You were an awesome mate, I only met you in year 10, but I felt like I’d known you my whole life. You were full of energy, and could always make me laugh. You will be so missed Youngy, I guess it’s true God only takes the good ones, because you were one of the best ever.
Rest in peace mate, and have fun in heaven xx
Kath xxxx
(link taken out cos it reveals my location.)
And I have the plaster to prove it! See!!!
It was pretty fun actually. As in, nowhere near as hard
as I thought it was going to be!
And it didn’t hurt. Not that I really thought it would hurt a lot, but it hardly hurt at all. The worst part was when they took the needle out, I barely felt a thing when they put it in!
I’m happy I did it! And roll on September when I can do it again. (The next date I can is…. MY BIRTHDAY!! How cool is that?)
Hope everyone else is having a great week!
Long time no post! Unfortunately, I am incredibly busy at college right now, I have my AS level exams coming up in the next month or so, and so everything is about REVISION. I can’t believe I’ve nearly finished my first year here already, it feels like only yesterday I started, whilst also feeling like I’ve been here my entire life. I love College! I even have an entire album dedicated to it on my Picasa. (Comment if you would like to see an English college campus and I’ll email people I know the link. Know in a bloggy sense of course.)
As for the title Reggae Reggae Sauce is quite possibly my new greatest love. Any UK readers will probably recognise it from being on Dragon’s Den, and I am so glad they invested. This sauce is absolutely gorgeous, I am yet to marinade anything in it, but as a dipping sauce it is tops! It’s very spicy, but not overpowering, just delicious.
Anyway, that is really all I have time for, I promise I will blog more after my exams, and toodles for now!!
P.S. (Can you have a P.S. in a blogpost? Idk) Anyway my mum is going for an ultrasound scan on her carotid artery on Thursday, to asses it before she has bypass surgery on her heart, so prayers for her would be welcomed please.
Light Will Emerge, by Kaci King.
I bought this book on the recommendation of Cindy, over at Cole Twins, and it is a fantastic book! It came in the post on Friday morning, and I took it to college with me, and spent my entire journey there glued to it. Same for my break, a part of my lunch, and my journey home! Then the same happened yesterday evening, and earlier this afternoon I finally finished it! I don’t often get so absorbed in a book I can’t put it down, in fact I have a tendency to put books down and forget about them, finding them with bookmarks in months later. But this book fascinated me. It is an amazing book, and is a real insight into both craniosynotosis and chiari,malformation, I have come away feeling like I have a real understanding of the conditions, and even more admiration for the mums’ and their children who have these conditions.
The book takes the form of partly diary entries from the time of surgeries and other events, and partly a narration looking back, and documents the difficulties not only with the surgeries, but also the difficulties the author had with doctors who didn’t take her seriously and underplayed her fears. The author has an amazing talent for really addressing her readers, and making you feel like she is talking to you alone, not just as one of many readers. She speaks openly and honestly about the good and bad aspects to the treatment she received, and the surgeries her children underwent, and really explains things to you in a clear and concise way.
If I had a review system going here on my blog, I would give this blog 5/5 stars, and recommend it to everyone! There is a link to buy it from here, so if you fancy a good read, hop on over and buy it!!
We were at the park before, and my cousin was playing his music from his phone incredibly loudly, and basically peeing everyone in the vicinity off.
Aunt says, “*cousins first name* Stop it.”
He turns it up louder. “*cousins full name* STOP THAT NOW.”
He turns it up as loud as it will go, “*cousins full name* If you don’t turn that off this second, when Rihanna reaches the chorus, I am going to do something you won’t like.” He stares at her defiantly.
As the song goes “Put on your green lights..”
My aunt leaps up, starts singing (shouting) along at the top of her voice, doing daft Dad dancing. Hip thrusts, Travolta arms, everything you associate with Dad dancing. Along with her singing. In the middle of a public park, with lots of families, and therefore quite a few boys my cousins age. The music went off instantly.
She turned to us and said,
“And THAT is how it is done.”
And was rewarded with a round of applause from most of the parents in the vicinity.
This is the one where I share some of the more… unusual queries people have entered in google, and found my blog.
