Getting up to date with April - part 7 (more day to day stuff)

I decided on Tue 20th that I would let myself buy some more DVD boxsets if my total spending (not including rent, Tesco DVD rental and magazine subscription - my regular monthly payments) in April didn't exceed an amount that I set then based on what I'd spent so far during April. I thought that I'd let myself buy some DVD boxsets to take my spending that month up to the amount I set, but I ended up spending only £5 less than that amount which wasn't enough for a DVD boxset that I wanted. However I had had some unexpected outgoings towards the end of April including Alf choosing to cash his birthday IOU for an iPod charger so I decided to allow myself to spend a bit more than £5 on a DVD. I struggled to choose between Gavin and Stacey series 2 and 3 or Outnumbered series 2 and very nearly bought them all at once. But on Sun 2nd I decided on Outnumbered and ordered it that night. I'll get the Gavin and Stacey DVDs at another point, maybe at the end of this month/start of next month if I don't spend too much this month (I might aim to spend less than last month).

Mon 3rd May was Bank Holiday Mon so there were some local carboot sales on that me and my parents decided to have a look at. First we went to a one off carboot sale in a pub carpark in a neighbouring village. There I bought a DVD called In America DVD for 50p, 7 DVDs that had been free with newspapers for a total of £1 and 15 CD cases for £1. It was very chilly while we were looking round and there were some light showers too so I left my parents still looking round and went back to sit in the car round the corner to warm up. While I was sitting in the car another shower started up which got quite heavy and then it started hailing. I was very smug sitting all warm and dry in the car. Dad sensibly found some shelter in the pub car park til the hail eased but mum decided to run back to the car in it. She got soaked!

We then went back home and dropped dad off because he'd decided the weather wasn't good enough to go to another carboot sale. Mum changed out of her wet clothes, we both wrapped up a bit warmer and then we headed out to the carboot sale we usually go to. There were not as many stalls there as there usually is and the DVDs were all £2 each rather than £1 each so I didn't buy anything. Mum picked up a few things though including a weird thing that moos like a cow! On the way home we called in to visit nan briefly and give her back her mobile phone that we'd sorted out for her. The phone in her new flat wasn't going to be reconnected til Wed so it was important that she could use her mobile til then.

On Tue 4th May I weighed myself like I'm now doing fortnightly. It was also my monthly weight to email my dieticians with. My weight was 54.3kg - so up 0.6kg on the previous fortnight and up a total of 1kg in a month. Both my dieticians were very impressed and are happy for me to keep weighing myself and contacting them monthly. I never thought I'd say this, but I don't really want to put any more weight on now. If my weight is up again next month then I'm going to ask my dieticians if I can stop my high calorie puddings because I don't really like them.

That morn I walked to the post office and the local shop and also walked round to the surgery to drop in a prescription for me. That aft I had to return to the local shop when mum discovered that she'd run out of washing liquid for the washing machine. When mum got back from work at the library she showed me her first knitting needle injury - somehow a knitting needle had attacked her leg through her bag and her jeans and had left a visible scratch. Her leg is fine now though.

That evening I went to another meeting of the teenage discussion group in the village. V wasn't there so it was just A and B who lead it, me, K and M. The discussion on Tue eve was very religious - yawn! We did have some interesting discussion, but I'm not sure how we got onto talking about whether knitting is divine or not?!?! Although I'm a very private person about my health I don't mind mentioning it when it's my choice and in my control, so I brought it into the conversation because I felt it was relevant. I started off by saying "I don't know how much you know [because I didn't know if K or M knew anything about my medical history] but I had a transplant a few years ago" I know A knows about it all because she knows my mum and I assumed A had told B everything. So I was really surprised when B said that she didn't know that! We had an interesting discussion about politics at the end. K isn't 18 until the summer so can't vote yet, but the rest of us could. Me, A and B all said that we would be voting Lib Dems and proceeded to discuss all the parties. M kept very quiet. He's very posh, privately educated and quite stuck up so I assumed his quietness was because he's a Conservative supporter! They were all talking about the different politicians they've had coming to their doors to try to swing their votes, but we've not had any of them this year which is probably because we've got a Lib Dems sign in our garden :)

Yesterday (Wed 5th May) I emailed S (the transplant co-ordinator at Hosp A) again because it was 6 weeks since she'd promised me an email and I'd still not heard anything. In this email I just asked if she could please reply to my email from March 22nd as she said she would in her email dated March 23rd. She replied very quickly saying that she'd not forgotten me but she'd been off work for a while. I've been promised a full reply by the end of the week so hopefully I will get that. Only 5 weeks to go til my transition is due to be completed and I'm still no happier about it, eek! I wish S had just dropped me a quick email letting me know that it would be a while til she managed a full reply. Replying 5 weeks later than promised isn't really fair on me - I'm supposed to be learning to trust this team!

