Seeing nan, swimming and school

I had a great relaxing weekend. On Saturday my nan came round for the day which was lovely as I get on really well with her. My Japan photos are now on my external hard drive, so I started to show my nan them. We didn't finish though as she asked questions about every photo and I'd taken around 700! So my nan is going to come round again soon to see the remained of the photos! I'm planning to post some of the best photos up on here soon (I promise), but it probably won't be til the weekend as I need to go through them all to select just a few to post up.

On Sunday morning I went swimming with my dad. It was so much easier without having to manage a central line or a stoma :) However I had stomach ache for the rest of the day, which may be related to swimming or may be completely unrelated, so I'm a bit nervous about swimming again. However I'd like to go next weekend to see how it goes. While I was swimming I also had fun attempting to teach my dad to swim properly (he can swim, but not very effectively). I discovered I'm not a very good swimming teacher as although I can swim, I wasn't really sure what my arms and legs were doing!

Monday was back to school. I was very tired all day; I don't think weekends are long enough to recover after a full week at school! I had a Japanese group oral exam at 9.30am, which went ok, but it wasn't brilliant. I've got my final Japanese group oral on Friday, so my group are working on that at the moment. Then my Japanese individual oral will be in about a fortnight, scary!

Then I had an appointment with the hygeinist at the orthodontist in preparation for getting my braces fitted at the end of the month. The hygeinst put blue dye on my teeth (which also made my lips go bright blue!) to see how clean they were. Apparently they like them to be cleaner than mine were when you have braces fitted, so she cleaned my teeth up for me and taught me a better brushing technique. I was also given a special toothbrush with bristles of varying length to use when I have braces.

I went back to school for a couple of lessons, but because I was so tired I almost fell asleep at lunchtime! I did manage to survive til the end of the day though (despite being later than usual due to an after school lesson).

Yesterday evening I packed up a shoebox full of gifts to send to a little girl I know who is in hospital at the moment and very fed up. She's been in since just before Christmas and has just spent her 5th birthday in hospital. She's usually very active, but is confined to her bed at the moment, so is very bored and frustrated. So I packed a shoebox with lots of little bits to amuse her including colouring sheets and pencils, stickers, a book, a cuddly toy... That was posted this morning, so hopefully she'll get it soon.

Tuesdays are the day I weigh myself and email my dietician. So this morning I was quite nervous before I weighed myself as I've had another week without any artificial feeds, but knew I couldn't really afford to lose much more weight. But I gained weight :D 0.8kg in one week with just 'normal' eating! Fantastic. It means it's now very unlikely that I'll need to go back onto overnight enteral feeds, as my weight is now heading towards target without any artificial feeds.

Today at school I had another busy day. I only had 3 lessons, but worked through my 2 free periods and most of lunch too. But I finally feel like I'm on top of my homework. This evening I'm just relaxing, sorting out some emails and watching TV. I'm also planning to finish a really good novel I'm reading this evening. It's called Lottery and is by Patricia Wood. I'd highly recommend it as all of my family have recently read and enjoyed it. And it's Alfie's (my younger brother) 16th birthday today. I can't believe he's 16! He had a very yummy birthday tea this evening - Chinese Crispy Duck - my favourite :)

Towards the end of the month, the hospital I had my transplant at (Hospital B) are holding a study day for professionals all about small bowel transplants. I've been asked to give a 10 - 20 min talk and answer questions as a patient representative. I'm really looking forward to it as I enjoy speaking for things like this, and have done many similar talks before. But I've not even started planning it yet, and it's about 3 weeks away. I'll keep you updated on my progress and preparation.

Tomorrow should be the birthday of a very special little girl I met when I was in hospital after my transplant. But sadly she died almost 2 years ago. I'll be making a post in her memory tomorrow, so have a look.

A busy week

I've now been back from Japan for almost a week. This week has been very busy though, with various school stresses, and of course I've been tired after Japan.

Today was the final deadline for my biology coursework, but I managed to get all of my experiment write ups in on time. I started working on them earlier in the week, with 3 to complete, and finished the final one this morning. All was looking good until I discovered yesterday that one set of results from an experiment were completely the wrong way round! I think I'd just written them down incorrectly though, so I fixed it, but had to redraw the graph. And as 2 of the 3 experiments I had to write up had been done back in September I struggled with the evaluations (what went wrong and how it could be improved) because I could barely remember doing the experiments! But I sorted it all out and handed them in this morning.

Today I also had my English Individual Oral Commentary, which was scary! I had to revise 3 texts (Wuthering Heights, 5 Sylvia Plath poems and an Orwell essay) as I didn't know which I'd be given in the exam. I was hoping for an extract from Wuthering Heights and that was what I got :) It was a good extract, but I was very nervous, so struggled to think of what to talk about. I had 20 mins to plan and then had to give a 10 - 12 min oral commentary on the extract. The exam room was boiling hot and there was a commotion going on outside, but I think I did ok. It was quite short though, so I got lots of questions at the end to take it up to 15 mins. The questions were ok though, until the final one. I was told that if I got an extract from Wuthering Heights it would be from the first 10 chapters, so as I didn't really like the book I just read the first 10 chapters, instead of the whole book like had been recommended. So the last question I was asked was about how a line in my extract foreshadowed an event towards the end of the novel (after the chapters I'd read)! I ummed and ahhed for a bit and then made a suggestion based on something I'd read in a synopsis of the novel. I think it was right, but I'm not sure. I'm now very relieved it's over. I should find out the result shortly - it was worth 15% of my final English grade!

I've still got some work to do over the weekend though as I have a Japanese group oral exam on Monday and another on Friday. On Monday I also have a Japanese test which I need to revise for and I need to write about my trip to Japan in Japanese for my homework.

But I'm planning to relax a bit this weekend too. I'm seeing my nan tomorrow, which I'm looking forward to as I've not seen her since I returned from Japan. It'll be nice to chat to her about it, show her my photos and give her a special present (a lovely silk fan) from Japan. And then on Sunday me and my dad are hoping to go swimming, which I'm really looking forward to. Before I became ill with liver disease I used to swim a lot and really enjoyed it. But I couldn't go when I was ill and then for a while after my transplant I found it too difficult with a stoma. Since my reversal last summer I've swum a couple of times, but found it too tiring. So I've not been for a while, but am looking forward to trying it again on Sunday.

This weekend I'm also planning to sort out my Japan photos. I've got them all on my external hard drive, but they seem to have come out of order, so I need to get them all organised. Then I need to go through the 700 photos to choose the best to put on here. And of course I need to work out how to post photos to my blog! Hopefully it'll be quite straightforward. So they should be up later this weekend or early next week.

I took the book 'Twilight' with me to Japan as I wanted to read it after hearing all the hype surrounding it. I didn't get much time to read in Japan, but read a bit on the flights. I very rarely give up on a book, but yesterday I gave up on 'Twilight'. I'd read over half of it, but wasn't really enjoying it and didn't want to pick it up and continue reading it. I don't think it's a bad book, but I don't think it deserves all the hype. I expected it to be excellent - and it wasn't. Today I started reading 'Middlesex' after Becky recommended it to me. I've not read much so far as I was very tired when I was trying to read it, but it sounds promising and I'll let you know what I think when I've read a bit more.