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Wednesday 15 August 2018

A balloon and a bottle of whiskey

So today is my birthday.
It's also the birthday of the Princess Royal, Napoleon, Lawrence of Arabia and it's the official death day of the Virgin Mary. Honest. Catholic feast of the Assumption.
I'm still feeling shitty. Had counselling earlier which stirred up a lot of stuff. Then went over to spend time with foal. Which made me realise the gaping wound in my heart when she isn't there. Sparrow I'm the mead hall again.
But anyway today I tried to do a Thing.
My parents gave me some Birthday Money. Instead of using it to buy essentials like say a good Islay single malt ( anyone willing to send me a bottle of Bowmore or Caol Isla please get in touch  😊) I thought maybe Sparkly would lure me from the couch nest.
So using the power of Amazon I ordered Sparkly.
Behold.

This particular Sparkly is an automated pressure cooker/ rice cooker / slow cooker that you just plug in.
He is now called Duke Nukem.

So I cooked with him because Sparkly must be tested. It's the law.

So the following is my recipe for Cajun Style Lamb Shank.
Yes I know it should probably be alligator.  But I live in Suffolk. Very few alligators and there's not enough meat on a common sand lizard.

Ingredients

2 lamb shanks
One onion (chopped)
12 mushrooms (sliced)
12 baby corn cobs (snapped to bite size
1 cup of black beans (dried or canned. If canned wash off the goo. If dried I soak by pouring boiling water on from the kettle then leaving it for 20 min.  You can use them without soaking but I think it's a better texture if soaked)
1oz dried wild mushrooms ( yes ounce. Come to peace with it.)
1 cup Arborio rice
5 tbs Black Treacle ( molasses to our American cousins in the colonies)
3 inches of fresh ginger (yes inches. Live with it)
2 cloves of garlic.
I tsp celery seed
2 tsp black peppercorns
2tsp coriander seed
2 tbs smoked paprika
3 tbs sweet paprika
1 star of star anise
1 tsp salt
1 cup tomato juice
3 tbs tomato puree
500ml vegetable stock.
A little olive oil to fry.

Method

Grind all the dry spices and salt to a file powder then clean out mortar and set aside. Peel ginger using a teaspoon handle (trust mu the skin is very easy to scrape of) and peel garlic by crushing with a knife edge (again trust me. Push down till you hear a pop. The skin just slides off.). Grind garlic and ginger together to form a paste. If it's taking too long add a little sugar it draws out the liquid.
OK here we go.
Heat a pan and add olive oil. When it's hot brown the shanks all round then put on a plate. When cool is rub all over with dry spice mix then set aside.
Add onion to the hot pan. When onion is translucent add fresh mushrooms and cook down to get all the liquid out of it. Then add the garlic and ginger. Cook for 2 minutes then stir in the dry spice mix and remove from heat. Tip this into your pressure cooker. (If using a casserole dish you need an oven at 140°C and the cooking time is 4 hrs. Keep an eye on the liquid.)
Transfer the lamb shanks onto the onion bed. Add the rice and beans and dried mushrooms and corn to the pressure cooker.(If you can find some you can add some okra too. It adds a lot to the sauce.)
Heat the pan you fried things in up and tip in the stock. Make sure you scrape the bottom to get all the flavour off. Stir in the treacle and the tomato puree and tomato juice. Mix well.
Tip into the pressure cooker.
Heat it up and cook under pressure for 45 minutes.
It's really yummy. Look.

So yes Sparkly got me off the sofa briefly.
Duke is lovely
Doubt it will last.
You never know.
Anhedonia and isolation and apathy are crippling.
Oh and I fainted and injured my left glenohumeral the other day. I'm strongly suspecting it's an unreduced subluxation. It feels funny.
Dysautonomia caused it.
Idiopathic bradycardia when I'm sleepy. Not enough blood to run brain.
But it should feel better by now. I've got limited usage still.
Time will tell.

Try the lamb. It's really yummy.

Wednesday 8 August 2018

The mad horse in the attic.

It's been a while.

That's an understatement. It's been ages.

And much has happened. A few months ago I would have put stuff on Twitter but...well I might get around to that.

But to update.

A couple of years ago my sternoclavicular joint failed. It's a crappy joint to fix. Finding a surgeon to fix it was a struggle. Eventually I found the excellent Simon Lambert at UCLH and finally got repair surgery done.

That's the bare bones physically. But even there details are lacking. For instance in my first surgery they repaired the joint but had to cut my clavicle into 3 parts then plate it together because my clavicle was deformed. Always had been. It's why it levered the joint out.

I want to reach out here to my secondary school PE teacher Mr Lewis and say that I was fucking right when I told you I couldn't put my shoulders back and stand like a man. You twat.

The morning I was discharged I got out of bed and felt something go ping. Followed by a wave of pain at a 10 on the arbitrary scale. And inability to coordinate my finger movement on the left. So I told the junior surgeon discharging me there was an issue and I needed an x ray. The patronising little shit argued 20 minutes before ordering one 'just to make you feel better'.
News Flash. People with EDS are hyper conscious of body states because we do an inventory every morning of what dislocated overnight before we dare move. I know when something ain't right.
5 minutes after the x ray Mr Lambert is in my room apologising profusely and saying that I was right. The plate had come loose. He had no idea why. So I had to schedule another operation to repair it.
I still went home. With a double broken clavicle.  Due to winter flu I had to wait 2 months for the next op. This time they went in with 3 heavy plates. And it held.
It feels like the Forth Bridge and presses on my windpipe a bit. But that bone is going nowhere.
They also did a biopsy and found the reason. You guessed. My fucking b list body not only can't grow collagen it also fucks up bone. My clavicle had fibrous displasia which means that the screws couldn't hold. Yet another gift from my genome.
But I skipped the part where I spent 2 months on morphine with a broken clavicle.
Ouch.
So op 2 goes well. Eventually the plates will have to come out. Then of course I had to go home to my parents to convalesce. I was pretty helpless.
That's when this gets darker.

I'm an aspie. We aren't social. We need quiet. We need space. We need to do our own thing.

My parents aren't aspies. They want to chat. Be social. Join in. They think I need that. I couldn't be alone. Mum would walk into my bedroom without knocking.  If I went into a room to read one of them would follow and talk at me endlessly. One day I timed 9 hours of one sided blather from them. As I healed physically my mind folded in on itself. I stopped getting better and started withdrawing. I started drinking even more heavily.

I lay on a sofa and read. And that was all.
I used twitter as a way of staying sane but then I misread a situation spectacularly when drunk and behaved disgracefully in a chat with an old friend. So I decided twitter was unsafe for me to use. The risk to others was too much. So even that stopped.

My brother could see what was happening and kept asking when I was leaving. But when this was raised Dad said we could not afford for me to move back. As I have no income no benefits and depend on my parents for cash I had no response. I was a prisoner.

Salvation came in an odd way. My psychiatrist delisted me as I had been away so long. Suddenly Dad found the money and I was moving back. Just like that.

I suspect he had it all along but just enjoyed me being there. It was killing me but hey.

So now I'm back but so damaged I can barely function. I'm working through the beauracracy with the psychiatrist. He is treating me like a new patient as per regs. I have lost my trusted care coordinator and have a new one I don't know. It's arduous.

The psychiatrist asked me how I was.
I told him that actually I was clinically dead. I do not socialise. I don't play the guitar any more. I don't do origami.  I only leave the house to get food or for appointments. I no longer cook. I don't play video games.
I'm dead and buried. I just seem to breathe a bit too much.

So that's where I am.

I don't recommend it.