Here's one I prepared earlier

Before I went into hospital I was doing a craft course with Jemima from Tied with a Ribbon and Claire from Claire Turpin Designs.  The course was a Christmas one and although I missed a couple of the dates due to being sick, I still managed to make it to the first two classes where we made some pretty bunting and a Christmas stocking.  And I even managed to finish them!

 I couldn't find any Christmas fabric that took my fancy so instead I made some bunting for my craft room, which is slowly showing some signs of order again after a visit from my incredibly helpful organisational sister.

My family still does Christmas stockings each year but the last few years we have been using Christmas pillow cases which ends up in a extremely overboard sized stocking! This year I am going to make each member of my family a stocking and limit the amount of junk food that can be crammed into the stocking, saving us all a bit of money and being a lot healthier as well!

Seeing as I can't go back to work this year I have all this free time ahead of me! I'm hoping I use a fair chunk of it doing crafting and making some handmade Christmas presents for family and friends.  Unfortunately the no work means the money side of things will be a bit tight for a while, until my income protection kicks in (if you don't have this I strongly strongly strongly advise that you look into getting it, you never know what your health is going to do!!) I am looking forward to the challenge of managing my money though, I've always been quite bad at it so hopefully this will help me learn to save and manage what funds I do have a lot better... fingers crossed anyhow!

I'll be looking for a Christmas meme to sign up to, surely someone has started one? I need to get motivated if I want to get things made and finished!

Massive Changes

So I'm back.  A whole new me with a whole new liver.  Slightly crazy? Yes.  In fact, really crazy if you ask me.  It's been a bit of a whirlwind few months for me and I'm still waiting for my head to catch up.

My medication I was on for CML had an extremely bad reaction with my liver, causing it to go into failure.  Unfortunately it was too late to do anything about it except put me on the waiting list for a transplant.  I was incredibly lucky and got one quite quickly.  It is very surreal to be woken up by nurses saying "You're getting a liver!" and then having to ring family to tell them.

This is a very very brief overview post, just to catch you up.  As I get my head around everything I'm sure there will be some amusing hospital anecdotes and succinct posts about life after liver transplant.

In the meantime though, it's great to be home, alive and semi healthy.  And with lots and lots of spare time on hand for crafting, resting, reading and relaxing!