Saturday was my 25th birthday. It went well.
In January I reported my change in circumstances to the DLA people, as by that point I was unable to walk outside at all. They decided to ignore everything I said in the letter, and kept my original award of higher care, lower mobility. While I was waiting to hear from them, I went from being able to take a few steps to not being able to walk at all, so I felt that I should be entitled to higher mobility (for those who are unable, or virtually unable, to walk). I put in an appeal, and they contacted my GP, consultant, then sent out an evil ATOS doctor last week to do a medical. It must have convinced them, as on Friday I received a letter saying my appeal has been stopped as they’d changed their decision and awarded me higher care, higher mobility 😀 My reasons for having higher care have also been changed from mental health (which is much improved, if not completely fixed) to physical care needs, which is more accurate now.
The back payment came in on Saturday, so I sent Johan out to buy my new television. It does iPlayer and YouTube and stuff, as well as being a million times better than my old one, which is nearly dead. It was less than £300, which for a 32″ LCD with internet is extremely good 🙂 It’s also nice being able to operate it from bed 🙂
What else has happened? I’ve still been really ill. I now spend most of the day in bed (about 20+ hours, sometimes nearly 24) at least four days a week. My sleep is a bit all over the place- little things stop me getting to sleep for hours after my meds would normally knock me out, then I struggle to wake up in the mornings (though to be fair, that’s not unusual).
I had my Computing exam. It went better than expected, so I’m hoping for at least a B, despite not being able to remember anything I’d been taught since Easter. I did the exam in the first aid room, but the bed was too high for me to use it. I took some beanbags but ended up not using them either, as by the time I needed to lie down I only had 3 short questions left, so I answered them, checked my answers, printed it off and went and lay on the recliner in Interface for an hour, napping for quite a bit of it. We stayed in a hotel near the college the night before so I didn’t have to worry about the journey in (we got a taxi from the hotel) and it was nice, though I couldn’t get my wheelchair into the bathroom, despite it supposedly being a disabled room. I crawled instead, and let them know when we were checking out.
Apart from that, I’ve not been in college as much as I wanted to. It’s the last week next week, and there’s the leavers ceremony, prom and things. I want to go but will have to see how my health is.
I did manage to make it to Flamingo Land with the college on Friday though 🙂 First of all everything that could go wrong, did. I struggled to get up after not being able to sleep until 1am because there were people talking very loudly outside. We were slightly late leaving because we forgot something, so we missed the first bus by about 30 seconds. The second bus wasn’t accessible, and we got on the third but I reacted badly to a woman’s perfume so had to get off at Blaydon. We got on the forth bus, but were running really late by then. We missed the metro by less than a minute, so ended up emailing the college to let them know we would be late. One of the support staff picked us up from the metro station, which was good 🙂 Then the lift on the coach wasn’t working properly because the road and path are uneven there. It took 25 minutes until I was lifted onto the lift so I could actually get on the coach 😛
After that though everything went well. I got a disabled band and Johan got a carer band, so we didn’t have to queue for the rides. I went on the first roller coaster to see how I’d manage with it, and it turned out that because they had good back support and I don’t get scared I could manage them fine, so I went on a few 🙂 I also got to see the penguins, which was awesome. I’ve been tired since, but overall I’ve not been much worse than I was anyway, so it was more the long day that did it than being at the theme park itself. Luckily it was pretty quiet there.
I went to little Martin’s birthday party on Monday. He’s getting so big 🙂
I am having problems communicating beyond just Twitter and Facebook at the moment. Instant messenger is exceptionally difficult, even with friends, and emails and letters are pretty much impossible to write. I keep losing speech, which makes communicating with the carers difficult when it happens. I am currently creating an Android app that should help with that at least.
I’ve also started project 365. I’ve posted the first two days to Facebook, and I’ll copy them over here in a minute. I’m hoping that taking a photo everyday, no matter how crappy, will give me something to do 🙂