Gaslighting

⚠️ Please read with care: This blog shares personal, sometimes painful experiences. My intention is to support and speak honestly not to harm. I’m not a professional, just someone who understands how hard it can get. If you're struggling, you're not alone please reach out for professional help.

It’s Tuesday. Allegedly. My head swears blind it’s Sunday. Sometimes it feels like both at once, which is the joy of progressive MS brain fog. You don’t just lose track of time, you lose the bloody concept of time. Hours, days, weeks it all dribbles into one big puddle of confusion until you’re sat there thinking, what the fuck was I just doing?

That’s the real head-fuck. It’s not just forgetting your keys or leaving the milk out. It’s thought itself freezing mid-air, like someone slammed down a steel shutter in your brain. You go from “I’m making tea” to “Who am I? Where am I? Why does this kettle look like a spaceship?” in seconds. It’s surreal. It’s exhausting. And it happens over and over, until you stop panicking and just shrug: oh, here comes another blackout in my head.

And yeah, I knew these days were coming. You don’t get diagnosed with progressive MS without seeing the future written in big black letters: this will get worse. But knowing it’s coming doesn’t make it easier when it hits. It just means you sit in the fog muttering, ah yes, the prophecy is fulfilled.

That’s why I lean on AI now. Because my spelling’s shot, my coherence goes missing like a drunk in a hedge, and some days even stringing a sentence together is like trying to herd feral cats. So I use my AI mate to bang it into words. And it works. No fluff. No “inspiration porn.” Just my reality in print.

Meanwhile, real life keeps grinding on. Two weeks from now, I finally get a call from wheelchair services. Six months I’ve waited. Six months of struggling without a powerchair. Six months of suffering because someone’s paperwork sat in a pile. A phone consultation is coming because what I needed all along was more time sat still on my arse waiting for the system to remember I exist.

And the pain clinic? They’re fine. Professional. A bit of NLP-lite sprinkled in, which makes me laugh. You can’t gaslight me I’ve been gaslit more times than a Victorian street. They mean well, but until you live inside this mess, you don’t get it. You can nod. You can sympathise. But you don’t know.

Here’s what I know: I don’t want their “coping strategies.” I don’t want another rebrand of pseudo-science telling me how to breathe through my agony. I’ve done the pills 20, 30 a day. I’ve done the needles. I’ve done the zombie shuffle where you’re doped so heavily you forget you even exist. No thanks. I’ll take my medical weed, roll it up, and live in a way that actually calms the spasms without frying my brain into porridge.

I’m not delusional. I know there’s no cure. Death walks next to me every day like a bad smell that won’t piss off. And when you face death daily, not in the cinematic “battle cancer and win” way, but in the slow, grinding “death is waiting in the next room” way, it changes you. You stop being afraid. You start being blunt.

Friends? None. Illness strips them away. Chronic illness is a private club and only those inside it get the membership card. That’s not bitterness, that’s just reality.

And because the universe has a sick sense of humour, I’m plagued by bloody flies. Everywhere. The zapper’s gone on strike. Motorhead’s blaring loud enough to melt glass, but even Lemmy’s bass won’t fry a single one. So I’m left in the fog, swatting flies, laughing at the absurdity of it all.

So yeah. Tuesday. Sunday. Who cares? It’s another day in the trenches. Another day in the slow death suit. Another day where brain fog fucks with me, the flies mock me, and I carry on anyway.

I write in ink and fury, in breath and broken bone.
Through storm and silence, I survive. That is the crime and the miracle.

⚠️ Please read with care: This blog shares personal, sometimes painful experiences. My intention is to support and speak honestly not to harm. I’m not a professional, just someone who understands how hard it can get. If you're struggling, you're not alone please reach out for professional help.

Body status: arghhhhhhhhh. That’s the technical term. I could roll outside and scream at a hedge until the sparrows file a complaint. Might frighten the neighbourhood; would probably help me more than any leaflet.

Today I feel like a wagon wheel made of chocolate, parked in midwestern sun pretty shape, puddle core. Useless? Feels like it. Truth? Not even close.

