A Year in The Life...

2013 was a bit of a mixed year. It didn't start out in the best possible way, still recovering from the glandular fever I had over Christmas and then being in hospital in only the second week of the year with chest pain and then catching a horrific sickness bug! Luckily the year got better! I turned 20! Which still seems a bit odd even though I'm nearly 21 now. I managed a 2:1 in my first year Creative Writing and Film Studies degree, even though I struggled a lot with illness and chest pain. And of course I started my blog! (I'm not sure what date that was I should probably check!) 

I feel like my illness has crept into my day to day life a bit more this year than it has perhaps any other year. It's something I seem to be thinking about more and more. Partly because the breathlessness, chest pain and medication routine intrudes my life more than it has ever done. Also the whole transplant idea has really taken off this year and I've had to think a lot about what I want to do and of course there's been a lot of worry about if I was even going to be offered it in the beginning, the disappointment that it didn't turn out to be miracle some part of me was hoping for, to the hope that one day that will change and transplant will be a safer route to go down. I think watching my boyfriend come to terms with it all has been the best part of this year. That sounds terrible but he really has surpassed himself and I am very proud, because it's not easy. We only got together at the end of 2012 so 2013 has been "the year of us". We just laugh about everything, and you've got to laugh about it. That's the one piece of advice I can give to you, is to never stop laughing in the face of adversity. Illness has always been a part of my life but it wasn't always a part of his, now it's just a part of us, part of life, part of everything. And that's pretty good going for a year's work. And there's no end to my praise for my family, particularly my mum, for how well they deal with it and manage to keep my spirits up too. The best thing about catastrophe (or rather the only good thing) is that it makes love stronger because you are that much more aware of how much it means to you. 

There will always be people who don't understand, who will never understand, but luckily for me there are very strong people in my life who understand and they far outweigh those people who really don't have a clue how ill I am because it's not written all over my face. It's that balance between treating me normally and being aware that I'm not normal that is so hard to achieve. The difference between not inviting me out or not arranging things for me because you'll assume I'm not going to be well enough and tweaking the arrangements so that I have the best time I possibly can while not damaging my health or excluding me. (I could go on for pages about how society is not following this simple rule when it comes to disabled people but I'll save that for another day!) For now I'll simply thank those lovely people in my life who are such a support to me. 

My writing has been the part of me that has grown the most this passing year and although my course is not perfect, it's doing it's job and I feel I am growing stronger as a writer. I've tried all sorts of styles that I wouldn't even have thought of trying, I've experimented and I've found out that I'm actually quite good at writing - who knew? I knew I loved it, I just didn't know if I was any good. And it turns out I'm not half bad. I'm going to have my name on a book one day. I want to walk into a bookshop, find some back shelf and say, "there, there it is, I wrote that. And look there's a gap, someone bought a copy!" It's a simple dream, but I take comfort in knowing I can do it! 

I don't have brilliant plans for 2014, I suppose I should be glad I haven't nearly died this year and I've made it to 2014 unharmed but that just isn't what I'm feeling. I don't like thinking about how the years are slipping by (I can't stand ticking clocks in my room because I hate to think of time passing so as you can probably imagine I don't like to celebrate new year much). To me, it's just another day. The fact that someone a very long time ago decided to split time into weeks, months and years doesn't resonate in my life other than a very practical way to organise everything. Only now I've got to remember to stick a different number on the end of the date which will probably take me most of the year to get use to. My birthday is the day I really think about the past year and what's happened, but as the rest of the world acknowledges a new chapter at new year, I thought I'd do this post now.

That being said I did have a very nice evening at my Gran's New Years Eve with pretty much all of what we might consider my mums side of the family. We had a nice Chinese and played a 4 hour game of trivial pursuit (which I lost quite badly - some of those questions are impossible!). It was a load of fun anyway and it was a really nice evening. 

So although I rarely acknowledge the passing of another year, I hope your year is healthy and bright, and hopefully mine will pass in much the same way as the previous year. With no catastrophes thank you very much. 

Happy New Year. 

Happy Christmas!

