The White Walkers (NOT a GoT Spoiler)

Signs that perhaps your aspie nature and long-running obsession with health and illness is becoming wildly unmanageable (read: ridiculous):

You become so fixated on the number of viral infections you've had, which GPs gently explain are a fall-out from glandular fever (how can someone so obsessed with illness have been unaware they had GF? Weird) that you become convinced you have HIV and that is the only way to explain the mystery aches and pains and tiredness and recurrent infections. You even go to the GUM for a complete screening despite complete monogamy and no needle-stick injuries.

The results are, unsurprisingly, completely negative.

Shortly after, I start falling asleep on the train to work, when you've just eaten, when you cry, have strange dreams that you confused with real life on a daily basis and struggle to sleep at night. I then believe, confidently, I have narcolepsy.

The fatigue dies down when I forget to daily Google "narcolepsy symptoms".

All week in the stifling heat and humidity, I seemed to sweat more than others, my hands shook constantly, I cried in public when trains were delayed, swore I heard announcements at the stations that no one else heard, sobbed into The Fiancé's chest about how long it could be before one of us eventually dies, and smacked a purple bouncy ball between my hands so I didn't hit inanimate objects. My support worker texted me about autism and Heat Intolerance and how you can feel like you're going...well, insane.

Someone relatively high up at work teases you when you ask for gloves to pick up any rubbish outside work and you go into overload and begin biting your hand in a toilet cubicle and covering your hands with alcohol rub. The ball bounces endlessly against the tiles and by 3pm you say, 'Fuck this. I'm taking an early finish tonight.'

Then you do come down with a cold and take your temperature every half hour, find your glands are swollen and that puffs from The Fiancé's asthma inhaler is the only thing that relieves the closed-throat feeling. I therefore believe that years have smoking have triggered COPD.

Or have been infected by hepatitis. 

Then. The night of The White Walkers.

The temperatures in the UK have shot up this past week, turning thrown away meat wrapped in bags and placed in the bin into a breeding ground for maggots. Like droplets of pus, they fell from the bin and when I shone a light on the yard, there was what can I only be described as a carpet of them heading for the house.

I used all the salt in the house, slug pellets, boiled kettles and checked through out the night that they had not squidged under the door. I spent hours crawling around the house picking up what turned out to be white scraps of tissue or dried rice grains. By 1am, I seriously considered setting fire to the bin as the ultimate solution.

The next day, The Fiancé and I mixed bleach and water and sluiced the yard and then poured the solution into the bin and taped up the bin with duct tape. Hot fumes would choke the bastards, Google said.

Afterwards, we ate a breakfast of bacon butties in front of Ink Master and enjoyed that strangely relaxing post-genocide euphoria that is perhaps shared only by serial killers.

All was well. Except for the rat that we discovered last week with the fur eaten from its skull, we weren't too worried. 

Today, heavy rains had turned the rat into a flattened white 2-D outline. I heard next door's kid scream about something and the mother shout, 'Don't go near it!' I hope she was shouting about wasps. When I checked our resident corpse, its tail had been raised and draped over a slab. Like something had grabbed it and then been interrupted...

I spent an inordinate amount of time by the back door, eavesdropping on their conversations and could only relax when I heard snippets that seemed to relate to booking a last minute holiday. Maybe they weren't about to bang on our door and blame us for rats and maggots? I emailed the council and begged them to remove the bin. 

I put down rat bait outside, chugged more Valium and The Fiancé stroked my head and admitted that it had been a particularly bad week and maybe I needed to see my support worker.

I nodded, flicked my fingers and told him I had an appointment in a fortnight. He frowned and, rare for him, advised me to gauge how I felt tomorrow before going in.

Then he grinned and said, 'How about you write a story about those white walkers?'

I'm marrying this guy for so many kickass reasons.