I have returned from my trip to Oxford and I'm certainly pretty tired out! But I had a really good time! I'm pretty pleased with how my health kept up as well. I wasn't as tired out as I thought I'd be throughout the trip but when I got home I was absolutely exhausted! I could barely stay away long enough to have a bath and get into bed but I felt much better after a long sleep. Considering I wasn't sleeping brilliantly on the trip as the hotel was boiling, I'm very impressed with how I kept going, even if I'm probably going to be feeling rather tired out this week. It was definitely worth it.
The trip mainly consisted of trying out all the restaurants in Oxford and I absolutely stuffed myself full of food! If I didn't put on any weight, I never will. We ate out for lunch and diner nearly every day. We found this really lovely pub called 'The Eagle and Child' just round the corner from the Ashmolean Museum, which is apparently where J. R. R. Tolkien wrote Lord of The Rings, and they had some of his drawings on the walls. Lewis Carroll too is said to have eaten and wrote there. It was very quintessentially British, which is always nice. We had a really good curry on the last night, which was just up the road from the hotel. I'm fussy with curries because I like a korma but I often find them too sweet and not spicy enough but I like really creamy curries but this time I had a spicy starter so I was happy with my very rich, creamy curry. I don't feel like I've been properly hungry for ages so I'm looking forward to have a few salads, eating a bit healthier and going back to my grazing.
The highlight of the trip was actually something we didn't plan at all. We were in the Ashmolean cafe, wondering what to do in the evening and thinking we couldn't possibly go out to dinner again and thought we'd check out the local theatres. The only thing on at the main theatre was the Rocky Horror Show and even though I love musicals I don't think it would be my cup of tea so we looked at the Oxford Playhouse and saw they had a Agatha Christie play on called 'Go Back for Murder'. Now me and my boyfriend love a good crime drama so we phoned up and got two tickets for £30 right at the front for that night. The play was really good too, probably the best play I've seen for a while.
The Harry Potter tour was great too, it was really good to go again because there was a lot of things I'd forgotten and things I didn't notice before. Though it wasn't quite as magical as the first time it was still really good. I won't spoil anything for you in case you're planning on going because the magic is in the surprise! I splurged a bit at the gift shop, but you never know if you'll be able to go again and you can't buy a lot of the stuff anywhere else other than the Harry Potter resort in America. So I bought some charity books J. K. Rowling did for comic relief back in 2001. I don't know why I never bought them but I'd been meaning to get them ever since I got another charity book, 'The Tales of Beadle the Bard' for Christmas, which are wizard fairytales and are akin to our Grimm Tales. The two books I got from the tour are based on Hogwarts text books, which feature in the original Harry Potter books.
'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them' describes all the creatures in the world of Harry Potter including some annotations from Harry and Ron. 'Quidditch Through The Ages', which obviously from the title gives a bit more information about the game than the Harry Potter books did. This too is graffitied and has a library stamp in the front with a list of students who have taken out the book, which is a nice touch. They were £5 each. I probably could have got them cheaper online but as they're charity books I wanted to buy them from a proper shop so I know where the money is going. And brand new books are much nicer when they haven't been battered in the post.
I also got a little notebook, because I love notebooks. I have loads of them lying around so one more can't hurt, right? The crest on the front is metal, the pleather is nice quality and the paper inside is really glossy so it's nice it's well made.
I also got a soft toy of Scabbers, which is Ron's rat and ends up being a bit more than he seems (dum dum dah!). I just thought he was cute and he's even got a toe missing and little patches of fur pulled out like he's described in the books. And I got a deathly hallows keying, which you can see in the picture too. I also got some pins to go on the little bag I keep my iloprost in because I put all my heart charity pins on there so I thought I'd start collecting pins. Because I'm weird like that.
There were lots of nice little book shops we found in Oxford we found as we were walking around trying in vane to make ourselves hungry before lunch. I bought a good hospital boredom buster book from Waterstones on the first day, which is called 'Wreck My Journal' and it's like an adult activity book basically. On every page there's a different way to wreck the book. For example there some normal ones that you'll probably remember doing to your old school books like punching through the page with a pencil, colouring in a whole page and some really inventive ones like eating colourful candy and licking the page and using strands of your hair to make a pattern or picture. It seems like a really funny thing to do in hospital because people will probably think I'm really crazy just sat in bed licking my book. I haven't put in a picture because I think I'll do a before and after shot when I've finished it. I also bought a book of Samuel Taylor Couleridge's poetry, which I like because it's really dark; Couleridge suffered from depression. And I also got Virginia Woolf's 'The Waves' because beginning sounds like a story I'm writing at the moment so I though it might inspire me to write a bit more of it. I bought both of those from a £2 bookshop. I think they must be the end of printing lines because they're all brand new and unread. Now I need to finish Mrs Dalloway, which I've been reading for ages. Miss Woolf is quite heavy going!
Think that's about it really. We wanted to go round a college but they were all closed and we didn't end up going down the river because my skin is reacting really badly to the sun at the moment. I've always got one or two attacks of heat rash but this year has been ridiculous. I'm going to see if my medication might have something to do with it as I got sun burnt the other day whilst sitting in the shade. Iloprost is the only thing new but it's not on the list of side effects. However there's probably not a great deal of data on the subject because very few people take it so that doesn't really rule it out as the cause. Maybe if it's due to photosensitivity there might be a different meditation they can give me rather than the hay fever tablets I've tried, which haven't done much for it. But for now I'm just trying not to scratch my sunburnt rash!
Nothing much else to update you on. I'm going to see the Papworth transplant team in just under three weeks for the usual tests and things. Nothing that interesting I don't think. I haven't got any further in my decision making as to whether or not to have a transplant in the future. I'm just going to keep checking in with the transplant team and I'm not ruling anything out yet and hopefully it'll be a nice while before I have to worry about making that decision.
I've got a few half written posts knocking about so no doubt they'll be up in the near future. Thanks for reading and have a nice day!
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