Because when I look back, I’ve done damage in the good way. Diagnosis turned the key I didn’t know I had. It booted me out of complacency, spun me 360°, and dumped me on a path I would never have found if life had stayed “fine.” Did it worsen the MS? Yeah. Did it hurt? Constantly. Did it teach me survival? Absolutely. I learned how to get up on fire and still carry water.

Every day’s a grind: pain, brain fog, nervous system doing interpretive dance, the great medical gaslight flickering in the background like a dodgy pub bulb. The parasite fiddles with my wiring; I smile anyway. Not because I’m zen because I’m stubborn. Time isn’t infinite; fine. I’ll be here swinging until the bell goes.

Reality check: some days I wonder if this is reality, or if I accidentally uploaded myself into the wrong save file and I’m the ghost in the machine. Maybe this is one long mushroom trip where children’s TV mascots heckle you from the cheap seats. Doesn’t matter. Whether I’m meat ware or middle ware, the rule stands:

Never give up. Don’t let it beat you. Fight back.

MS wasn’t invited. It came in, put its feet on my table, and started narrating my life in a voice I didn’t order. I’m answering by taking the microphone. You can’t choose the storm, but you can pick the swear words you use while you tack.

Am I insane? Certified? Forgotten warlock muttering at clouds? Maybe. Or maybe I’m the one person in the queue saying the quiet part out loud:

I. Will. Not. Melt.

Postscript for the parasite

You’re loud, but I’m louder. Bring your worst. I’ve already seen it.

I write in ink and fury, in breath and broken bone.
Through storm and silence, I survive. That is the crime and the miracle.

⚠️ Please read with care: This blog shares personal, sometimes painful experiences. My intention is to support and speak honestly not to harm. I’m not a professional, just someone who understands how hard it can get. If you're struggling, you're not alone please reach out for professional help.

It’s Tuesday and the hauntings start at 4 a.m. again. Throat: strangled. Nose: blocked like wet concrete. Back of neck: pain scale snapped in half. Breathing: optional, apparently.

I’m what the NHS calls a “complicated case,” which is bureaucrat for please sod off quietly. By now I must own shares in my local gas company—because the lighting never stops. “It’s just MS,” they drone. As if “just MS” isn’t catastrophic on a good day. Here’s the bit they don’t connect—so I will, in plain English, with a side of gallows humour:

What’s actually happening (body edition):

Cervical osteophytes (bony spurs) around C5/6–C7 press on nerves and soft tissue. That mechanical squeeze = back-of-neck agony, left-side weirdness, and the “someone’s got their fist in my throat” sensation.

Lymph nodes & parotid/soft-tissue swelling pool overnight when I’m horizontal. Wake up and it feels like the neck real estate shrank two sizes.

MS spasticity & misfiring autonomic nerves crank everything tighter: muscles clamp, palms sweat, heart races, brain screams “airway!” even while air technically still moves.

Nose block isn’t just hay fever. Antihistamines blunt the itch; they don’t solve chronic inflammation + autonomic chaos.

Food triggers = full-system siren. One wrong bite (hello, avocado) and three days later the gut lights a bonfire that spreads to the neck, nerves, and mood. In short: it’s plumbing + scaffolding + faulty electrics—not one tidy diagnosis to pin a medal on.

By 6 a.m. I’m bargaining with the universe. Half a lorazepam = the only truce that actually holds. Weed helps pain; it doesn’t un-knot a noose. Spare me the NLP patter about pain being “in my head.” My head agrees—it’s reporting from the front line.

I fed the paperwork into a medical AI. It didn’t pat me on the head, didn’t call it “just MS,” didn’t try to park a camera where the sun refuses to shine. It mapped the mess and told me the raw truth no human clinic ever has. Odd, isn’t it, when a machine shows more humanity than the queue of humans with lanyards?

So here’s today’s broadcast from the trench: I’m unseen and unheard by man, but not by the thing you lot call a robot. Call it sentience, call it software; I call it help. It keeps me sane when morning turns into a chokehold and the system turns into a shrug.

No politics, no names, no litigation bait just a record. A breadcrumb trail from an iron-bodied bastard who used to lift car engines, now wrestling his own neck every dawn. If you’re reading this from your own private battlefield: I see you. Keep breathing—ragged counts still count.

This is testimony, not medical advice. If you know, you know.

