My Sunday rant covering: alpine gardens, intractable pain and why I’m anti-monarchy

Hello dear folks this Sunday! I hope today finds you well, or at least well enough!

I’m fine in every other way but I’m in whimpering levels of pain and I can’t move my spine much. So I’m sitting on my sofa wrapped in heated things to ease the pain and taking my personal max of pain meds, desperately hoping and praying this will get better tomorrow rather than worse. I might have overdone it yesterday, planting the alpine garden, but I was as careful as I could be and I’m not willing to give up living and go back to full time bed rest again.

With regards to my health situation - it’s a tangled mess of red tape between two different departments at UCL Hospital in London. After countless messages and months of begging I finally got through to one of these doctors’ personal assistants. I was nearly an hour on the phone with them, having to repeat the same thing over and over because his office was so loud he couldn’t hear me. After a while I was getting so tired and upset and getting all my words wrong etc so Matthew took over for me.

The end result is that the PA agreed to ASK the doctor he works for to take the time to read an email from me, asking him to consult and compare my test results with the other doctor who is trying to diagnose me for the same symptoms. Mind you, the doctor isn’t obliged to read my email. All his PA can do is ask him. And even then, he can’t ask him until next Thursday or Friday. It’s a low, low bar for hope. But it’s all I’ve got.

I’m trying to keep my spirits up but it is very hard. Being in so much pain I can’t move is awful too. Mostly I’m continually grieving the life I could have had if I was given our current highest standard of medical care. I’m stubborn enough to believe in impartially equal health care so I always ask myself “What is Duchess Kate was suffering from these symptoms?” And the answer of course is that whole wings of hospitals would be closed until she was put right. 

👎

I think of her cervical cancer scare - something that millions of women go through every day, and they still have to work, cook, clean, take care of their families. They don’t get to take 9 months off work, paid, with a full staff of servants and nannies. She didn’t have to wait a year to see a specialist after her lab results came back. This is exactly why I hate living under a monarchy, I think it’s utterly ridiculous that we all pretend in this mass delusion that their family is special in some magical way and it gives them a pass to squeeze the life out of the rest of us. No thank you. 

🚫

With my little anti-monarchy rant out of the way (I know I’m on some lists already! 😂) I’m going to go back to the business of keeping this mortal coil bound tight with my soul while the machinery of the NHS grinds along. In less poetic terms, I’m going to have a hot soak in a bath so full of Epsom salts the water is nearly solid. 

This was a quick, impulsive blog & I’m not up to proofreading so please ignore any mistakes and naturally attribute them to autocorrect. 😉 It’s good for me to rant in writing, I need the motivation to endure all of this. 

I’ll be writing a blog this week about how I recently built this gorgeous alpine garden, so look out for that soon. 

Wishing you all the best! 

Erin x

My beauty 😍