A few updates to share with you all :)
We have raised enough money for me to have all of the blood tests I need as well as some left over for other tests, which is such great news and I am feeling incredibly lucky to have such support :D Thanks to everybody who has donated, publicised and helped out with our fundraising so far. We've still got a long way to go with affording treatments long term, but just to be able to start to find out what's wrong and have a plan to solve it is an amazing prospect. Especially as we have smashed through the £1000 raised mark, and have got lots of things coming up in the next month to hopefully help raise more.
Also on the good news front, the blood tests were actually really easy to organise, or so we thought. So we arranged for our really lovely district nurse to come out last week and do the full lot of blood for us for Breakspears tests, and my mum to drive them down to Hemel Hempstead before 2pm.
But it ended up being cancelled. So this week the plan all came together, and Ruth came by to take my bloods, and there was rather a lot of them :/ More than I'd expected. She is the loveliest lady though and makes it actually not too bad to have huge amounts of blood taken when you're half asleep. I even managed to break the record of amount of vials taken in one go by my nurse.
I'm well known by my surgery as being almost impossible to find a vein in and usually have several puncture marks before they find one that works :P but we got success first time :D I know it might seem odd to be documenting blood tests and be quite so excited about them but even though I've had so many bloods done over the years I've never expected them to show anything as the bog standard NHS ones never really do with M.E. So to be able to see what is actually going wrong is a first :) I had 13 vials and some of them were flipping ginormous, its surprising how much blood your body can lose in one go and still be ok with it. Minus my hand turning grey and a slight pastyness :P
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| Ignore hypermobile arm bendyness at the wrong angle |
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| All boxed up and ready to go. |
My dad drove them down and dropped them off at the hospital pathology lab. Now just to wait a few weeks for the results and begin to put a treatment program together :D The hope of getting stronger is especially appealing at the minute as typically my body has gone into winter mode and is getting one virus after another (last year that lasted 6 months of solid extra poorlyness, it really better not be planning to do the same this year :/) so I'm a lot weaker than usual and not able to do the amount of things I was only a couple of weeks ago. Which is frustrating and I'm getting lots of worsening symptoms as a result.
Erm... yes slightly pale. At least I look the part for Halloween ;)
My next few posts will probably be guest posts from family/friends about Fundraising events that have been going on, so I can curl up somewhere warm with my hedgehog awaiting spring, and the winter viruses to pass :P
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| Piggles favourite spot, in my bed. |
Love to you all,
Em (and Piggly) xxx
