This relapse has been going solid for a year now, and recently it’s got even worse. At the moment I can’t get out of the house most days – I did manage a trip into town last week for essential supplies, but that has laid me up since – in fact, most days it is as much as I can do to get dressed, flop on the sofa and watch rubbish TV, maybe read a bit if I’m not feeling so bad, and make myself a bite to eat (as in ‘heat up a ready meal’) twice a day. This is getting really distressing, and I can’t see an end to it at the moment. I do believe that I will get better – I’ve been through this cycle before, but not for so long and so badly, so it is difficult to believe it in experience at the moment. My sister popped round this morning to take me to a garden centre for a cup of coffee and a chat, but even that proved too much for me – by the time I’d walked the 20 yards to her car I was exhausted, and I couldn’t cope with conversation – hard to take in what she was saying, and keep up with the pace, and lots of things she said upset me. This is something else which kicks in when symptoms are really bad, emotional lability, so that you can’t control how you feel, don’t know how you’re going to feel from one moment to the next, and get upset about all sorts of things. I remember once I was leant a DVD boxed set of the Blue Planet, the David Attenborough series about the seas, to while away the hours I was stuck on the sofa, but I had to switch it off because seeing fish being eaten was making me cry. And that’s how I’m feeling at the moment. I’ve been on the verge of tears all day, but I don’t have the strength to actually cry, plus I’ve got nothing really to cry about, it’s just a formless feeling inside me. Have just had a quick chat with my lover – even that was difficult because it’s difficult to hold conversation, I can’t think of things to say and can’t express the things I do want to say or how I feel, but she is being amazingly understanding, and it was lovely just to hear her voice for a few minutes. Oh, I do hope this relapse starts to lift very soon, I’m struggling to keep going at the moment.