As long as you’ve got your elf…

Sunday Blog 63 – Sunday 11th December 2022

I remember this cartoon from years ago–I can’t quite find the right attribution without falling into a black internet hole so I am taking the risk of just posting it, anyway. It’s so topical for me. Because, Christmas and Elf. Yes, mature people are always saying “as long as you’ve got your health” and a wag, sick of hearing this, riffed on it with a Christmas theme comic.

For over two weeks now, my health has been unpredictable and its absence has stripped away everything normal. Yoga practice, Sunday Blogs, writing… everything is weird.

I’m not convinced of the usefulness (or indeed the existence) of Elves. But my health is something that, when it is missing, I desperately seek it and remember its value.

The short story seems to be my neck is out. That has meant no comfortable way to lie, sit or stand. Migraines that won’t stop, even a trip to Emergency which helped with the worse excesses of the nausea phase. But every night now I am lucky if I sleep until midnight. Then it’s a cat and mouse game of trying remedies and distractions, repeat until dawn.

The very worst thing for me is I wake with absolutely no energy. To say I am a morning person is a vast understatement. My flat mate from the 1990s in London so hated my cheerful early morning trill of “Shower’s free!” that she has re-purposed it into a wake up call for her teenage son, so he too can suffer as she did.

Now the morning finds me on this strange shore where I wake feeling like I have been squeezed of every last bit of joy. I shuffle through the morning hours until about 9.30, when I typically would have been doing my yoga and feeling on top of the world.

I miss my health. I don’t know where it is, or when it will come back. But when it does, I will remember to lay my gratitude on thick. Without it, life is hard..