I was sleepy all day yesterday. I kept uncharacteristically yawning, and by 6.30 I just wanted to go to sleep. I got helped into bed, tried to stay awake but gave up by 8.30 and was asleep.

I woke up at 3.30am and couldn’t go back to sleep. Every time I thought I was nodding off a leg would jerk ( in a way that hasn’t happened for a long time ). I did sleep, I think at about 7.15 though, just about at the time when Gawain came in to start my day, so he woke me up. I was aware that I felt negatively towards him, and critical, for absolutely no reason. I felt impatient and had no urge to chat as I normally do.

It’s been about 2 and a half years since I’ve definitely had a Urine Tract Infection, so I’d forgotten the effects and symptoms. The penny dropped however when I saw the colour of my urine and that it had filaments floating in it. Unlike years ago, I now keep a course of antibiotics at all times, that I can start when I suspect I have one, which then stops the UTI from worsening, but before I’d have to wait a few days for a GP appointment that was just hard to even get to, have a test, which took a few days, whilst the UTI became entrenched in me, and eventually about 6 days after it had started I’d begin the treatment. It would be 3 days before I started to recover at all, so all in all at least a week of being irrational, depressed, and paranoid, during which time any interactions with people would definitely be affected negatively ( as in I would be anything varying from sullen to unpleasant, and always negative ). When you have dementia or have a spinal cord injury ( and I’m sure other things too ) UTI’s affect you in a different way from when you are ‘ normal ‘. We 2 groups of people are mentally adversely affected whereas ‘ normal people ‘ aren’t in the same way.

Between 2014 and 2016 I had UTI’s probably half of the time. One was either starting, I had one raging, or I was coming out of one. I would have maybe a week between infections, where I’d be merely depressed as hell about being paralysed. The UTI time I’d be paralysed, as depressed as hell, plus paranoid and irrational.

As I write this, thanks to the double dosage tablets I’ve taken, I already feel myself more or less, thank God.

I can’t go back in time and change anything, and things happen that are irreversible. I do know that the best people rode the storm with me though, and those that weren’t strong enough were either swept away, or abandoned ship.

Survival of the fittest, and that’s the natural way of things.