Yesterday morning I got up at 8.45am (which is very early for me) because I'd heard the previous day that the presale for Marina and the Diamonds' Oct/Nov tour would start on the Wed. However it didn't say a time, so I got up so I could be at my laptop by 9am in case they went on sale then. I kept refreshing my email page because the link would be sent to me in an email and the email eventually came through at 12.30pm - I'd been sitting there all that time! And as you'll have seen from this blog post, I got tickets!! :D

In the afternoon me and mum popped round to see my nan because although we'd returned her mobile phone on Mon we'd forgotten to return the charger too! I helped my nan sort out a few things on her computer while we were there. And on the way we called in at the local garden centre where mum bought some geraniums for the garden. I tried to persuade her to buy the red ones but she chose some pink ones instead.

Yesterday I discovered that my phone was playing up as although I could receive phone calls and texts I couldn't make them, it kept saying there was a connection error. I phoned my older brother Chris who knows about these kind of things and left a message on his answer machine asking for help. Also my phone alarmed low battery even though I'd charged it recently so that made me wonder if there was a problem with the battery too. The battery has seemed fine since though, so maybe it was just a one off thing.

Dad pointed out to me that there was a double page article in the local paper about ME so I found that to have a read. The article started off well but then went on to say how this sufferer had been cured by something called the Lightning Process and had then gone on to train as a teacher of the Lightning Process. There isn't a cure for ME although there are lots of people offering expensive cures that have no scientific evidence behind them. The Lightning Process is one of the most well known and some people are apparently miraculously cured by it although it sounds very doubtful to me. It costs a lot of money and there are lots of criticisms of it and no scientific proof that it works. So I thought it was a shame that the article in the local paper was so much about what a great cure the Lightning Process is. However, there was one small paragraph about criticisms of it, so at least they were acknowledged.

Today I got up early (9am) and me and mum headed into the city. We drove to the Park & Ride on the outskirts of the city (dropping Alf off in a local town on the way through) and then got a bus into the city centre. I enjoyed listening to Marina and the Diamonds on my iPod on the bus journey. Me and mum went on a long walk out of the city centre along a road with a few charity shops on. I bought 2 cheap books in one charity shop - one was a children's book that I used to like and one was a quick read. We stopped for drinks and then wandered back into town although we did have to ask for directions on the way! We walked for about an hour and a quarter in total then, which I was quite impressed with. When we got back into the city centre we met up with mum's friend for lunch in a cafe. I had a baked potato and we all chatted together. On the way out of the shop I picked up a local magazine because it had an interview with Diana Vickers in it. My tummy pains were bad while we were out :(

Me and mum then split up so she could go to her wool shop and I wandered round the shops but didn't buy anything. When me and mum split up I decided I'd better check to see if my phone was working and to my surprise it was :) So I'm not sure what the problem had been - maybe a network problem. I received a lovely text from Lizzy saying thanks for Mia's presents :) When I'd finished wandering round the shops I wanted to look in I still had a bit of time before I was due to meet up with mum so I found the films section in Waterstones and sat on a comfy sofa reading a book about Pixar animation :) Me and mum met back up, had drinks and some shortbread in a cafe (mum knocked our table which resulted in my glass of milk spilling over my jeans, whoops!) and went into a couple of shops (including M&S for some biscuits for me).

We then headed back to our car on the Park & Ride bus and then mum drove to Tesco on the edge of a local town where she had agreed to pick Alf up. Me and mum did a little Tesco shop while waiting for Alf. I was very pleased that I managed to resist buying Diana Vickers' album. It's on Spotify so I can listen to it for now without having the CD, so I decided to wait til the CD drops in price to buy it and be able to put it onto my iPod.

We dropped Alf off at home and went to our local Polling Station to vote. I saw the start of the BBC's election coverage and hope that the exit poll isn't representative of the actual results. The exit poll was created by asking random voters across the country who they'd voted for. And it suggested that we'll have a hung parliament with Conservatives getting the most seats, followed by Labour. It also suggested that Lib Dems will actually lose some seats. I'm supporting Lib Dems so I hope they do better than that. I do suspect that the Conservatives will win though :( I'm not watching the election coverage on TV tonight, I'll just check how the seats are going on the Internet before I go to bed and hear the final result when I get up tomorrow morn.

When we got home I saw my morning tablets out in the kitchen. I'd got up too early to take them this morn so put them out ready to take before we left the house. But I'd forgotten. Whoops! Think that's the first time I've ever done that. I took my Tac as soon as I got in plus the tabs that I only take in the morn and then tonight I took the tablets that I take twice a day minus my Tac. I think that should be ok as sometimes people have to delay taking their Tac if they're having a Tac blood test done at the hosp.

When we got home I also saw my post. Outnumbered series 2 on DVD arrived, so I'm really looking forward to watching that :) Unfortunately there was also something else waiting for me in the post. I opened it to discover my DLA renewal forms - arrrrgggghhh! The last time I applied for DLA was just after my transplant so lots of things have changed since then - my health problems related to my transplant have reduced but I've developed ME. Unfortunately people who have ME struggle to get DLA. I've got a few months to fill the forms out and dad said he'll help me with them, but I am still worried about it. I found the ESA forms hard, this is going to be even harder.

That's now my day to day updates completed but I'm going to do a couple more updates about other bits and pieces before my blog is completely up to date. It's definitely nearly there now though :)