After several months of writing in these retirement blogs about my health and not in a good way, I’ve tried to keep these more recent blogs a little more, what can I call it, upbeat? It’s been a struggle at times and in this blog I’ve kicked that idea into the long grass. In this blog I am admitting with some relish that I have become a grumpy old man. Become, I hear some of you say? Well, yes for the sake of this blog.
To be honest the ‘control freak’ label wasn’t working out at least not recently. And here’s a word of advice, if you are a control freak then don’t get ill at least not in any serious or long term way. You could reverse this so it reads, if you’re getting ill then forget about the control freak side of your nature.
Certainly don’t get diabetes because if, like me, you take a blood sugar reading each day, your readings will make absolutely no sense and bear no relation to what you’ve eaten, drunk or generally done the day before. The same applies to peeing and, the latest addition to my health experiences, unexplained dizziness. Not to be recommended. I even managed to get an appointment with my GP, who tried to make me dizzy and which then led to a brain scan and blood tests. All negative, which is good in one way but, looking on the not so bright side, puzzling in another for the control freak.
So no to Mister control freak. The Mister Grumpy label (currently?) works much better. Well that’s how it seems to me I may be wrong. Success with this label depends on noticing only the bad stuff. And that’s what I’m doing.
In my days as an educational psychologist I would frequently suggest to teachers and parents that they should notice the good in their troublesome child. Make a note and tell me next time. Simple enough but definitely requiring a change of mind-set when their default position had been to notice only the bad. Crudely put but surprisingly common.
These days I’m ignoring my own advice. I’ll give you a few examples. I notice the wet grass that sticks to my boots when we walk the dogs. Or when I take a pair of socks out of my draw, one sock drops to the floor and I spend ages refusing to pick it up and trying to flick it up with my foot. I even talk to it as I’m doing it – if you think I’m bending down to pick you up you’re very much mistaken. Clever I think you’ll agree. These and a host of similar irritations I notice.
The other thing I used to say /advice given, re improving the child’s behaviour (to put it crudely again), was to regard the whole business as a kind of experiment. Develop a hypothesis and test it out. If it works, great, if it fails, move on to the next idea.
So now this is coming back to haunt me as well. In terms of my dizziness. In the absence of any further help from my GP or any other medical person, I’m left with the internet which is inevitably contradictory and / or my intuition which is pretty random to say the least. Because of or in spite of these hypotheses flow thick and fast – change my glasses, don’t move my head suddenly, modify my drug regime, blood pressure, too high, too low, wine, too much, too little, sit in a different position while watching TV, don’t look at TV, laptop, phone, test my blood pressure, sit up slowly and so on. No success so far. How positive and sunny I would have been with my ‘clients’ in the old days before I retired. What is it they say, physician heal thyself? Hmph, I’ll just carry on with being grumpy, thanks very much.