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