Sorry I've been rather quiet over the Christmas period. I've been meditating, willing my body not to get ill this year and somehow I managed it! I've actually been so busy leading up to Christmas that a part of me is quite looking forward to the rest. As I think I mentioned I was going off to Swansea to see my boyfriends family as soon as my final assessment was done for university, which was the last of four due in within a week which was not pleasant at all! We pretty much just chilled out in Swansea, as we didn't want to be really busy and get myself ill for Christmas. Unfortunately James ended up with a cold for Christmas - who saw that coming?! 

Then as soon as I was back home I had a pacemaker check, which was much better than expected as the technician said that he'd be surprised if my pacemaker didn't last ten years which is awesome as I haven't had any of my pacemakers longer than 6 years and as this one is 6 years old now I was expecting for it to be needing to be changed pretty soon. So that's one worry off my mind because I heard they like to do it under local anaesthetic in adult hospitals and while I'd definitely prefer that to the terrible sickness I get with general anaesthetic, I'm pretty keen to delay my first experience of being awake during surgery, or surgery of any kind come to that! 

After that I was busy catching up with everyone I hadn't seen while I was working on my assessments at uni, including spending some quality time with my mum and enjoying the luxuries of home the biggest of which being the bath! Although obviously my mums cooking is probably the best thing about being home. 

I had a lovely Christmas and I was healthy!! Which is brilliant! I had a lovely Christmas Day with my mum and her side of the family and then I went to my dads on Boxing Day to see his side of the family. It was a good two days and I really enjoyed myself. I love Christmas so much and it's always nice to get together with the family. Even better when they come bearing gifts! I got so many lovely presents and I'm really grateful to all of family and my boyfriend for buying me such lovely things! I got a lovely bag from my mum that's covered in ring pulls from cans, it looks really cool and the proceeds go to good causes. I got the headphones I asked for, a Kurt Geiger bracelet I asked for, a lovely necklace that was a complete surprise and an awesome feather quill from my boyfriend, a little make up bag from my mum that has the exact same pattern on that our family sofa had when I was little, lots of nice warm things like gloves, socks, slippers and woolly tights, the usual ton weight of chocolate and fudge and lots of lovely smelly stuff for the bath and shower and some lush goodies! (On that note: How good does Lush's snow fairy smell? Blimey I've heard people go on about it but boy does it smell good, it's like cotton candy heaven!) And I've got a topshop gift card to enjoy spending in the new year as well which is nice as I don't have much disposable income for new clothes these days.

I had problems with my chest as usual over Christmas but nothing too bad, mostly just because of the lack of sleep from all the excitement! Definitely looking forward to a nice rest. I don't have any plans over the next week other than to relax so I'm going to enjoy that, spend some time with my mum and chill out catching up with all the Christmas television I missed while I was busy being sociable.

I hope everyone had a brilliant Christmas and was healthy too! 

Updates

Well let's just say the morphine patches didn't work out for me. I honestly don't think I've felt that ill in a very long time. I was completely drugged up, but not in a good way, I barely had the patch on 18 hours and I was so dizzy and weak I struggled to stand up. I ended up in A&E because I hadn't eaten or drunk anything for 48hours and anything I had managed to drink I'd thrown up. It really wasn't very nice. It's put me off trying any other kind of slow release morphine. Or anything that takes two days to wear off. I think I'd just rather deal with the pain forever than go through that again.
So I'm just going to deal with the pain for a while and I've got a follow up appointment with palliative care the week before Christmas so I'll discuss any other kinds of pain management then but not surprisingly I'm feeling really put off at the moment.

This past week I've been really busy doing all my work for uni. I had two 2,500 word essays and one 2,500 word portfolio to do for this week. I had a Writing for Young People essay in today, which was a close reading of a couple of children's books and I think I'm going to do pretty well in that. I managed to link in a bit of child psychology so hopefully I'll get some brownie points for good research. The other two things are due in on Wednesday, I've just got a conclusion to do and when I get one of my portfolio pieces back I'll have to do all the corrections before I give it in.

