I am in Spain again.

I came over on the ferry last Friday and will be here for a few more days until the ferry home with my lovely dog, Aura.

I have just been having a look at my bucket list for 2010 and seeing how much I am managing to achieve.

I am in the process of point 5 – to drive to Spain. We had a 24 hour journey from Portsmouth to Santander and from there an 8 hour drive to Javea, on the east coast where my boyfriend lives.

As he has been helping me through my operation and ongoing illness he is going to stay with me in London until our lives change around and so we have come back to get the house ready for in order to let it out for summer rentals and to hopefully make enough money for him to keep his home.

Being ill not only affects you but the amount of disruption that everyone who is close to you has to deal with can be immeasurable. My boyfriends’ mother has lived in his house for the past few years and so is having to pack up and move to London to stay with her other son too.

But we will get through it and enjoy the chaos that is part of life.

I am achieving another goal and that is to be celebrated.

Well, I am just too excited.

I am off to sunny Spain tomorrow and I don’t know what to do with myself.

Just so you know I might be too involved with sunshine and open spaces to consider the cyber world but you might get a sneaky look in somewhere along the line.

I have waited soooo long for this that I am scared that it will go by too quickly.

Passport, check. Exhorbitant insurance, check. Letter from the consultant stating all the wrong things – check. Medical bits and bobs, check. Packed yet – noo!

Off I pop then and I shall try to master the art of uploading some beautiful pictures.

Adios amigos

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 told you that I have a real hard time making decisions – well I have really needed a new mattress for ages and I have been looking at buying a new one for at least 8 months.

Bearing in mind that I was sleeping around 16 hours a day for the best part of those 8 months you could say that this didn’t really leave a lot of time to make the decisions!

I did try though and never realised that it could be such a huge investment both financially and scientifically.

You get sprung, latex, memory, biocotton, eco-system friendly, and ones that help you get out.

You get firm, medium and soft, and then some that you can turn over and each side is a different softness.

You can split this comfort down the middle and and in different areas of the bed although I did wonder if that would have any effect on the short body of mine.

But at the Ideal Home Show I finally managed get what I wanted and at the right price. I settled for a foam thingy, with an eco-whatsit filling, topped with a NASA inspired memory layer and surrounded by anti-bacterial, hypo-allergenic with a silver thread outer layer!

Cool heh.

I then went on to the food section – I love it! I love cooking and find it incredibly therapeutic.

If I was going to be a salesperson I would love to do this for BAMIX, the Swiss food processor extraordinaire! It is so fantastic that I have 2, we buy them for wedding and housewarming presents and my folks even have one under the stairs for when they get a retirement home!!!

Anyway, as you can imagine we are throughly Bamix-ed out and therefore I had to get excited by something else this year and so I looked for the biggest gathering of people to see what demonstration would impress me the most.

And I was not dissappointed. Around the corner we found a demonstration just about to start with a smattering of smiley customers carrying their hot credit card purchases and the charms of a very enthusiastic demonstration team.

A mandolin! Not just any mandolin but a German made precision steel V-shaped multi-purpose (almost makes the tea) Mandolin.

So I watched the demonstration in awe, like a school girl enthralled. I hung on to every carrot, examined every potato and chomped on the thinnest, sexiest pepper you have ever seen.

And so I was sold! We placed our hands in the air to be first to buy and get the free gifts of a juicer and swirly, whirly cucumber pretty do everything bit of plastic and excitedly went home to try it out.

Well, was I dissapointed to find that I just don’t have the charms to make a swirly, whirly piece of cucumber look sexy.

Boy, I just made it look sad.

So I shall have to go to the sexy, twirly, whirly school of cucumber modelling.

I am going to the Ideal Home show today that opens at Earls Court Exhibition Centre.

I am going to get exhausted as the show is enormous but so inspiring and my favourite part is watching what new invention captures everyones imagination and because I live only five minutes away I usually see this product being carried by loads of takers over the next few weeks and it never stops making me giggle.

For years the main product was the rubber broom – BOGOF! There were thousands sold so I am going to see the next home product of the future and try to enjoy the show.

As I only live down the road I am lucky that I can get home ver quickly if it does not agree with me or if I get road rage in a line of people!

I worked at Earls Court for a few years and understand how the back end of this show is just such a massive undertaking, building a house in a couple of weeks only for it to be pulled down a few weeks later.

I shall tell you how I fare and if I get inspiration or perspiration from my first major indoor event since forever!

