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Friday 13th March 2026 - The Ellyllons Have Taken Over

Photograph taken from above of MrsVark lying on a grey sofa, wrapped in a mustard yellow fleece blanket, cuddling MykaVark, a grey Maine Coon cat. She's wearing a striped headwrap in brown, orange, and cream tones, and is gazing down at Jasper with a soft, affectionate expression. Myka looks entirely unbothered by the whole arrangement, as is traditional.
@theaardvark

💜 The Ellyllons Have Properly Lost the Plot

Right. So. full relapse. We're doing this.

I say "doing this" loosely, because actually doing anything right now is... well. Not happening. The Ellyllons have absolutely hung up on me. Every single one of them — the pain ones, the fatigue ones, the ones responsible for sending coherent signals to my actual eyeballs — has collectively downed tools and walked out—selfish little gits.

So this post has been typed. One. Finger. At a time.

Every letter shoots pain up my arm and straight through to my collarbone. My vision is doing its best impression of a watercolour left out in the rain. And my speech — ah yes, my speech — has buggered off entirely, which is, as you can imagine, a whole extra layer of fun.

The tinnitus today is… something else. There are no words for the noise in my head. Well, there probably are, but I can't access them right now because my brain has apparently gone on holiday without telling me. Somewhere quiet, I assume, unlike the inside of my skull.

😪 Two Years. Still, little Treatment.

I've been sitting with this for two years now. Two years of FND, ME/CFS and fibromyalgia doing their worst. Two years of waiting, chasing, advocating, exhausting myself explaining to people why I can't just "push through it."

And days like today, I won't lie to you — it feels like I'm going backwards. Not metaphorically. Literally. The things I could do six months ago feel very far away from where I'm lying right now.

That's a hard thing to admit. I don't do self-pity easily. But I also promised myself this space would be honest, and honest means saying: today is really, really shit. And that's allowed.

🤖 Paul's Genius (I will never tell him I said that)

Now. The only reason this blog post exists at all today is Paul.

Because that brilliant, purple-bearded, quietly-insufferable man has sorted out a way for me to get words still out even when speech goes, and my fingers are staging their own little industrial action. He's set up a system that means I can dictate, tap, poke — whatever I can manage on any given day

#WheelyHappyDays #KOKO #FND #MECFS #Fibromyalgia #SpoonieLife #ChronicIllness #InvisibleIllness #BurntwoodSpoonies #Relapse #WheelchairLife #MentalHealthMatters #ItsOkayToNotBeOkay #Burntwood #Lichfield #Staffordshire