Then on Thursday I'm off to Swansea to see my boyfriend's family, finish up some Christmas shopping and have a nice Christmas present wrapping session as we obviously need to give each other our presents before I go back to my hometown to spend some time with my family. I just can't wait for all my work to be done and submitted so I can relax and enjoy Christmas! I can't really do many Christmassy things at the moment because of all the work I've had to do. So I'm looking forward to the end of this week!
Christmas is my favourite time of year and as I was ill for the last two Christmases, I'm ready for a really good healthy Christmas this year!

Feeling Sentimental

Today is the 2 year anniversary of my lung haemorrhage. My lung haemorrhage was the point at which things started going wrong for me. You've heard the story. I was a dance student and then I couldn't do anything. It sounds like a Hollywood movie. I don't why I remember these dates when I can barely keep track of my friends' birthdays. I guess my brain is clinging to the moment it all went wrong. And when things go wrong as dramatically as a haemorrhage I guess it's normal to remember them. 

I'm not an expert but I do think traumas tend to be more mentally destructive than they are physically. It was such a horrible experience that it's odd now to look back on it because I know there was a time where I remembered every unpleasant detail and now there are only fragments of memories. It's not like I want to remember the horrible things, and my brain does tend to forget them, but I feel like I must remember it. Firstly because it reminds me how lucky I am to be alive and that's a feeling I want to cherish because it influences every choice I make in my life. A little awareness of your own mortality can be a good thing in very small quantities. I also feel like these memories, although not pleasant, are a part of me, part of who I am and I'd love to find a way of remembering them without having to think about them. I want to avoid that horrible period between tiredness and unconsciousness where your brain decides now is a good moment to think about all the silly things you've done and all the bad things that have happened to you. But I want to keep the memories because they're a big part of my life. I don't want to shut out bad things because they make me who I am and if I forget them then I haven't let them mold me.

I think there are advantages to not blocking out bad memories. It's strange that I remember so little of the operations I had throughout my childhood. Of even the pulmonary embolism I had when I was 16. The problem with memory is it's selective and usually worse at selecting things when you aren't sleeping. Everything was a blur even as I was experiencing it so now all I can see is fog and the things too awful to forget. I think if I could remember more of the relaxing time, the sitting around watching tv, the lovely nurses, it'd feel less like a trauma. 

I'd also like to remember these things because I am a writer and I'm very creative and I think it's the things that have happened to me that had made me like that. So apart from anything else these things make pretty good writing material. I would like to write an autobiography one day too and the fact that I can't remember much is a bit of an issue. 

I wouldn't change a thing about my life and I think my brain is going against me here by letting me forget the things that are important. But I can't complain. It's done a pretty good job at dealing with all the trauma that's been thrown at it over the years. If the only damage it's done is too my memory then that's pretty good going. 

But please brain, don't let me forget how lucky I am to be here. 

Life!

I'm sorry I haven't blogged in a while. My chest pain has been pretty constant and draining during the last few weeks and I haven't been up to doing much. When I have felt like writing I've had to get on with the four assignments I've got to submit in a months time for uni. They boasted for the first couple of weeks that they'd tried their hardest not to have all our assignments due in at once, but they've obviously failed quite miserably at that! I've been working on the 9,500 words of assignment and I've actually made pretty good headway at getting it done. I've finished one assignment, got the first draft done for another and started another, which I'm quite happy with because I don't need any more stress because that always makes chronic pain a lot harder to deal with. 

Today, I decided, to hell with it I'm going somewhere. After deciding not to go out all at for Halloween and firework night because they cold makes my chest exceptionally painful, I decided that the Christmas light switch on in Bath was something I should go to. And I'm so happy I did! My boyfriend and I had a nice lazy walk (I say walk in the loosest possible way as I was in my wheelchair but there's no word for that) around town, had a look in some shops and bought a warm hat to see me through the evening. Then we got into the warm and had coffee and a chat. Then braved the cold again for the main event. The light switch on, which this year starred Mary Berry along with a band and a gospel choir. Simply because we came at Milsom Street (where the event was) we ended up being allowed by security round the side of the stage without too much of a crowd and later the security even asked everyone to get out of the way so we could have a good view from behind the gates. We stood (again I'm using wrong word, I sat) by this really lovely woman who was also in a wheelchair and had the sweetest little 6 month old baby on her lap. We got a bit of press attention too, which I always find a bit odd as they wouldn't have looked twice at us if we weren't in wheelchairs but it's pretty cool still that I might end up with my picture in the local papers. 

