcamp. I also found out that currently my hands are only working at approximately. 50% of what an average person of my age should be.

Then, because I apparently LOVE a bit of drama (cough NOT), I caught a rotten cold, it felt a bit like it had a hint of flu. Not your everyday sniffles—this one came in swinging. To start with, my throat felt like I was breathing fire (dragon in disguise), my nose constantly running (used three boxes of tissues in the matter of a couple of days! Don’t get me started on my ears… totally blocked, and my body ached like a linebacker had tackled me. One second, I was hot; the next, I was freezing. It was a rough week.

As if that wasn’t enough, work … do I need to elaborate? Every task I touched seemed to morph into a never-ending walk up a steep mountain. Literally, every time I thought I was finished, I found something else that had to be done before any task was completed, so I was working through doing lots of emails, calls, admin, etc, but not making any progress. Do you know what I mean?

Then came the plot twist: vertigo. Concentrating was not in the cards. I started getting these weird dizzy spells where the whole room would start spinning out. Standing up felt like a gamble—sometimes I’d wobble, sometimes I felt like I was going to hit the deck. One particularly bad moment? I had flipped my head over to tie my hair, stood back up, and boom—vision blurred, ears screaming, balance gone. Tried the ol’ “pinch your nose and blow” trick to pop my ears? Rookie mistake. Everything went black, and suddenly I was in-flight, 30,000 feet above sea level (at least that’s how it sounded). Won't be doing that again! It made it so much WORSE.

By the end of the month, the cold still hadn’t entirely let go. I was falling asleep after work, nose still a faucet, ears still blocked, most nights when I got into bed, I had to make sure there was a loo roll close by.

Naturally, this was the perfect time for me to make a very wise decision: rearrange all the furniture in my room. Alone. On a random Sunday afternoon. You know those “what was I thinking” moments that hit halfway through a project? That was me, mid-bed-lift, sweating and swearing, lying on the floor under my bed, questioning myself. But stubbornness wins again—I finished it (sort of). There is a bit of tweaking to do, but I got it to a liveable standard. I had wanted to do it for MONTHS, but I kept putting it off.

Let’s cross our fingers that April is a little less crazy.