When the technicians were called out for a third time, they carried out a general maintenance check. After being up in the ceiling, one of them came down and said that he had found the main wire for the alarm cut in half up in the roof. He asked me if anyone had been up there. I said, "No. I live alone." We worked out that it couldn't have been a resident possum or rat, since there was no gnawing, just a clean cut. The technician said it was weird. After that there was an odd noise that came from the fire detector in the hallway. It only occurred several times before stopping. It was not like the sound I had heard them make when the battery has gone flat and needs replacing.
Due to the occasional lessening severity of the CFIDS, I was managing to leave the house once a fortnight to meet appointments, as well as go to the Rapid Creek Markets with Andrea once a week. Andrea and I would also occasionally go to the supermarket together as well. Then we'd be so exhausted, that we'd have to sit down on the floors in the aisles. I still had floaters in my eyes and was often disoriented. Every time I attempted to drive to Tricia and Martin's place, which was only a few blocks away in Malak Crescent, I would end up at North Lakes Shopping Centre. This rarely failed. Sometimes I didn't know where I was, only that I was in Darwin. One day Andrea and I suddenly turned to each other while in Casuarina Shopping Square and I asked, "Do you know where we are?"
"Yeah, but where are we going?"
Neither of us knew. So we were getting lost in Casuarina Shopping Square after having shopped there for years. Dementia, the loss of short-term memory and daily brain fog were just a few of the many symptoms associated with CFIDS. Still I was managing to 'walk with the angels'. Under the circumstances and with dogs, cows, and the house and garden to look after, getting depressed was a luxury I could not afford.
During 2004 I was finally able to start taking Binda and Kindi for short walks once again. There was a lovely little park a few minutes away from the house. The entire walk took about thirty minutes after which both the dogs and I were exhausted and collapsed. But these walks became a regular and then an almost daily event. Binda was so excited that I worried he might have heart failure. He got very down if he wasn't walked. Kindi was less enthusiastic but she seemed to catch on to Binda's state of ecstasy. At first I was concerned that we'd never make it, but on more than one occasion what had felt like a male 'angelic being' had turned up to walk inside my body with us to that park, allowing me to see the world through a different set of eyes, or what often felt like several sets of eyes simultaneously.
In the meantime, the 'phenomena' continued inside the house, and had now also started to occur outside it, as if it was following me. One day an overhead light blew out in Casuarina Square next to the Hoyts Cinema Complex, when I was on my way to the surgery for my B12 injection. Then as I went around the corner to claim on Medicare, the rows of small round lights that were in the ceiling started flickering on and off over my head. People were looking at the lights and then looking at me. I stopped myself from saying, "I'm not doing it!" In the end there must have been between ten to twenty lights doing a kind of 'morse code' just like they had inside The Andy Bar.
A number of things happened following this. The first flickering light to be noticed by both Andrea and myself was inside a small section at an art gallery along the Stuart Highway. It was a series of lights along a tube. One of the lights above my head began to flicker on and off. It flickered once or twice at first and then did it for several minutes. Around this time I was entertaining the idea of renting a unit in McMinn Street. During an inspection the light outside the bathroom flickered on and off once over my head. When I returned for another look, the same light did it again. This time the estate agent and I were standing beneath it. When I asked, "Did you see that?" he said, "Yes."
The next lot of lights that I remember being affected were the lights at the Casuarina branch of Westpac Bank. They were gently flickering directly overhead while I was sitting down to fill out a deposit slip. They did this several times again, witnessed by both myself and Andrea. Then when I approached the tellers one of the lights flickered above us. I asked the teller who served me; "Is anything up with the overhead lights?" and she said, "Not that I've noticed." Andrea never saw this second light. Since then the lights have flickered very gently several times at this bank, mainly after I had left Ridgehaven Circuit. It was like once the 'phenomena' started up, it would keep repeating the same pattern in the same area over and over again.