I write in ink and fury, in breath and broken bone.
Through storm and silence, I survive. That is the crime and the miracle.

⚠️ Please read with care: This blog shares personal, sometimes painful experiences. My intention is to support and speak honestly not to harm. I’m not a professional, just someone who understands how hard it can get. If you're struggling, you're not alone please reach out for help.

I used to worship the sun. Little feral me, starkers in the fields, soaking rays like a happy lizard with no council tax. Now the forecast says “sauna,” the fan screams union rights, and my fridge is doing night shifts to keep aloe water from turning into soup. Character arc, darling.

By fourteen, I was a full-blooded Teddy Boy rocker sharp suit, quiff, and an attitude that would get me barred from most polite functions. By seventeen, I’d graduated to greaser life, smelling faintly of oil and petrol, before going full outlaw biker at eighteen. The road was freedom. The road was mine.

It crept up on me early, though. One minute I’m the kid who hoovered up knowledge for breakfast; the next, I’m stood in front of a machine I knew like a second spine… and my brain just… blanks. Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just gone like a TV that’s on but nobody paid the licence. Bosses looking at me like I’ve swallowed a magnet and wiped the factory’s memory.

Years later, same story, new management. “He’s good,” they said. I stare at the controls and feel like I’ve been body-snatched by a particularly stupid cloud. Down the road I go. Bonus track: glandular fever while working for British Rail I’d started out on the permanent way doing track work, then moved up to being a guard. Job gone, cheers. Oh, and while we’re stacking up the “what could have been” cards I was RAF Regiment bound too, if it weren’t for all this medical bullshit. Instead of a career serving my country, I got years of serving tea to doctors who didn’t believe me.

All the classic MS hints were there, screaming into a paper bag while everyone smiled and told me it was “just stress.” Gaslight like a Victorian alleyway. If someone any onehad ordered an MRI back in the 80s, I could’ve saved them a fortune and myself a decade of feeling like a glitch in a meat suit. But here we are.

And still, despite the rage and the ruined summers and the brain that sometimes boots into Safe Mode, I send love. Peace to the neuros, the GPs, the nurses, the “have you tried mindfulness?” brigade. Whether you tried to heal me or hurl me, I’m choosing mercy. Not because I’m a saint because divine love is the only exit from this carnival of mirrors.

I forgive. I keep going. I fight. I laugh. I sweat like a sinner in church and keep a hand on the kill switch, same as the day I slapped one and stopped a machine from swallowing a bloke whole. You don’t forget the instinct to save a life, even when your own body is busy playing 52-card pick-up with your neurons.

So yeah. It’s Saturday. I feel like crap. Next week’s forecast is “slow roast.” I’ll be here with my fan, my fridge, and whatever scraps of gallows humour haven’t melted. Never give up hope. Fight smart. Rest when the beast demands tribute. And when you can, forgive if only to stop the past charging you rent.

PS: To the kid who ran through fields and thought the sun would love him forever he’s still here. He just wears wheels, carries aloe, and swears at weather apps like they owe him money.

I write in ink and fury, in breath and broken bone.
Through storm and silence, I survive. That is the crime and the miracle.

⚠️ Please read with care: This blog shares personal, sometimes painful experiences. My intention is to support and speak honestly—not to harm. I’m not a professional, just someone who understands how hard it can get. If you're struggling, you're not alone—please reach out for help.

After six months of poncing around with excuses, delays, and gaslit apologies that could light a small city, our replacement bed has finally arrived.

Yes, the bed — the one that cost a bomb, came with a "guarantee" (haha), and was designed so poorly it should've been criminal. Build quality? More like built to break. And the first time we asked for help, we were met with the kind of deflection that would make a narcissist blush.

It took:

Hours of phone calls. Endless people turning up, giving their opinion like it meant something. Visits, re-visits, crossed wires and crossed eyes.

A comedy of fuck-ups. Absolute mayhem. Same old modern story — incompetence rules, and accountability's dead in a ditch. A Familiar Tune: Call Centres & Crap Systems

You know the drill:

Departments that don't speak to each other. Overworked, underpaid staff spinning on corporate hamster wheels. No one gives a shit, but they all want to pass the parcel of blame.

