I know I haven’t been writing on this blog for some time now but I have been writing!

I have just been concentrating on the positive things that I need to achieve and want and am able to do. I have been collecting my thoughts, spending time with family and friends, dreaming, and fighting yet another infection!

I went to see my consultant and in spite of the infections they are hoping to do the operation to re-repair my forehead, only this time they will use vascular surgery and take veins and skin from my forearm and I am positive that this will work.

Although I can now drink my coffee through the hole, I have threatened to appear on Britain’s Got Talent with a stream of multicoloured smoke if I don’t get fixed soon.

At this moment in time I am awaiting a date to be co-ordinated for the surgery to take place as it has to fit in with all of my consultants.

I am alive! I am positive! I am grateful!

Thank you.

I have lived in London on and off for almost 15 years.

In all that time I have never even considered the amount of noise pollution that affects every minute of every day.

As I said yesterday I really want to find my nice, happy person that I know I can be and so, this morning, I took my cup of coffee into the sunny garden.

And for the first time it was peaceful.

I could hear the birds. I could see blue skies. I could almost touch sanity.

I am so grateful.

I know that people around the world will be on the other side of sanity trying to get into an aeroplane but for once I can honestly say that nature has power over the western world too.

I know that we see and hear in the media about natural disasters and occurances around our beautiful planet but it isn’t very often that nature really does come into our cushy lives within the first world.

Today I will rejoice in the layer of ash clouds that have won the battle with us and take every moment to savour the quiet beauty that can be found. Even in London,

I went to church last night for a reconciliation service. I was led to believe that this service was for those of us who are just far to shy (not naughty of course) to go to confession on a regular basis in order to be absolved of all of our sins.

As I have mentioned before I am a Catholic but it took some time to get confirmed and mainly because of the confession part of this particular faith.

I have my personal faith and with that is a journey that probably has no bearing on which particular church I go to but I eventually realised that being Catholic was part of who I am. It is part of my culture, part of my families culture and basically what I knew about and felt comfortable with the most.

When you have been very ill, well at least in my case being the mom with 9 lives, you do a lot of praying and when you pull through time and time again it has led me to think about faith in a slightly more gentle way.

As my mother had convinced me that this was a service that I could go to and without having to list ALL of my sins just be absolved I was eager to attend. You see at the beginning of every confession you start with ‘Forgive me Father for I have sinned, it has been ….. years since my last confession.’

Well seeing as I had my last confession when I was confirmed it was 4 years ago and that would take my tally down quite substantially and so I marched off in good faith (excuse please!).

As soon as we got settled and had the Hymn sheets in our hand I realised that anonymous absolution was not going to happen. There 2 hymns down were the words ‘ to be sung during individual reconciliation’. My stomach lurched as I pointed this out to my mother who was also more than happy to have all of her sins systemically removed during a Mass exodus. She had a look of horror about her that immediately dispelled any thoughts that she had pulled me into this under false pretenses and so we sat unnervingly waiting as, one by one, those braver and bolder than us dissipated to the 4 priests scattered around the church. You see there is a confessional but to keep up with the times and to move forward with the open faith policy that is so en vogue you just go and sit next to the priest and hope that the choiristers and pianist keep playing as you mull over your discressions of note.

Neither of us wanted to get the deaf priest for fear of shouting out our woes to the congregation and so we just sat, and sat, and my tummy starting singing along just to make me that little bit more unconfortable than I was before. But eventually my mother obviously had to show her (39 year old) daughter that this was easy and she popped of to share her deepest, darkest truths with the hearing aid cladded parish priest and what could I do but to follow suit and plod along to the back of the chapel to confess my unabashed anger with the world (whilst smiling my nervous twitch Chesire cat grin) to the Spainish priest who I thought would be easier on me.

It is all over now.

We can go back and take those years off of our absolution table and breath in complete piety until the next time.

I must say that it does have such a strong hold on you and priests can give you so much – the way I see it is that if you have a nice, kind absolving priest you can be happy for the time to come until you next get the courage but if you are unfortunate enough to get a hard-lined, rigid man of the cloth it is a bit like smashing a mirror only the years of bad luck go on until you next get the courage to be absolutely absoluted!

I know that we all have dreams but when you are a mom with 9 lives you start to think about leaving a legacy.

Not necessarily a financial legacy although that would be great but something for your children to be proud of.

At the beginning of the year I wrote down my bucket list for 2010 and in it I have a couple of things that I am working on.

