A stream of blabbering consciousness

OK I'll try not to go too Virginia Woolf on you, because we all know that could end up disastrous and potentially boring. No promises though. I KNOW I keep posting about CF stuff, but to be perfectly honest, not much is happening in my life right now apart from CF shizzle. Trust me, I cannot wait until I can start blogging about a life like the one I had a couple of years ago! And it'll be even better because it'll be a life without hypos and blood sugar monitoring and creon with every meal and shitty hangovers. I stumbled upon a blog where the person complains about having to monitor her blood sugars for 48 hours whilst in hospital, and how annoying and tedious it is because she can't snack or eat anything too sugary etc etc. I wanted to scream at the screen "try doing this every single day!" 48 hours in hospital doesn't even take into account energy used to travel places, walking about, socializing, drinking - every single thing that affects sugar levels. I'm just jealous. It's such a delicate art to get right, takes so much forward planning and thinking ahead, even seems mathmatical at times when trying to calculate how much energy you'll use against how many carbs you've eaten against how much insulin you should therefore take. It's hard. I like to think of it as keeping my little grey cells active whilst they otherwise would be rotting away as I watch Neighbours day after day. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, wasting and sitting and stewing as I slowly become a shrivelled body with an australian accent. I already have a shrivelled pancreas - two decades of it being completely defunct. I can't get over how lucky I will be to have a new pancreas. Proper life changing shit right there. Did I ever write that i'll have two pancreases?! They're not going to take the current one out for some reason, but due to it's shrunken size it won't take up much space. Odd huh. I keep having Tarentino/CSI style visions of my autopsy and the forensic pathologist discovering this absurdity within me. "Holy moly! This gal's got two fucking pancreases! Whatta freak!" My mind is slipping into it's black comic ways. It does this all too easily. This sunny facade hides a comically sinister interior. Maybe it's because i'm not fazed by blood nor gore nor shockingly blunt facts about the body. My mum's dad was a doctor, and she brought me back his book of colour photographs of the insides of the human body. Cadaver after cadaver after cadaver. I'll be honest, it was a little queezy-making at first, but you de-sensitize very quickly to the puffed out organs and rubbery skin that almost looks like Egyptian papyrus paper. It's fascinating. Imagining that once they were functioning entities with blood rushing through them, powering them, as they relentlessly work to enable people to write drivel on blogs (it's an old book, so they were probably writing drivel in ink to lovers far away or to the next door neighbour asking them to please refrain from having the wireless on too loud.) But now they're just artificially coloured ghosts of lives that once had been, delicate yet scarily robust as if Damien Hirst had created yet more modern art soaked and protected in formaldehyde.  I now have a weird fascination with finding people's livers and spleens and doing that 'tap-tap' thing doctors do and pretending I know where everything is. The thing is, it's not hard when they're bloody massive, but normal people's ones are hard to find! Still, I go, "ahh yes, no hepatosplenomegaly here". My mum looks at me like i'm frickin bonkers. But go on, say that word, and I bet you'll want to say it again and again. I read on wikipedia, it's the simultaneous enlargement of both the liver and the spleen. Hepato - spleno - megaly. I passed a degree thanks to wikipedia. I love you wikipedia, you unreliable beautiful source.

How's that for stream of consciousness. Actually, kinda shit.
I could go on, but I won't. Because I know you stopped reading a long time ago and just skipped to this paragraph because it was shorter. 

I'll bullet point the rest.

- Today I am eating jelly babies and catching up on Once Upon A Time and painting strawberrys on my nails. 

- Yesterday I used my Freedom pass for the first time, and caught two busses home BECAUSE IT WAS FREE AND BECAUSE I COULD. Saved 5 mins of walking. Felt brilliant.

- Our Sistine Chapel bathroom is nearly finished and looks beautiful. I'm going to order candles with Raphael's cherubs on from amazon. Then create and frame a photoshopped version of our cats, that would look a bit like this.

- Watched Bright Star again last night with a fellow Keats lover while eating ice cream and (more) jelly babies and carbonnara. Not all together. I love Ben Whishaw.

- I need to wash my slippers because they're getting a bit smelly. Sorry.

Croque Monsieur, madame?

My appetite has returned! So I decided to celebrate this triumphant return with a breakfast the Calorie King or Queen would be thrilled to bits with. They would set their trumpets blazing, their flags waving and their Knights in extra shiny armour to line the route from kitchen counter to kitchen table (or in my case, living room sofa/ bed) to herald in this long-awaited return.

So I figured, by always getting up at midday (or later, never before), i'm missing out on a meal. In hospital, by the time I would have had a measly breakfast at home, i've already had a FAT breakfast, biscuits, lots of tea, and a proper hearty hot lunch.

So today I woke at 10, had a cereal, went back to bed, woke up again at 12 and made myself this baby:

That is one calorie packed toasted sarnie.

2 bits of bread, buttered both sides (so it's like a proper toasted sandwich)
Layer of cheese
Layer of ham (6 wafer thin slices)
Layer of chorizo (5 slices)
(Another) Layer of cheese
Sliced tomatoes
...and maybe more bits of cheese

Put in a toastie bag, toast in the toaster.  Or if you have a toastie machine, use that!

Meanwhile, make, or heat up the bechamel sauce - I already had one made from when I had this yesterday...
Butter, flour, milk, cheese, pepper, and I put a little bit of mustard in too, all stirred up on the hob.

Then put the toastie in a pan
Cover in the sauce
Sprinkle breadcrumbs on
And put under the grill until it bubbles!

Then eat. Yums.


I had two of these today. All before half 2! Divine. It's not quite up to hospital standard just yet, but I do constantly graze all day on salami, crisps, more salami, ham, toast, chocolate... you get the idea. I'm then so full I have no choice but to sit and do nothing... and, um, eat more. Tomorrow I might try a croque madame - which is this, with a fried egg on top!