The Rosebush

Pics are now available HERE of Cyclone Nargis.  Please don’t use them, especially if you are a journalist! Just ask me nicely

By the way, my photo gallery is now relocated at smugmug.  Thanks Mark!

I am now in Bangkok for a week or two with nothing to do except eat greasy food (yum!!) and lounge around by the pool.

I am textable on the usual number!

I’m being evacuated (!) to Bangkok on Friday and will be textable from then, and will have better net access too.

THANK YOU to all the people who called my parents to ask about me :) 

xx

But I am safe and well.  I’m still in Yangon, which is a total diaster area, but I’m okay (and grateful for all the worried messages!).

Waiting to see what will happen next…

Yangon is not a fun place to be, and I think it’s going to get a lot worse over the next few days.  People are queueing up for HOURS on end (like 8 hours at a time) to try to get fuel, and are then limited to just a few gallons at a time.  Supermarkets are running out of food and drinking water, and it could start to get ugly in terms of civil unrest as people start to panic. 

Fortunately for me, i’m a foreigner and will (I hope!) be taken care of by my employer and my embassy, but it is a tragedy that the vast majority of Burmese people can’t say the same thing.  I’m definitely one of the lucky ones.

Anyway, once I can update again and maybe even get some pictures up, I’ll do so.

Ciao for now and thank you again for caring xxx

…but apparently I am green anyway!

Went back to taekwondo today after a month off for holiday and medical treatment (for my stupid back) and my teacher told me that he’s ready to give me my green belt! He said I don’t need to have an exam, that he’s been assessing me every lesson and that I’m already past green belt standard :)  Might even get my blue belt in the next couple of months too!  Who knows?!?!

Happy today

A few of my pictures are available in my photo gallery from my holiday in Borneo.  I’ve ruthlessly edited out the bad ones, though a couple of blurry ones remain just cos of their amazing content!

Feel free to leave comments!

x

So today is the last day of my holiday with my parents in Singapore and Borneo.

I won’t go into masses of detail about the holiday, but I will say that once I finally started to unwind (the first day I went diving, obviously!) it turned out to be an amazing holiday which I have really enjoyed.

We have stayed in Singapore, Kota Kinabalu (Borneo) and Sandakan (Borneo) and our experiences over the last 2 weeks have led us to see orangutans, proboscis monkeys (which only exist in Borneo), crocodiles, long-tailed macaques, beautiful views of Mount Kinabalu, the biggest flower in the world (the Rafflesia), the smallest orchid in the world, a giant centipede and a group of singing chefs.  Yesterday my parents were both attacked by leeches in the jungle and I got away scot free.  It was quite exciting, although slightly disturbing that my mum kept finding leeches or leech bites hours after we left the jungle and thought we’d got rid of them all.  Lots of blood. Yuk.  But the nice jungle men got some leaves from a bush, chewed them up and put them on my mum’s bites and they stopped bleeding.  Amazing how nature can work for you and against you on the same day in totally weird ways.

These are just a few of the things which have shaped our holiday.

I have also done a bit of thinking and have made at least one life changing decision… a year too late, but there you go!

Now, if I’m honest, I am looking forward (in some ways) to leaving Burma and returning to England to restart my life again.  I am missing my friends more than I thought possible and would give anything to be with them right now, sharing a few giggles over a drink… but 4 months isn’t so long, and I will, of course, miss certain  special people in Burma, as well as the country itself.  But I suppose I will find my path when I get back and things will contine the way they should.  Fingers crossed….

I’m in Singapore with my Mum and Dad! Yay!

My brother is not here…. Boo…..

We went to the Raffles Hotel and had Singapore Slings! Yay!

Mum paid! Yay!

Tomorrow we’re going to Borneo! Yay!

Nick will not be there either Boo…..

When I went to the Bangkok hospital on Friday afternoon I saw 3 specialists - 2 about the shooting pain in my back/leg and the other about my mirena. Well I had some x-rays for my back and was told I have mild scoliosis (when your back isn’t straight, but more S shaped) but worse, I have hypermobility in my lower spine, so two vertebrae are moving too far apart when my back bends and the other sides of the vertebrae are moving together and touching a nerve.

To rule out herniated (!?) discs, they decided to give me a lovely MRI scan on Saturday morning, which meant the Mirena had to be postponed, as having an MRI with a coil can cause it to heat up (apparently).