The top search query for this month is “Gang Bang Betty” which hit on my post about Betty Bryce’s X factor audition. While a funny search term, that one is completely understandable, I can understand why my blog would come up. I can only hope they were looking for the X Factor, and not anything unsavoury.
And sadly, that is it for the funny. I’m still getting around 5 hits a month for “Harry Wong” though, and I still haven’t a clue who he is.
And, to the person who searched “How to cheat at GCSEs free” I’m afraid I can’t actually help you there, I would have no idea. I would recommend revising, instead of spending your time googling that.
A sweet lady on a blog I read does this every Monday, so even though I’m 17, and I don’t have all too many memories that will fit, I decided to start, and just see where I get! The original idea lies here with the sweet lady who started it!
My object for today is this card,
Which may seem weird, but there is a story behind it. And my cousin, if he reads today, will recognise this instantly.
You may or may not know, depending on how well you know me, that when I was 7 my mum had a heart attack. A major heart attack, one big enough that she died twice, once on the ambulance ride, and as they pulled up to the hospital. Both times she was luckily, by the grace of our good Lord, brought back by the paramedics. Anyway, I knew none of this at the time, I actually didn’t even know she was ill, because I was in school. So, after school, I have been told a neighbour picked me up, and I vaguely remember getting sweets from the corner shop, and going to my aunts house, and playing with my cousin. My memory of most of it is, of course, pretty hazy, I don’t think I ever realised the true seriousness of my mum’s condition till much, much later, but I know me and my cousin were playing in the front yard, and I’ve been told this was the same day. So, we were playing, and an older woman came up to us. She asked if we knew who Jesus was, and we nodded. She reached out, and she touched the Star of David necklace around my neck, asking if I was Jewish. I replied, “Yes and no. My daddy is, but mummy isn’t, I dunno what I am yet.” And she laughed, and handed me and my cousin each one of these cards. She told us, “Jesus told me to give these to you two, and I want you to know it’s true. And, I want you both to know that he is the great Physician, which means Doctor.” And she walked off.
I have never ever forgotten that, and I still have the card to this day. I remember the way I stared at her when she spoke about the doctor, and even though my aunt is to this day convinced it was a weird coincidence, I have always felt that it was God speaking to me, through that woman. I can’t explain it, but I just know!
So that is the first item I would put in the memorial box, and yes, 10 whole years later I still have that card. And, my mum recovered wonderfully, and came out of the hospital just 2 weeks after her arriving there in such a state.
Yay!! It’s the Easter holidays. And everything is going medium well so far.
The boiler. Kinda broke rather majorly on Saturday, as in water started coming out from the bottom, it poured for around 5 mins, slowed to a drip, and has stopped today. The engineer is coming out today, but luckily the boiler is both insured and in warranty, so we are pretty much covered. As well as the fact googling the make suggests it is a fault with many of our boilers, and the people who fitted it went “Oh do you have a *Boiler type and make*” when my mum rang up to tell them, so I definitely think we are covered! And at least, even though it isn’t working, it never leaked properly seriously, and there is only a tiny amount of damage from the water to the floorboards below.
Something seems to happen every time I’m on holiday from college recently, but cross fingers, the boiler will be the only thing this time.
Apart from that minor disaster, everything is fine here. My mission is to watch a DVD everyday of my holiday, because I have loads that I’ve never watched. So, on Saturday, I watched Après Vous, and I re-watched Corrina, Corrina, and yesterday, I babysat for Jethro, (He isn’t called Jethro, but he likes Gibbs on NCIS, and so has requested his blog name be Jethro. I’m babysitting for him all this week, because his mum can’t get off work, so he may be mentioned a few times.), and we watched Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, and re-watched Man of The House. The original one with Chevy Chase, not the new daft one about cheerleaders. All the films are good, but Corrina, Corrina, and Man Of The House, I would recommend most. Today, Jethro and I are supposed to be watching Zathura, so I may post a mini-review of that later.
Everyone in my family is fine at the moment, and I hope everyone in the bloggy world is the same
Please keep the Cole family in your prayers, as they work to find answers to their children, and seek a cure for Chiari Malformation.
Happy Easter holidays/Spring break everyone! (For any American readers I may have, I’m dying to know, are these Easter holidays the Spring Break that Ross and Chandler on Friends mean when they go “Spring Break Woohoo!”?)