I want to start the first Globally Responsible Community. Working on recreating communities in areas where they can not only help themselves but they can help others too and so, for my birthday, I set up another blog which I hope to get underway after the Easter break which will explain and expand and work out the way forward for the project ‘Piotopia’.

I am not so bold that I think that I have the ability to change the way the world works but I do believe that we could all be doing something a little more proactive, a little more fun and a little more together and so I am going to use the time up to my operation to finalise the business model and get this project underway.

I have been thinking about how it could work for around 7 years now so it is not something that I take lightly and unfortunately have been unable to forget about it altogether – it is there tapping away at the back of my head!

I have lots of things that I can be proud of in the past but the happiest times of my life have been when I am actually doing a job that I am proud of.

During really dark times of illness it is the legacy that I think of and that keeps me going and now that I am in brighter days it is the legacy that I shall be working on.

I have been away for a weekend with friends.

Not something new or lavish. Nothing too exciting or extreme. For me it was the start of normality again though and there is nothing quite as good as normal when you have been living in a cocoon of infectious disease and uncertainty for so long and for that I am truely grateful.

Just to be able to have conversations with friends instead of a barrage of nurses, doctors and consultants who look at you with their head slightly leaning to one side with that ‘there, there’ look plastered all over their faces which roughly translates as we don’t have a clue how this is going to turn out for you but we are trying to be decisive.

I still have an affinity with lavatories – I never like to be far away from a good standard of ablution facilities but the other day I walked fast enough to overtake a pensioner with a walking stick! How cool is that.

I have visions of me partaking in the 2012 Olympics in the hidden disability hurdles which will be under the ‘you can’t run but we will certainly try to hide the fact that it was our fault’ section.

It is only now that I realise that I really have no idea what was wrong with me as it is so hard for anyone to give you straight answers nowadays for the fear that you will sue them and as I mentioned before this is the reason I am writing this all down. I want other people to realise that they are not alone.

Although the MSSA infection is supposed to be the better of the Staph infections and in spite of the fact that I was catagorically told that I had a ’suspected’ pseudomonas infection, it was because of the good standing that MSSA has in relation to all of these killer superbugs that MSSA is the only infection that has actually been written down in my notes.

I also have been able to grow Strep and what is euphemously written down as Diptheroids and converted to normal skin flora from the open wound on my forehead. Each of these bacteria are killers if they get too much of a hold on your body and as I start to feel ‘normal’ again I realise that I am truely grateful to be alive and although I obviously am a superwoman that does not make me forget to count my blessings when I have what everyone else would consider a boring old day.

To me it is a kick in the teeth to infection and another point in my favour.

How lucky am I to be alive?

I went to church today.

It was really wonderful and filled me with the spirituality that I desperately need to get through the next couple of weeks.

I haven’t been going that regularly because of being so ill and because of the risk of infection that being in a group of people brings but I felt well enough to tackle those smaller issues today in favour of being filled with something that I can’t honestly explain to you.

When I walk into church I almost always well up. I feel humbled in a way and excited by an energy that surrounds me. I know that this doesn’t work for everybody but it does for me and for that I am truely grateful.

I have had some miraculous experiences which I can only contribute to my faith. I am Christian and in 2005, after much internal debate, decided to confirm my Catholic status.

I have always been to church with my family and brought up in the Catholic faith and even though I was sure of my God, whatever form this may take for you, I was not sure that I could agree to the man made rules that went about being labelled as a Catholic but after many years of deliberation and avoiding the issue, I decided that my faith was not ruled by the brand of religion I was practicing but was inherent in my heart and soul. What the Catholic faith gave me was my identity and culture and a way to express this belief.

I went through the process of Confirmation and met some wonderful people who were on the same path as I was. Catholic (which roughly translates as for everyone) was now becoming more a way of bringing us together and giving us a voice in a world where it is hard to be heard and even more difficult to be listened to.

I have been asked recently whether I am cross with God and even the most Holy seem to understand why I could be but I am not cross with Him, this is my path and I will walk it. The people that I do get cross with though, are the ones who think they are God. I have decided to take more control of my own care and not to be so sure that the people who oversee my care actually do know best. I have to trust my own instinct and learn from what I have been through in the past and I think that I should add that to my resolution list.

In the meantime I shall put my trust in Him and my overall knowledge that I have much more to do on this earth before I walk the stairway to Heaven.