I have just tried to join a thread and become part of a community.

It backfired and so I shall carry on here!

I apologise for causing offence to anyone.

I write what I feel and this is the outcome. Sometimes I am not right. Sometimes I am not wrong.

But I am getting brave enough to share my story and I will not be broken again.

I have just received the news that I was expecting. The ‘we don’t think you are ill note from the Department of Work and Pensions about my claim for Disability Living Allowance (DLA). Stating that they made their decision based on my honesty, every piece of documentation and scans from 2 hospitals, 4 consultants, 2 nursing agencies and the reliable statement of a GP who won’t even write me a letter to travel or prescription as they are too scared! I am fuming but not so much for myself as I expected this much from the pen pushing police but how long do really ill people have to suffer because of the rules that are supposed to help them and not those who are scamming. I nearly died last year and when my mother phoned to inform them that I was in hospital they just said that they could revoke any decision. It is now obvious that people are dying without the help that they deserve.

I am going straight to appeal and going to show them my head. I want them to know that their system isn’t working and I am very tempted to go to the press to show exactly how you can get pushed out so slowly but so surely that if you are not strong enough it doesn’t bear thinking about.

I don’t want to be worse than I am – I want to get better – I certainly don’t need this shit. PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) gets straight back in there along with PMT, political rage and God help me if I got in the car right now.

On Friday morning I actually noticed that one of the corners of my now very pronounced hole was leaving residence.

Yes, there is a little bit of bone that is protruding and on examination my ENT surgeon pronounced that it was indeed bone that I was looking at on a daily basis the only problem being is that it is not very good bone!!!

As I was taking the opportunity to sit in the patch of garden that was being shown a little sunshine this morning I was contemplating the leper colony that was once an island off of Greece and thinking that if I have to deal with a much larger facial deformity than I have dealt with over the past 9 years I would rather face up to this in a warmer and more inclusive environment rather than the cold and very unforgiving UK.

I could still be of benefit in a comforting environment. I could do chores or take the place of a working child in a 3rd world country.

As I have had do deal with the social system based in the UK for so long and been offered the social care system that personally holds no benefit to me mentally whatsoever I am contemplating starting an exchange programme.

Anyone want to join? I will take the place of a 3rd world child in a factory environment and they would be able to benefit from an education in the UK. The only problem being is that they would have to deal with the problems associated with growing up here and to be honest – if I am thinking their lifestyle is better what on earth could I do to encourage them to think that they would be better off here?

Just a thought.

So I went to see my ENT surgeon on Friday.

I have been off the antibiotics for nearly 3 weeks and so on that note everything is looking good.

There is a problem though. The bone graft under the titanium plate which is almost the size of my forehead is rubbish. It doesn’t have a good blood suppl and has therefore not taken very well and, in turn, it is causing the hole in the skin to get larger.

And so he spoke rapidly about me going to be centre of discussion at their multidisciplinary meetings so that they can all discuss what they are going to do with me.

Frontal bone flap, skin grafts blah, blah, blah!

I just get more complicated as this story unfolds.

My ENT surgeon told me that he often speaks to my plastics consultant and whilst they have conversations regarding world politics, the state of finance, they inevitably turn the conversation around to me!

Needless to say I am going to have to go through another almighty operation but at least I am alive to do it after seemingly beating MSSA, pseudomonas and strep infections to this point.

I spent yesterday and the rest of Friday dealing with my PTSD in its angry phase. Hating the world and feeling as though I had consumed a bottle of wine whilst watching people brush past me all being normal.

l even tried to do ‘normal’ myself and sit and have coffee and a cake without hatred wanting to punch every living soul (including dive bombing pigeons).

Needless to say – PTSD and the pigeons won!

A methicillin-sensitive Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA) infection is an infection caused by the staph bacteria which is able to be treated with most penicillin based antibiotics and has yet become resistant to the more common antibiotics enabling the treatment to be cleared up easier than it would be if it was resistant in the case of MRSA.

Although the staph bacteria is common a MSSA infection can cause as many problems as the well known MRSA bug but, in theory it is easier to treat with a vast array of antibiotics.

MSSA can be found on many people and would not cause any harm whatsoever. It is only when the bug is able to enter your system and when you are very ill that it would cause you any serious damage and would become part of the infectious diseases that need to be treated within a hospital environment.

Most staph infections can be killed by using basic hygiene rules such as hand-washing and antibacterial gels.