The switch on show was really good, lots of Christmas songs to get everyone in the festive mood and then of course the highlight for everyone, Mary Berry! I love The Great British Bake Off and I love Mary Berry because she reminds me so much of my Gran. They were even both born in Bath and around the same age I think. My Gran is a massive fan of hers too. They're just both the sweetest women you can imagine. I think everyone would love to have Mary Berry as their grandmother. The best thing was that when she came down from the stage she walked towards us and started mingling with the crowd. Where we were was the only bit that wasn't fenced in so she was able to come right up to us and she shook my hand and asked me how I was and then my boyfriend asked if we could have a picture together and she said yes!!! I could barely contain how happy I was! My boyfriend managed to get a really good photo of us, which I will treasure for ever. It was just the prefect end to a lovely day. And I'm just so glad I decided to go out today because if I hadn't I wouldn't have had the lovely day I did. As it turned out my chest wasn't so bad in the cold, though you can see in the picture I'm pretty well wrapped up! But it was probably more to do with the excitement of seeing Mary Berry and having a lovely day that took my mind of the pain. It's hurting now as I lie in bed writing but I can have a swig of morphine now that I'm safely in bed and it doesn't matter if I fall asleep.

Before I start talking about what's happening with my chest pain, here is the photo: 

The press were also snapping like mad at this point so I might see this photo in one of the local papers too! 

I'll fill you in on what's happening with my chest, while I'm in the blogging mood. I went to the hospital to see my usual specialists but as usual they don't know anything. They seem pretty sure it's my pulmonary hypertension causing it but what the exact cause is remains a mystery. I always seem to be that person who just doesn't make sense at all! I go against pretty much everything ever written about heart disease and PH. To be honest I'm more concerned about pain relief and my palliative care doctor seems to have been a bit quiet for a while. Until this morning that is, when she suggested using a morphine patch. (As if I don't look enough of an addict as it is with my bag constantly full of syringes and tablets. It sure is going to look weird if I'm wearing what appears to be a nicotine patch and an oxygen cannula and I'm only 20 years old!) The liquid morphine isn't working out very well for me though. I took it at the beginning of the year for long periods and felt fine but this time I'm really feeling the drowsiness side effect, which is very frustrating. But the patch sounds like a good idea as it doesn't have the highs and lows of taking conventional forms of painkillers. Where you're in pain you take some, the pain is subdued and then the pain is back, which makes is the main reason it can become addictive and as pain management isn't as effective as slow release forms. (For anyone who is worried, my doctor told me it's virtually impossible to get addicted to morphine when you are using it for pain, it's when you take it when you have no pain that it effects a different part of the brain and it's then that addiction may be caused.) I don't know when this is going to happen but she said she wants to see me to discus other options so I'm not sure if these patches are going to get to me that fast. That is the most annoying thing about the healthcare system, everything takes a ridiculous amount of time. "Hello, I'm in constant pain here!", "so we'll see you in three weeks, okay?"

So I'm just waiting for things to be sorted at the moment but I'm getting out, which is good for my sanity, and I'm enjoying my uni work too. I'm feeling happy, which is the main thing. Just remember, life is for living, take every chance you have to go out there and let life give you the good stuff. Above all, learn to listen to your body, if it's telling you to rest, do it, if it's undecided, go out and have fun and see what it does to you. You don't know until you try, and maybe your body will give you a break. It did for me! 

Bath Christmas lights at Southgate shopping centre. 

