Middle aged woman on a bike
I don’t know what caused my latest flare up, but once it starts it's a spiralling cycle of feeling dreadful, then feeling better, then a sudden urge to stay close to the bathroom, and then the inevitable hopelessness in knowing that you have little control over what happens when you’re away from your home unless you starve yourself. This is what living with IBD looks like…..
Let me tell you about mental health issues. I’m not talking about the kind of issues that are visible, or the kind of issues that cause alarm with your friends and family. Like many disabilities a lot of mental health issues can be invisible. Millions of people suffer daily with what seem to them to be relatively minor mental health issues. Issues that cause them problems with relationships. Issues that cause them anxiety. Issues that don’t allow them to appreciate their own self-worth. Issues that in isolation don’t really appear anything to be concerned about....
I knew I needed to make sure that I didn’t scrimp on my sleep on this trip, but despite being on the road for over 16 hours, and riding almost 200 miles the day before, I was wide awake when I arrived at my hotel room. I scattered my belongings around the room, thought about my day,
Today is the day I sail to the Netherlands, for the biggest ride of my life.....except it’s not. No passenger ships are sailing, there is no race in the Netherlands or anywhere. I thought I was ok with this.....
Today was much like yesterday, but without a cream team, or a round of applause for the NHS. However, the health workers and support staff were reporting back today just how touched they were that their sacrifices were so appreciated by the population as a whole. Even royalty and the PM & Chancellor joined in with the applause. The NHS will certainly be earning our praise over the next few weeks, as the death toll from this indiscriminate virus rises daily, and it seems inevitable that we will be practicing social distancing in one form or another for considerably longer than the initial 3 weeks set in place.
As the country starts to get to grips with the first full day of lockdown, people are coming to terms with this new way of living in their own way......
But even better than all the community sharing is the fact that people are just trying to cheer each other up. They've stopped moaning about loo roll hoarders and started putting their children's rainbow pictures in their windows