Sickness is not a choice

So here I 'am back again, just being busy with writing my last PhD reports. You could say it's more wrestling than writing and time slips through my fingers while thinking and rethinking my words at paper, sorry... at the screen. But nonetheless every time as I did some work, how little it may be at the end of the day, I feel still somehow satisfied  about starting this adventure. It gave me a lot of pleasures and new insights. But since last weeks this adventure has been stopped rather in a rough way and unexpected. But I want first come  back on  last theme: my health!

Those who have read some of my earlier blogs know that I wrote some time about how I have experienced being sick for a long time, and that I felt some uneasiness about my health while I officially had recovered. Now I realize it is my condition that did worry me, more precisely the actual state of my condition. And with that condition I mean my total state of mind and physical performance. Before getting ill I ran three times a week for one and half hour, easily. I felt rather strong and sure about the things I did in my work, my research and in private life. But now for a long time I had these strange varying  moods: sometimes not being capable to concentrate on one object, or I started with (too) many different things at one time. Because my memory wasn't at his best I needed more time to do the things I had to do. To compensate this I spent more time to my work and my research, making long days and weeks. Looking back now I was rather on my way to a nice big burnout. In the meanwhile I saw my extra work time of my sponsor slipping away.

And so it went on for another year and September 2016 my free time was over. I got back in my old job of vocational expert during four days a week. From that time on I had to do my PhD writing in my own free time. But fate had other plans with me. At the end of that September month my mother in law died at the age of 89. Not totally unexpected because of her state of health and her age. But after the alarming call of the physician she died in two days. So the shock was rather big. In November my own mother was diagnosed with the beginning of the Alzheimer disease. So now I landed in the land of care and bureaucracy. Not a very successful combination I can tell.  And in between these tragic moments we had a serious renovation in our house.

So I planned a stop until January to resume then my research activities... fighting against some underlying tiredness. But fate had again other plans: in June 2017 my mother was suddenly taken to hospital. She did loss a lot of blood and had a cardiac arrhythmia. She recovered rather soon despite her age of 92 years, but my brother and I were from that moment in a constant alarm state of mind. My mother is now 94 years of age and we are very busy with caring for her while Alzheimer more and more power gets over her.