Palliative Care Again

So I had an appointment with my palliative care doctor today to try and get some good pain killers for my chest pain. She didn't really know what the chest pain was but agreed that it was probably my pulmonary hypertension. Whether it's the effect if the pressures in my lungs or the effect of my lungs having to work harder. She did say it could be the iloprost but I'm not sure because the pain doesn't seem to get worse after I take it. She said it could be something to do with the stomach also because the pain is right at the bottom of my lungs so it could be something else. You have to be careful not to get fixated on the lung disease and just assume it's the lungs. I've had problems with my abdominal organs before now. 

She didn't get any tests done because I'm going up to Bristol early November and it's best not to have too many x-rays if you can avoid it. They aren't dangerous really, but when you've had at least two a year for the whole of your life, the radiation starts to mount up a bit. There's no point having one in Gloucester for them to do new ones in Bristol in less than three weeks. 

Anyway, she offered me a man made version of the oramorph, which tends to give people less side effects than the conventional form. I haven't tried it yet cause I have to drive back to Bath this afternoon and I don't want to risk it making me feel too drowsy to drive. There are lots of options if that doesn't work. It's just a case of finding the right painkiller for me. I'm glad I'm starting to get sorted on the pain killer front because I feel like my chest has got worse in the last few days. I'm hoping this new morphine is going to work. I'm falling a bit behind on my uni work. I think I'll have to spend tomorrow sending apology emails to all my tutors as I've missed a whole week of lectures now and I haven't recuperated at all. My palliative care doctor couldn't really help me on that apart from making sure I get a good night's sleep. Trouble is my pacemaker isn't very good at slowing my heart rate down enough to sleep. She said that was normal though so at least I feel less weird now. I've hallucinated whenever I've tried sleeping tablets so I'll just have to stick to camomile tea. 

I'll keep you posted on whether the new morphine does the trick.

Thanks for reading :) 

Feeling Down

I got really down tonight. I had a plenary class at uni, which usually just involves a writer coming to talk about their work, give us tips about the industry and getting creative and things like that but today we had a graduate come in and talk about her career since leaving uni. She was aiming to be a writer and producer for big feature films but at the moment she was working on some films independently and getting into the industry by working on tv and film sets. She is a runner, which is basically just someone how organises all the backstage or behind the camera things. Now I would absolutely love to have that job. That would be one of my dream jobs. I've wanted to be a backstage theatre manager ever since I did some backstage work at one of the shows at my old dance school. I was only in one dance so I mostly did all the backstage stuff and it was really fun. You get all the rush of being a performer, running around getting everything organised but you just don't ever go on stage. It would be my perfect job, and I reckon I'd be really good at it too as I'm good at organising things. 

But the job involves a lot of running around. If someone isn't on the side of the stage at the right time, if a prop isn't there, you literally have to run around trying to find what you need. Depending on what your role is, you might have to go around all the changing rooms giving people the time they have until they need to be on stage. I don't think you could do it in a wheelchair because most theatres are very old, there are stairs everywhere and the corridors are narrow and usually half blocked with props and racks of costumes. I think holding down any kind of full time job is going to be near impossible. I'm hardly at uni 3 hours a day and I'm thoroughly exhausted. And it's too much to hope the an employer will be flexible about all the time off I'll have to have for hospital appointments and varrious illnesses and catastrophes that my life tends to contain. 

I don't know, maybe there is a way I could volunteer backstage at some kind of theatre because I think I'd enjoy it so much that I wouldn't care if I wasn't getting paid. I just don't like the thought of staying in all day, doing nothing and then wondering why I'm not getting any inspirations for my writing. 

It just got me feeling a bit down about what I can't do and that surprised me because I'm usually really positive. I guess everyone has those down days. Perhaps it was just that I wasn't expecting someone to come in and talk about the kinds of jobs I can't do because I'm doing a writing degree and however ill I am, I can sit in bed and write. I should just be happy that I'm good at writing and there's a good chance that I'll be able to make a career out of it, however small. But is it wrong to want more? 

I'm going to try and do something with my days when I finish university, even if it's just for fun, and maybe I could do some volunteering work at a theatre, or something similar. Because I hate the thought of sitting around all day trying to write. I want to do as much with my life as I possibly can while I'm still well enough to do things. I don't want to loose that drive. Of course I'll carry on writing, writing will be my main goal. But I need to do other things to feed my creativity and my drive. Virginia Woolf calls the mundane, everyday chores of life cotton wool. That's what I don't want. For my life to be full of cotton wool. Because no one wants to read about cotton wool. 

