In which the Rodent discusses meal planning and its online profile.

Look for Supermouse The Rodent, migraine on Google and what you get is myLivejournal. There's no trace of this blog at all. To be honest, that's the way I prefer it. It's just a mild nuisance when I am on a borrowed computer and don't have my bookmarks to hand.
My Livejournal is more or less a report to my friends of everything I've been up to. This blog is a report to myself and possibly medics about how my migraines and ME and other health issues are affecting me. It's much duller, on the whole, but neither are exciting.

Today I want to talk about food, meal planning and how migraines affect what I eat.

On Tuesday I baked trout stuffed with a mixture of sweet potato (which should be precooked), lemon grass paste, ginger paste (very little, but enough) and spring onion. I was intending to cook mackerel, but in my un-drugged addledness accidentally clicked the (much more expensive) 'responsibly raised' trout from some Lord's lake.

It was very nice. It was also three times the price of the meal I'd intended to have.

Migraines make it hard to budget. It's harder to plan a journey properly, because I get confused about when things are, what date is 'now' and what day goes with which date. Even with a calendar in front of my, I can get puzzled. It also makes it hard to work out where to get buses, so I end up with taxis a lot of the time out of a need not to have to think too hard. And, as above, they complicate meal planning.

ME does similar but with extra problems on top. You have the difficulty of planning, and the additional joy of not knowing whether or not you're going to be able to cook the food you've bought. Fresh trout looks very pretty in the fridge, but what if you then are exhausted from putting the shopping away, and can't cook it before it goes off? I eat more fresh food now, just because I can usually rely on myself to be able to cook, for example, fresh meat before it goes green and smelly. I use less tinned milk and tinned fruit. I cook proper meals and then have the energy to freeze portions.

Just as being rich lets people save money that the poor can't (tax rebates, bulk buying, better quality therefore longer-lasting goods), being full of energy lets me save energy. I can cook a huge meal and freeze it later in the same day or the next morning. I've been able to clean up the kitchen right away, so I don't have to scrub off dried-off gunk before I start portioning things out. The kitchen is tidy, so I can find the pen and the freezer containers.

The payoff is that for a while after a cooking session, I can just throw in a home-made frozen meal, nuke it for five-and-a-half minutes and know I've got good food going. I can use the getting-food-ready energy on other things, which might make it even easier next time as I shop for new ingredients and plant food plants so I can pick my own. And, of course, I save money too, money I can spend on taxis.

If I could plan food out properly, I'd save even more. I think, once the Tramadol is properly back in my system, I'll be more able to. I don't think it's worth taking a break of more than three days, just because the migraines then take such a hold that I spend days drugged up but no better off thinking-wise.

Last night, newly back on painkillers, I was in terrible pain and so the planned painting session didn't happen, but I did get to socialise and the planning ability was there, in that I knew it was Wednesday and I knew that Wednesday, therefore this day, was art day. I'd even managed to buy a vinyl table cloth for art, and remember I'd bought it, and put it out before the evening began. I'm quite pleased with the level of joined-up-thinking this implies. I am just greedy and want to be able to apply it to meals.

Tonight's dinner is tinned soup and Matteson's U-shaped sausage. The delicious taste of planning failure.

In which the Rodent lives the life better stoned.

The first day of Tramadol did not go well, because I slept badly and then got woken up several times an hour and a half apart each time by poor well-meaning Pol. This left me wiped out on Sunday. I got poor-quality sleep in the afternoon and of course stayed awake all night. Then I had to get up to host Ruthi (a person of much, much shininess). My first painkiller of the day was HFCC again, but, on being reminded I have Tramadol as an option, I took one tonight.

The headache's still there but I can think clearly through it and the pain is somehow ignorable. I have no idea why opiates help me the way they do. They clearly do help, but crivvens if I can see why. I'm not addicted to them and every doctor going says they don't help alleviated migraine symptoms, so why do they leave me able to follow thoughts in a straight line?

To give an example, just now before finally dropping off, I've finished the process of getting back on MSN and Skype and I've uploaded my preferred icon, which will end up here when I find out how to do things with pictures. Part of the uploading involved installing an image converter and using it to convert a gif to a bmp. I kept getting it wrong, which is the sort of thing which makes my migraines spike massively, normally. Trying to problem solve and stay on-task like that is very, very hard with a migraine. Just now I have a humdinger but I've still done all that and even remembered to blog before I go to sleep.

The five months of unremitting pain have left me without any fear of the worst migraines can throw at me painwise, so in a good world I won't get into a despair spiral when the headache gets sore. Tramadol being a very effective painkiller, I think I'll notice the pain more when it wears off, an effect I'd seen already with cocodamol. I was convinced that Tramadol had helped me think more clearly back in late 2006/early 2007, during which time I learned a good chunk of Spanish, moved to Seville for several months, found a good (very good) hostel as a temporary measure (Hostel Oasis in Seville is a very, very good place), rented a flat and dealt with flights back to the UK (although I did need help with booking a train). I wasn't happy, and I was too unreliable to be fit to work, but I was functional. Unhappy, in pain but still feeling like a person.

Contrast to my time without, which was spent more or less doing nothing. Forgive the self-pitying tone here, but it was a crappy second half to the year. My social life dwindled because I couldn't stand to see anyone and, worse, can't remember from one conversation to the next what has been discussed. Trying to concentrate to remember is a migraine spike, usually. Not right now, when drugged on Tramadol, but usually. My old skills all fell away and I lost the ability to learn new things. I tried to plan a Solstice meal and couldn't, until I started back on cocodamol.

Magical opiates allow me to think, reason, remember and plan. I can without, but such cognitive efforts are always fragmentary and disordered. I lose the thread of what I am trying to do and the inevitable frustration that engenders causes a small vicious circle of pain until I drop what I was trying to do and go back to lalala butterflies again.

It was a pity that the first day left me an insomniac wreck, but I'll see how it goes from here.
It's 2am, later than I planned on sleeping, but it's still within my definition of 'night' since I am generally a 3am-11am sleeper when healthy. I think I can drop off and even if I don't, there are strict instructions left to let me sleep it out tomorrow so I can get my head straight. Pain is base five, spiking eight.