Photo courtesy of St. Patrick's Shamrock Company at http://www.realshamrock.com - a website where you can buy shamrock - jaypers I'll be getting mine out in the field, as usual!...and a twinkle in me eye,
I'm off to Tipperary in the morning!"
I wish - but, it is good that St. Patrick's Day falls on a Wednesday this year, as it gives me a chance to mitch off from teaching - no I mean take a well-earned rest and have a bit of family time.
I'm just surfacing from what has to have been my own worst winter of discontent: illness after illness, pain after pain, strange swellings and shrinkings, ultra-mood swings - it could be viewed as being funny, in that understated way that Irish women have, except that all the way along since last September I've remained undiagnosed - but I'm finally getting closer to a diagnosis! Progress indeed. I've had a colonoscopy (basically, a camera up me bum -unneeded, but apparently an elimination that was needed), and an OGD, both of which thankfully I was knocked out for (camera lowered into the tummy and small intestine). Nice, I suppose, to know that at least that part of me is okay and has been passed as fit. Wish the rest of me was :/
But it seems that the pains and the mood-swings and the awful, awful mind-numbing tiredness is down to wandering bits of endometrium; the lining of the womb.
You'd think that this stuff would stay put, where it belongs - but no, in some women it likes to go off and have an ould grow on other organs, causing 'adhesions' which are when one bit sticks to another - say your ovary to your womb, or your ovary to every other organ around it.
What happens every month as you go through the cycle is that these extraneous bits grow and shed, just like your womb would, except that there's nowhere for the shedding to go... which is why you get strange, regular pains (that were frankly the most excruciating thing I've ever been through - I'd much rather have had a baby, without any anaesthesia any day!). I'm far from having the whole thing sorted out, but it's nice to have a name for the symptoms - endometriosis - and not feel like I'm simply going doolally.
So, wherever you are, have a Happy St. Patrick's Day : enjoy the wearing of the green and have an ould pint of shtout for me!