I've said cotton wool to many times now and it's gone weird on me. Cotton Wool. 

How Hospital Made Me Weird

Managed to get a few minutes to myself to brush up this post I started writing a few weeks ago. Enjoy and feel free to laugh at my strange ways! 

I'm into a bit of amateur self psychology. Every time I have a weird dream I try to figure out what part of my confused brain put the events together. But I think a lot of the weird things about me stem from things that happened to me in hospital. I'm not talking about mental breakdowns, just little quirks of my nature that will probably be amusing to read about. I thought this would be a good funny post anyway.

Perhaps the most obvious quirk of nature which originates from hospital is my fear of masks. I'm talking about the plastic party masks, ones that pretend to be a face. They just really creep me out. The more cartoony they are the worse they scare me, particularly when they cover the mouth and the mask has a really wide cartoon style smile on. However really realistic ones, like the goblin masks in Harry Potter don't bother me at all because they don't seem like masks so much. Anyway I think this came from the surgeon's masks as they cover the mouth and I think that's the thing about masks that creep me out. You wouldn't think masks come up in your life that much but it's quite surprising how much it does. I think I see a mask on tv or in someone's picture on Facebook on average about once a week. And Halloween is really not fun! I don't know when this fear came because I've not always had it, it seemed to just come out of nowhere at some point in my childhood but I'm sure surgeons are to blame. 

The next one is sort of a good one. I think because of the endless list of doctors and nurses that have seen me naked, I have no insecurities about my body at all. The only thing I don't like is that my leg hair grows insanely fast, but I could easily keep on top of it if I could be bothered. Considering I grew up dancing where everyone is really conscious of their weight, their size, their height and everything because it affects what kind of dancer you can be. To be ballet dancer you have to be around 5'6" in height, have long legs, a flat chest, high arched feet and all sorts of things like that, it's surprising that none of the body obsession rubbed off on me. I don't know if it's the amount of people seeing me naked and not making a big thing about it or just because I have bigger things to worry about. I suppose I can blame heart disease for the things that I could hate about my body, the fact that I'm really skinny, that I'm short (there are cases of identical twins where the child with CHD is about a foot shorter than the child without), that I have scars etc. But none of it bothers me at all. Perhaps it's more comforting to be able to blame it on something rather than just having to accept it. I'd hate to not be comfortable in my body. I'm really glad that I turned out this way. 

After constant consumption of calpol and other strawberry flavoured medicines, I now can't drink or eat anything that's strawberry flavoured. Worst are things that are really sugary like strawberry milkshakes. Tastes and smells have strong connections with memories. The smell of oxygen is another thing that makes me want to gag because of all the times I've felt ill and been given it as a child. They had to resort to tying it to my teddy when I was little in the hope that some of it would waft into my face. I don't mind the fresh oxygen that comes in tanks, that's only got a really subtle smell but the oxygen that comes from oxygen concentrators smells like a mixture of car exhaust fumes and melting plastic. Everyone I know who's used it said it's completely bearable, but I can't stand the smell at all.  Which is pretty annoying because I could do with being on oxygen quite a lot and ordering oxygen tanks is a massive pain because the oxygen company my gp uses is rubbish. But I'm thinking about seeing if my palliative care doctor could arrange a better system because my gp has tried all it can but the oxygen company are having none of it. 