So the next day, I went to see the physiotherapist first (or… the ‘Voodoo Doctor’ as I now like to call her). I told her I was nervous about having an MRI without sedation and she suggested acupuncture for a few minutes before the scan to calm me down. Well it didn’t exactly work. In fact, two of the needles she put into my neck almost instantly made me feel like I was going to throw up. I told her this and she pulled them out a little bit, and it immediately went away. Amazing! She kept talking about ‘bad energy’ and my ’spirit’ though, so it was like she was fluctuating between western medical approaches and Chinese traditional medicine… I lost a bit of faith, I must say…

The weirdest thing was that she put needles in my arms, the wrists and upper arms, but then she put them in the fleshy area around my elbows. She did the left one which felt weird, but was okay, and THEN… the other one in my right arm, and it was incredibly painful… It didn’t hurt for long, just a second, but it was definitely the worst needle and it hurt a lot. I told her this (and she would have noticed me jumping halfway across the room) and she told me that this part of my arm is related to the bowel. Well how STRANGE - the bowel is where I had endo excised from and is where I still have microscopic endo… Coincidence or was the voodoo doctor actually talking sense? She did know that I had bowel issues, so was she just tapping into that, like a perceptive fortune teller or is there really a neurological link between my right elbow and my bowel? Intriguing.

Anyway… after my not-very-relaxing-at-all acupuncture, I went for my MRI. I was in pieces, terrified, because last time I had an MRI was back in October before my lap, and I panicked and just couldn’t go in the machine without sedation. In the end they pretty much just put me under and did the lap straight away afterwards. This time I was wide awake and really scared. I was actually crying as I lay down on the bench… The nurse was so sweet, and put her hand on my foot and asked if I wanted her to stay with me, and I said yes.

So I managed to grit my teeth, squeeze my eyes shut and not completely freak out inside the machine. They put some music on through the headphones which was a godsend cos it gave me something nice to focus on, though it didn’t drown out the sound of fifty machine guns going off all around me, but it definitely helped. I forced myself to keep my eyes shut cos I knew I’d panic if I opened them and saw the top of the machine 6 inches above my face! (I’m so brave!!) Luckily they only kept me in there for about 20 minutes, so that was a relief!

So… no herniated discs, so the next step was to be given a really attractive back support (flesh coloured, of course - I did ask if they had any other colour, but alas…). After that… it was mirena time. I was taken up to the OR area and changed into a robe. I had the drip inserted and the pre-med went in, making me a tiny bit less ‘with it’. I was wheeled into the OR and it was FREEZING and the room was full of metal and I started thinking ‘crap, I really hope I’m out for this, cos if nothing else I’m gonna freeze to death.’ There were so many people in the room, considering all I was having was a mirena!! Didn’t exactly calm my nerves. A doctor put a small mask in front of my face and asked me to take some deep breaths. I took a couple and thought ‘oh god, it’s not working, I’m going to be totally alert through the whole thing’. That was the last thing I remember thinking before waking up in the recovery room with a nurse saying hello and telling me it was all finished.

So… I had wanted to give a detailed description of the procedure, so that future Mirena patients on here would learn from my experience, but… if I was at all awake during the procedure, I don’t remember a single thing about it. (The twilight sedative is basically the same as Rohypnol, which is why you have no memory of the procedure afterwards.) Sorry!!

What I do remember, all too clearly, was the pain in my lower abdomen when I woke up - it was excruciating. The nurse gave me paracetamol and something else, but I was still squirming around and sucking in my breath after a few minutes so she went to find the doctor and when she came back she had a syringe full of Fentanyl in her hand which she threw my way via the drip. A minute or two later the pain was almost totally gone.

Now, 4 days later, I am taking 8 different tablets, most of them more than once a day, and I’m not sure what most of them are. I think there are 2 kinds of anti-inflammatories. One is Ponstan, which seems to be the one which really helps (its the only one which I forgot to take yesterday and yesterday is the only day so far since Saturday when I’ve had bad abdominal pain - like a period pain) but I only have 2 left, and I’m a bit worried about how much it’s gonna hurt when I can’t take the Ponstan any more.

Anyway… so whilst the whole weekend was pretty much taken up with medical crap, I made a point of spending Sunday and Monday relaxing. Bit of a shock to find out about the back stuff, especially as I may have to give up taekwondo which I *love* - the only sport I’ve ever enjoyed, and feel like I’m achieving something in… Anyway, I’m officially rambling now!!

So there you go… hope you’re not all asleep. Thanks for taking the time to read about my experiences at the weekend!!

Back to the hospital in Bangkok tomorrow to see the gynaecologist, osteopath and physiotherapist to discuss a) the procedure of fitting a Mirena coil and b) what the hell is causing the shooting pain down my left leg.

Coil fitting is Saturday morning and in public I’m boldly pretending that I’m totally unfazed by the concept of having injections in my cervix, followed by having my cervix opened up and a foreign object placed inside. It’s FINE! Not worried at all…. Ahem.

They’d damn well better give me the strongest sedatives they’ve got :/

Please send me texts tomorrow on my normal UK number… Gonna need cheering up