Skip to main content

Still at home!

What have I been up to the last couple of weeks? Living is the answer! I’ve been able to take the kids to school, do the food shop, have family dinners, see family and go out with friends. And it’s been bloody brilliant! 

That’s not to say that everything has been hunky dory. I’m on a reducing dose of steroids and 10 days ago my dose reduced from 30mg to 25mg. Within 2 days I was in agony, going to the toilet all the time and passing blood. So I rang the IBD nurse, who spoke to my consultant and back up to 30mg I went. The plan now is to taper off the steroids really slowly so instead of reducing by 5mg every week the reduction will be every 3 weeks. Hopefully that will give my body time to adjust to being less reliant on the steroids and stop me from flaring when the doses get lower. 

I think the adalimumab injections are definitely helping. Since being on these weekly I have felt soooo much better. But to get 5 good days a week I have to have 2 crap ones. I inject every Monday and for some reason the injections give me awful insomnia every Monday night. I literally get no sleep, so every Tuesday I’m exhausted. The injections also leave me feeling like I have flu for the first 24-48 hours so I’ve learnt not to plan anything for Tuesdays so I can just rest and feel sorry for myself! But it’s definitely worth it because before beginning the injections I was only getting 1 or 2 good days a week so for that to have flipped and it’s now only 1 or 2 bad days a week is bloody brilliant. 

I’m having to have weekly blood tests at the hospital to check my phosphate and adalimumab levels. So far these have all been ok so fingers crossed it stays like this. 

We’re starting to get ready for Christmas. Hubby has gotten all the decorations down from the loft and started putting the lights up. We always have a real Christmas tree so we will go and buy that on Friday when the kids get home from school and then decorate it on Saturday when all the branches have dropped. The last few years I’ve been really poorly in the run up to Christmas so it feels really strange to be feeling reasonably well. I did quite a bit of online shopping on Black Friday- all my nieces and nephews are sorted and so are the kids main presents. This year I’ve agreed with some family and friends to not buy gifts though as it can get daft me spending a tenner and them spending a tenner, often on stuff that nobody needs or really wants. And with everything being so much more expensive I would rather people save their money. I would much rather spend time with people, making memories, than have more stuff. 

Talking of stuff, I’ve been having a HUGE clearout and have finally gotten on top of the mess in my bedroom. My room had become a dumping ground for all the things in the house that nobody wanted or knew what to do with. And because I wasn’t there most of the time it didn’t really matter. But now I’m home (and planning to stay home) I wanted to get it sorted. It started out looking like this…


And ended up like this after a LOT of work…


I’ve been ebaying lots of the kids clothes they’ve outgrown and various other bits that were in my room. I’ve sold quite a lot of stuff and become quite friendly with the staff in my local post office! 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Light at the end of tunnel

I’m sat writing this blog post in St Marks, the specialist bowel hospital in London. So much has happened in the last few weeks; it’s all been a bit of a whirlwind. But I finally feel like there is some hope at the end of the tunnel. Let me tell you why.  At the beginning of June I was admitted yet again to QMC in Nottingham with huge amounts of pain, my bowels not working properly and just feeling generally unwell. I had only been home a couple of weeks since the admission in May but I had been feeling so rubbish most of my time had been spent in bed. I had tried everything I could to stay at home but the pain had become so bad I was barely able to stand or take a few steps on my own.  I had expected to maybe be in for a week or two to get stronger pain meds and get back on my feet but I ended up being in for almost a month. They put me on morphine injections and ketamine but then stopped them when my heart rate dropped to 30 beats per minute and my breathing to 7 breaths a minute. Th

The light at the end of the tunnel is a train

Last week was a busy and pretty crappy week for me health wise. I had to go and have blood tests done with the nutrition nurses and I had two hospital appointments; one with the gallbladder surgeon in Nottingham and the other with colorectal surgeon at St Marks. I was hoping to have at least one surgery date to write in the diary following these appointments but I came home empty handed on both occasions. Here’s what happened.  I began noticing over the last few weeks that I’ve started feeling really crappy. I’m feel lucky to have been at home for the last 6 months and I have been the most well I have been for years but it felt like things had shifted slightly recently but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. But years of being sick means I know my body and I can tell when something isn’t right. I have been feeling permanently exhausted and having way more bad days than good. I’ve gone back to spending 2, 3 or more consecutive days in bed, unable to do anything but watch tv and sleep.

The wrong size line

I’m on the M1 heading back to Nottingham after a road trip to St Marks to get my line repaired. But this is me, and as usual it wasn’t a smooth ride. More like a bloody shit show. So what happened? Let me tell you… After being admitted to QMC in Nottingham on Sunday with a broken Hickman line I was taken down to Interventional Radiology on Monday afternoon to get my line repaired. Firstly, I couldn’t believe it was happening so quickly and secondly I didn’t want to get too excited because, well it’s me, and usually things don’t go according to plan. And sadly I right to rein in the excitement.  When the doctor came to consent me for the procedure it was for a replacement, not a repair. I assumed he had made a mistake so I told him I was there to get my line repaired and was definitely not there for a new one. He looked at me and said “I hate to be the bearer of bad news…” and that’s a sentence that never bodes well. He then went on to say that they didn’t have any repair kits and that