I'm not sure if this is a good one or not. I never feel like I was a proper teenager. I had to grow up really quickly because just as I was turning a teenager was just when I was finding out a lot of things about my illness and my future. I went through a bit of a difficult year when I was about 13 when I found out everything, and I was bullied a bit at around the same time, so I had a bit of a down year but then after that was all sorted and I got my head around everything I felt a lot more grown up. It's like I did the whole teenage thing in one year. I guess it's a good thing because I felt like I was pretty happy as a teenager and I'm sure if you asked any adult what part of their life they'd want to skip it would probably be the teenage years. I think a big part of it is I've always been very aware of my own mortality, and I think the thing about the teenage years and university student age is you just don't really think about how much bad food you're eating, what smoking is doing to your lungs and what drinking is doing to your liver. Although I guess the fact that adults do all of those things means that that theory doesn't just apply to teenagers. I've always thought of myself as mature for my age. Perhaps my brain is trying to fit all my development into my life expectancy. By the time I'm 30 I'll be knitting surrounded by cats. 

This is probably the weirdest one. I really like order and being in a really controlled environment like a school. I always wanted to go to boarding school when I was little because it seems like a really safe place to be because you don't have to deal with the world much. I'm a bit of a hermit! It must be really unusual for a creative person to like order because creativity is so messy! I guess this is because I have a lot of decisions and problems do to with my health and I like the thought of not having to deal with it and just having someone just say right this is what's happening. Even though that obviously wouldn't work in practise. I'm not a natural leader, lets say. I'd make a good minion. 

The next one is quite annoying. It's that I can't get to sleep unless I'm in a room of perfect silence and darkness. I'm really fussy about the conditions in which I can sleep. I can't have a ticking clock in my room because that annoys me. I can only have the fan on if I wear ear plugs and I have to have it on a low setting because I hate my hair blowing into my face; I hate anything around my neck and face. I reckon this is because of all the nights I've spent in hospital, which is like sleeping outside how noisy it is. Especially when I was in the children's hospital where there are babies crying and toddlers screaming round every corner. Hospitals don't really value a good nights sleep. The nurses talk loudly in the corridors all night, they don't turn the lights out till 11 if you're lucky and then wake you up at six for blood tests and even if you don't need any tests they wake you up for breakfast not long after. I struggle to sleep in the day because obviously darkness is hard to find. I suppose spending a lot of time trying so sleep in a noisy, loud ward should have made it easier for me to sleep in a semi-dark quiet room. But unfortunately that didn't happen. 

I think this one is really understandable. I hate gruesome or violent films. I don't mind the odd thriller, the odd crime drama but those really gruesome films like the Saw franchise or films like that I can't stand at all. I'm sure this is because they're often really clinical, there's usually a surgeon's scalpel at hand and oxygen masks and hospital beds with straps and creepy things like that. Especially if it's a torture scene So obviously I'm not a massive fan of that. I don't really like the feeling of being freaked out by gory stuff. And hate seeing people hurt each other, even on film. It's just not my thing at all. I find it opens up a lot of unpleasant memories for me. Having tests you haven't had done before, doctors with a tray of needles, is pretty frightening and it's the same feeling that I get when I watch some mad guy brandishing needles and scalpels at some helpless 'patient'. So no, I'm not going to watch any gruesome films, thank you. (Saw is on our watch list for my Film Studies module this year! Help me!!!!!)  

Here's a nice one to finish on, it takes an awful lot to get me bored because of the endless hours I've spent in hospital, lying around for days on end and not doing much. I think this is partly my nature also, as my mum is an artist so she is exceptionally patient with her drawings. We always used to sit together and paint or draw, or do puzzles and things when I was recovering from surgery or illness. I always have a head full of things to do and relish the long periods of calm in which I can begin to make a start on everything I want to do. I'm a highly creative person too, which also helps. If I'm bored I'll look through my list of unfinished pieces of writing, my sewing box, my bookshelf, my craft drawer, my library of DVDs and I'll always find something interesting to do. Most creative people have had some kind of trauma in their lives, which kick starts their creativity. Certainly a lot of the successful ones have. Often it's an illness in their childhoods, or bouts of depression. Depression is a very popular one for writers, J. K. Rowling, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams and Emily Dickinson all suffered with depression. While studying dance, I came across a lot of dancers who had had some kind of illness in their childhood, often this was the reason they began dancing in the first place. It's good that some good comes out of a bad thing, and it's obvious to me that having heart disease has made me who I am and I've never wished for a moment that was any different, even though of course I'd love to get rid of this illness, it's still a part of me.