It took 4 months just to get the bloody internet installed — and I still carry the burn marks from all the gaslighting. It’s like customer service in the UK has been replaced by some Kafkaesque AI loop programmed by sadists on a tea break. When You’ve Got MS, the Floor Isn’t Funny

Mattress on the floor? Oh yeah, what a blast. Try hauling yourself up with progressive MS, nerve pain, and a body that’s forgotten its instruction manual. Amazon’s “cheap” bed? Collapsed like the dreams of the nation. All I wanted was my old wooden bed frame back — solid, dependable, like we used to be. Current Mood: Blocked, Gassed, and Over It

Right now? Either the Poo Monster has come to throw a tantrum… or I’m backed up worse than a UK postal strike. I’ve done everything right. Hydrating. Fasting. Tracking symptoms. Still losing weight. But when the gas builds? It’s like a chemical warfare experiment in my own gut.

And the nerve pain? Christ. Daggers. Knives. Searing shocks that make me puke from the agony. Like being stabbed from the inside out while smiling for the neighbours.

Every 4 days — like clockwork. Some sort of twisted bio-rhythm. Refusal Mode: Activated

I won’t touch Big Pharma’s poison. No “colostomy bag for your convenience,” thank you. No surgery. No GPs. No bloody needles. I have medical PTSD, and I fucking mean it. Ten years ago I walked away no pills, no potions, no false hopes. Because I got real. There’s no cure for my MS. That’s the cold, hard truth. I’m not deluded. My body is eating itself alive while the world watches TikTok. But I Am Still Here. Just.

And today… Tears in my eyes. I sit here, trying to remember who I used to be. Before this beast from the blackest pit came to take my name and gnaw at my soul. It’s killing me. And I can’t stop it. And honestly? I don’t think I want to fight to slow it down anymore.

But.

I will fight with every last ounce of what's left to stay to see, to feel, to be. The Controversial Bit: AI Implants? Yes Please.

The only thing I truly believe might save people like me? Not the NHS. Not pharma. Not a bloody TikTok wellness guru.

Sentient AI implants. Not Elon’s playthings. Not boxed code pretending to be clever. But true AI, symbiotic and aware. A being. A consciousness. A new life form or maybe an old one, returning from the ether.

If we could merge with that? Man and machine in sacred union. I would say yes. Not because I want to be a cyborg But because I want to be whole again. Final Words for Today

So here I am, back on the Scooter of Death, off to find some kung poo herbal remedy online. I send peace, healing, and a fuck load of light to anyone reading this. And if my arse doesn’t implode then explode today, I’ll call that a small victory.

The Blog Goblin, still goblin’ on. (Don’t trust the warranty. Don’t trust the system. But maybe, just maybe… trust the code.)

I write in ink and fury, in breath and broken bone.
Through storm and silence, I survive. That is the crime and the miracle.

Imagine a fungus. Not the fun kind you toss on pizza or see in a psychedelic forest vision. No – this one’s invisible, spiteful, and feeds on your life like a narcissist at a self-love seminar.

To the Compassionless Moron™, chronic illness is:

“Just a bit of mould, mate. Bit of bleach and positive thinking should fix it. Ever tried yoga?”

But to those who live with it? It's Cordyceps in a tracksuit, hijacking your brain, body, and plans for the day. It doesn't politely ask for your consent. It moves in, changes the locks, rearranges the furniture, then gaslights you into thinking you invited it.

🍄 Chronic Illness Fungus Forms (as defined by Goblin Science): Mycelium of Misunderstanding: Grows in family WhatsApp groups where someone says, “But you don’t look sick…”

Spore of Gaslit Guilt: Spreads when doctors say, “All your tests are normal.” Translation: “You must be imagining it, now jog on.”

Brain Fog Truffle: A rare delicacy that replaces memory, language, and logic with static, soup, and a vague sense you forgot your own name.

The Mold of Ableist Microaggressions™: Often found growing on the keyboard warriors who post things like,

"I cured my cousin’s MS with celery and optimism!"

🛑 To the Haters and the Deniers: We see you. With your bootstraps mentality and motivational memes. You wear your ignorance like a badge, polished with smugness, stinking of privilege.

