Goodbye, 2015

I re-read the post I wrote this time last year, and I'm pretty confident I can beat it. 2015 has been awesome. 

In my end-of-2014 post I spoke about how lucky I felt to be training for my job. Now I've qualified and been working for a couple of months I feel no less lucky, but often a lot more stressed. It's still very hard to think "on balance, this is still fulfilling" when you have to change scrubs, forget about wearing underwear for the rest of the shift, and try to filter out the lingering smell of amniotic fluid in your hair... but I wouldn't do anything else!

The year where my health is worse than 2014 will probably be the year I die. 2015 wasn't perfect, but it was significantly better. My progress with transverse myelitis has plateaued, but I'm at a point where I'd be happy to stay for the rest of my life. Leg movement is (near enough) back to my normal: I'm bouldering, cycling, and rowing. Sensation is still fairly impaired, and I'm still obliviously breaking toes and bruising legs, but I've only been in complete agony with nerve pain 5 times this year - I'll take that! Now it's been nearly 15 months it's looking unlikely that I'll get any more bladder sensation back, but I saw my urologist a couple of weeks ago who feels the risks of spinal surgery to possibly correct this aren't worth the potential benefits. I agree, and whilst I'd rather not be catheterising for the rest of my life, I'm definitely grateful that I've been dealt retention instead of incontinence.

Earlier this month I met my new gastro consultant in Nottingham. He seemed very unimpressed with my switch to vegetarianism (still going strong!), but conceded that I'm possibly the best nourished I've been in a decade. I got a bit better after my little Crohn's relapse in Africa, but now I seem to be heading downhill again. I've re-started azathioprine (an immunosupressant drug most commonly used after organ transplants), and I'm having scans for a ?bowel stricture (a narrowing of the bowel caused by scarring), but it's barely affecting my life at the moment.

My first Christmas as a vegetarian was surprisingly un-disappointing, and working whilst everyone else was off wasn't as annoying as I thought it would be. Let's do 2016!

Love Emily x

Heidelberg, Germany

Since my last post most of my life has been consumed by midwifery, but last week I had the luxury of a weekend off, so I spent it in Heidelberg, Germany, visiting friends from Leicester.

Heidelberg in the winter is pretty cold so I took along a truckload of painkillers, expecting the weather to trigger a fresh new wave of agony. I was extremely relieved that nothing kicked off, and also quite proud that I managed to climb to the top of Heiligenberg - a mountain which boarders the town. Wheelchair to mountain in 12 months isn't bad :)

As for work: it's going better than I expected it to, I'd been told, numerous times by numerous people, that I'd go home and cry after the end of each shift for the first 6 months, and after that I might see an improvement. I've been working for 4 weeks now, and it's not so bad!

Although the support my Trust has given to ease the transition from 'student' to 'qualified' has been great, I've still found myself becoming a bit stressed - and that's starting to affect other areas of my life. I can't sleep as well as I did, I'm becoming quite prone to minor illnesses, and my days off are just spent sleeping. I feel very far away from the calm and happy person I was in Africa, and I struggle to believe it was only 4 months ago. Luckily Nottingham is a great city for sport: I've joined 2 gyms, a swimming pool, a rock climbing centre, and an (extremely casual) rowing team - and Abbie is always up for a pub session! I'm using travelling as my carrot: I'm off to Norway in January, and hatching plans for inter-railing in the summer. Even at my most stressed I still love my job, and couldn't imagine doing anything else. It's just a case of gaining more confidence, right?

Love Emily x