Bad Blind Day

Hi lovlies, 

I want to talk a little today about those bad days we can have. You know the ones, you wake up late, you drop a pint of milk on the kitchen floor, you miss your bus and when you finally get to work you realise your shirt is on inside out. Yes those days where you wish you could turn back time, crawl back into bed and hide form the world. Well as a blind or visually impaired person we have those days to with an extra topping of sight related disasters. Let me explain it a little more.

My bad blind day started with me waking to my Charles Bonnie Syndrome (see my blog post on this condition here). I woke to intense colours and shapes, which quickly turned into patch work of zombie faces. I woke with a splitting headache. Getting out of bed I walked to the toilet and with not being fully awake as I woke late and needed to get Dylan ready for school. I walked straight into the door frame of my bedroom and fell to the floor. I mean who would put a door frame there!!! Just kidding! It is in these moments that you realise how much you depend on your senses and good sleep in order to strengthen them. 

As you can imagine the morning went on but with a haze of activity. My uncle kindly helps me with the school run and on a morning like this I have never been more grateful. So, at this point I want to curl up back in bed but I have things to do. I press on with my emails and social media updates, only to have a fight with my laptop and phone. My laptop of course, chose today to start playing up. I promise it’s not to do with the operating system updates I have been putting off for a month! 

I sit and have a break, sitting in a dark room hoping this will help with my CBS. It did help the headache, but them dam zombies, now with fangs won’t go away today! 

…and so I push on….

I start the dinner with help from my little label reading assistant who is named Dylan. We spend time together cooking but I knock over the jug of boiling water onto the floor. Narrowly missing my feet but still splashing me. Dylan was shocked but helped me get ice and looked after me perfectly. We finished the dinner with the help from Steve. 

Finally, I got to sit and chill out watching a little tv. Unfortunately all I could focus on was the hillioucinations from the CBS as by now they were bright and very intense, even when I shut my eyes. All I want at this point is to sleep and get this bad day behind me. The only way from experience at this point is to have a hot bath, a cup of herbal sleepy tea get my wave music on and allow it all to go away as I drift to sleep. I am longing for this day to be put to rest as tomorrow is another. 

As you can see from the running events of my bad blind day there is a mixture of regular and blind related incidents to contribute to the bad day. It is those challenging things that arise from my disability that I have started to realise more, and starting to learn to accept them. I believe that once that dice has rolled on that bad day the best thing to do is to just roll with the punches as it won’t stay like that and I always learn from those situations. 

For example I set two alarms now and allow myself at least 10 minutes to sit up and come around. Allow my senses to awaken before I walk out of the bedroom. When my CBS is that bad, I am learning not to push myself to carry on and instead to learn to take the time out even if it’s 30 minutes in the day to relax and maybe do some meditation or just have a cup of tea and sit down to allow my body and mind to calm down. 

When you are in that bad, anxious, frustrating place it is always good to feel it but to also be kind to yourself whilst you do. If you allow this to happen, I have found that the next day is always a better one. We have bad and good situations in life it I have found that it is how you hold these and how you move on from them that matters, not the thing so much itself. 

These are all my own thoughts and experiences. I don’t wish to dismiss anyone through my stories. I just hope it might give you another way to look at things. Thank you for reading and remember next time you have that bad day or feeling it coming on, just ride the wave and it may not be as bad as you think, and you will get through it a little easier. 

Take care and show yourself love

Nina xx