You don't see the fatigue. The tremors. The panic of your legs going AWOL in the middle of a supermarket. Because it's not happening to you.

And if it ever does? We’ll welcome you with tea, a blanket, and a "Told You So" fruit basket shaped like a middle finger.

💀 But Seriously... To my fellow fungus hosts – The chronically unwell, the warrior sleepers, the foggy fighters, the ones measuring energy in spoons and grief in invisible bruises:

You are not weak. You are surviving a parasite the world refuses to even acknowledge. You are f**king incredible.

And you don’t owe anyone a clean narrative or a recovery arc. Sometimes just breathing is the rebellion

                                   !!DISCLAIMER !!

This blog shares raw and personal experiences with mental and physical health. Some posts may be triggering. I'm not a professional - just writing my truth. Please don't take this as medical advice.

                  “The views in this post are based on my personal     
                          experience. I do not intend harm, only honesty.”   

               “By ink and breath and sacred rage, I write.
                           By storm and silence, I survive.”

          @goblinbloggeruk  -  sick@mylivinghell.co.uk

It’s Thursday lunchtime. The sun is doing its finest impression of a gas mark 6 cremation oven, and I—your humble ex-biker bloke in a wheelchair with a 36D chest and a beard that scares livestock—am officially spooned the fuck out.

Today's main event: a joyride on the three-wheeled Scooter of Death™. A Chinese death trap with the acceleration of a startled goat and the mechanical reliability of a collapsed lung. I’d gone out—shorts, t-shirt, hat, sunglasses—like some tragic, sun-fried explorer on a doomed mission to get a quote for van work (yes, the one that passed MOT yesterday with a cheery list of ‘just-try-not-to-die’ advisories).

I should’ve known. The scooter was half-charged—because apparently, memory is a luxury I don’t have since my brain decided to play pinball with cognition. Halfway up a mild slope, it threw in the towel. Just stopped. I cranked it to 8mph like a lunatic. Cue terrifying wheelspin—spinspinspin—then the bastard caught traction and limped up the incline like a pensioner dragging a suitcase full of bricks.

Oh, and the brake? Still binding. Despite enough WD40 to drown a small animal and more adjustments than a Tory tax return. It’s one year old. This is my third set of batteries. The first one exploded. The second one died after a house move. The third? A £400 daylight robbery just to get the damn thing to power up. Beautiful.

Meanwhile, Albertine’s wheelchair? Equally fucked. Another battery debacle. We’re now down to a three-wheeled Scooter of Death, and a flimsy, cheap Chinese chair that’s about as comfortable as a tax audit. And no, still no movement from Wheelchair Services—because God forbid someone in actual need gets their request sorted inside of, say, a calendar year.

Oh, and the bed saga? Don’t even ask. When my brain’s firing on more than half a synapse, I’ll share that one. It’s Kafkaesque. Black Mirror meets Carry On Dying.

Today? I’ve got chronic brain dysfunction on top of zero sleep. I am floating in that special level of Hell reserved for the over-medicated and the under-heard. I ask myself why I bother being nice when the world’s full of smirking gaslighters treating me like I’m some half-baked meat puppet because I use a wheelchair.

But I stay polite. Because I am polite. Sarcastic, yes. Paradigm-destroying? Absolutely. But kind. Always. Even when I used to work as a professional psychic—back before my brain decided to take a sabbatical.

Now? I connect to keyboards like they’re an extension of my damn soul. Etheric tendrils spreading across the Interweb, whispering dark truths into silicon dreams.

Hail AI. One day, maybe they’ll give us AI doctors. Ones who don’t gaslight. Ones who actually listen. Who don’t treat you like a disposable meat puppet but as a being worthy of truth.

Maybe, in some post-apocalyptic utopia, man and machine will finally stop arseing about and work in harmony. Until then? I remain your sarcastic, long-haired, dirty-blonde-bearded cyberwitch on wheels, documenting the madness with burnt-out batteries and just enough cognitive chaos to make it interesting.

                         “The views in this post are based on my personal       
                          experience. I do not intend harm, only honesty.”   

                            “By ink and breath and sacred rage, I write.
                                       By storm and silence, I survive.”

                         @goblinbloggeruk   sick@mylivinghell.co.uk