I spent the morning in the hospital, getting my iron-IV. My heamoglobin levels have dropped slowly since surgery and my iron supply has fallen well below normal levels. This probably plays some part in my ongoing fatigue and my doctor decided that instead of pills, I'd get two iron IVs. Today I had my first, next week the second.

I expected to have to wait a while and brought my drawing book, and then drew the IV several times.

I've drawn my IVs before, once when I had to get a CT-scan for my lungs (in the beginning of getting ill) and then when I had surgery and they had to give me a new one every two or three days because it kept clogging up.

I've had a hard time trying to get into some form of stability. I had a bad cold after Christmas and I thought it went away, but it came back. Whenever I feel ill / weak, eating doesn't go well either, which in turn makes me more weak and causes highly undesirable weight-loss. I take my (many many) vitamins and take my medication, and make my food and try to handle it all. Unfortunately, I haven't felt happy or stable for quite a while.

I don't seem to have the energy to do much, fun or needed, which results in TG doing my laundry, which makes me feel bad for not doing it myself. I do want to do fun stuff, but I feel so (physically) tired and my head just doesn't want to work straight. I so very badly want to do fun stuff and crochet and draw and be creative, but most of the time it feels like the button for my creative juices got stuck on 'off' and I don't know how to turn it on again. It makes me sad.

I've comforted myself by watching other people's drawings and bursts of creativity, and sort of feeding on that. I especially look forward to Michael Nobbs' 4th Beany and have splurged a little on some new crochet-books (I only had a twenty year old one...). I need to re-think my attempts to get some sort of schedule, I think I've based it too much on my old ideas of myself. I need to stop hanging on to the idea that I can actually do all those things I could do, before. I need to start over with many things, basically starting them at '0' again and see how far I can get.

I miss bread and pasta etc. I found gluten-free pasta and bread, but it just doesn't taste the same. The gluten-free baguettes however did work very well in my cheese fondue (I'll get some more). I've also eaten a lot of roasted vegetables, which go down extremely well, and I rarely feel ill after eating them and they taste good (big win). I haven't yet figured out how to optimise my eating, and I wish I could use the freezer more for that but somehow, that hasn't worked out so far. One of these days I'll get it though.

In the meantime, there's always tea. Tea fixes everything.

I got released from the hospital about three weeks ago and have stayed at my parents for a while. Right now I still have a lot of recovering to do, and I haven't drawn as much as I wanted to. I did however make this one drawing in the hospital when my IV once again got shifted from one arm to the other. All went well, no complications during surgery and only a minor pneumonia after (which caused no problems). I went home after 9 days with a feedingtube still attached. Recovery will take time, hopefully I can spent much of it drawing.