Avoiding What You Should Be Doing

Today has involved a lot of homework avoidance. I’m in the last stretch of my Masters’, and am pretty much down to doing a dissertation and then I’m done. I’ve submitted the research proposal, have had feedback from the professor, which I have completely ignored for almost a month. I’ve just had too much going lately. I should have spent my day in today sorting it, but avoided it by doing other mundane tasks like dusting, making a loaf of bread in the bread machine, making breadcrumbs with the ends of old loaves, making beef cobbler in the slow cooker (recipe to follow, eventually), playing with Lego (you kind of have to), cleaning the bathroom (true homework avoidance) and defrosting the freezer.

Why am I telling you this? Well, following up on the last post about Raynaud’s, if there be anything in day-to-day life that brings on a nasty Raynaud’s attack, it’s dealing with anything around freezers. The freezer wasn’t totally frosted over, but was getting enough so that every time I pulled the drawers out, I left a trail of frost across the kitchen floor. Time for it to be done.

Yes, I have seen, and defrosted far worse than this in my time too.

Now, I’m not one to go hacking away at the freezer; I’m a firm believer in the "put a pot of boiling water in there and the laws of physics take its course" method of defrosting freezers. So, in theory, I shouldn't have my hands in the ice much. But the problem isn’t the ice, it’s the freaking cold water that’s left after the ice melts! As much as I use another bowl to catch the water, a lot of it has a nasty habit of running right down the back and under the washing up bowl on water catchind duty. So I have to mop it up, and this is what my hand looked like halfway through.

Just looks red and wet to you? Believe me, it bloody hurt!

This is what Raynaud’s looks like just before the fingers turn completely white. And believe me, it bloody well hurts!! I could barely move my fingers just after I took this photo, which made eating lunch a bit of an adventure. And it took HOURS for them to warm up. Glad that I don’t have to do this task too often.

When I defrost the freezer, I put everything in my big camping cool box while I do the job. As it’s connected to the fridge, I have to move of the fridge contents too. And while I was packing the last bits into the cool box, I had a sudden horrible realisation. What the hell was I going to do with the Humira?!

Humira has to be kept between 2-5C. HAS TO. It’s not like insulin which needs to be kept cool, it has to be in the fridge. Period. It can come out of the fridge and warm up to room temperature for a while, but once its warmed up (and you want to before you use it. It’s bloody painful injection anyway, but it is so so much worse when it’s cold!!), you need to be using it soon. What you really can’t do is have it fluctuate in temperature. It’s either cold or it’s about to be used. And it can never be frozen. EVER!! And I have a cool box full of very frozen things. I just had a delivery last week, so between that the one dose I still had, and the delivery, I had £2500 worth of medication that could go very wrong if its kept too long next to anything too cold. Shit.

£2500 of NHS money nestled between smoked ham, tortellini and lemon sorbet

I managed to get around this by doing some creative rearranging in the cool box to try to keep everything fridge-y on one side and everything frozen-y on the other (tried), but it only occurred to me while I was doing this that every other time I had defrosted the freezer since I started on Humira a year ago was just after I used the last one and was waiting for another delivery. Really should have done it last week! #Crohnsproblems. Oh well, they all seem to have survived, anyway.

As an aside, today’s venture into the freezer also found this -

Never seen a breast like that before!

That, my friends, is a chicken breast that has wrapped itself around the wires of the freezer drawer and has frozen solidly into that shape.

Breast too big to fit through small gap. This sounds vaguely familiar . . .

That didn’t make it into the cool box, and will be dinner tomorrow once it has totally thawed, but it took two whole hours at room temperature, and a lot of work with my freezing cold fingers to get it even vaguely defrosted enough to get it unwrapped from that wire so that I could get drawer back in the freezer. That chicken clearly had spirit, but it will still be a cooked and tasty beast no matter how much it resists!