Tend to get hi-jacked by real life, or at least my good intentions do. Or, even my real life good intentions get hi-jacked by other things, and everything has to stop.
I have tried to write this post a million times, but I just can’t seem to find the words. I have no idea how to say it without sounding either uncaring, or overdramatic. I’m going to try, one last time, and this post is going out there, so if I sound mean, please understand that I’m not being, and if I sound overdramatic, then I probably am being, so please disregard that bit of my post. And it’s bloody hard without names!
Tuesday evening I was playing with/helping look after my cousins, , as their mum was in bed feeling unwell, with what we now know was a chest infection, not just a cold. So, I was helping her husband, look after the children while he looked after her, if that makes sense. Around 7.30pm, at the very beginning of Eastenders, he came downstairs, and subtly pulled me out of the room. He explained that my aunt seemed to be worsening, she was coughing a lot more, struggling a little to breathe, and even though she was insisting he shouldn’t take her to hospital, he thought he was going to. I suggested he rang NHS Direct, because they would almost certainly agree with him, and maybe (I’m naming her for this blog), Carla, would be persuaded if she heard a professionals opinion. So, he rang, and described her symptoms, let her talk to them, and said “Yes, she needs to come to hospital, and we are dispatching an ambulance now.”
So the ambulance and the RRU car arrived in around 9-10 minutes (More on that later), and the paramedics went upstairs, and I believe they gave Carla some form of nebuliser, and put her onto oxygen. And they brought her downstairs, put her into the ambulance, did some checks, and raced her off to hospital with the lights and siren going. At that moment, I think it sank in to me, and her oldest child, just how serious this was. My uncle had stayed with us, thinking back that seems mental, he should have been with Carla, but he was gathering things into a bag, and then we all piled into the car and began the long journey to the hospital. (It’s about half an hour away from their house, maybe a bit further.) The car trip was awful. The kids were both crying (They are older children, early teens), and the girl was convinced mummy was about to die, and I think the boy was secretly thinking the same. I tried to reassure them, but it was hard, not knowing what was happening at the hospital end, not wanting to make a promise I couldn’t keep. Anyway, eventually we arrived.
To cut a short story shorter, we found she was still in the triagey bit of A&E, but she was a lot more stable now, she had a IV line in, and she had her oxygen mask. We went in, and she talked a little to us, which went a great way to comforting her children, and her nurse came in, and took the time to explain in simple terms what they were doing for Carla to the children. And, really, once she’d arrived at the hospital things calmed down. She got the antibiotics she needed, and improved amazingly fast, and she will be hopefully discharged today. (She was going to be discharged yesterday, but the duty doctor wasn’t quite happy with the sound of her breathing.) But, for about an hour, everything was up in the air, and it was so scary. She’s fine, thank God, and also thanks in no little part to the amazing level of care she received at the hospital, and in the ambulance.
Here is where I would like to talk about the ambulance. The RRU car and ambulance arrived simultaneously, around 10 minutes after NHS Direct said they would. They made a half-hour journey, if they came from the hospital, or a 45 minute journey if they came from the ambulance base (someone with more knowledge would know which, but I don’t), in TEN minutes. Even with sirens on, I think that’s impressive, though to our government, ten minutes would be seen as a failure, because the target is 8 minutes. I have heard people say before that ambulances in the UK are too slow, they take ages to come. Well, I have a family member who has a severe form of epilepsy, that now is under control, but at one stage lead to ten 999 calls in the space of a year. Every single ambulance arrived at their house in less than 8 minutes. When my mum had her heart attack, the RRU car arrived while she was still on the phone, and the ambulance didn’t take much longer. All the paramedic staff I, or my family have ever encountered have been wonderful, exemplary examples of the level of care given from the NHS.
So, thank you to my local hospital (I don’t want to name it, because it will give my location away!), and thank you to the North West Ambulance Service (They cover a much larger area), for everything you do for everyone in my area. YOU ROCK!
Edit- As Ron pointed out, I missed NHS Direct off my thank you’s, so thank you to NHS Direct, and especially to Nurse Hannah and Dr Khan that my uncle spoke to. (I take no responsibility for those names being wrong!)
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