Fracking Blogs

Does anyone else have about six different blogs on the go? Yesterday I was moved to comment on an article I saw in the Guardian. It described the journey of a woman who had been diagnosed with a blood cancer when pregnant with her third child. She is now nearly four years post stem cell transplant and doing well coping with 3 children and life on it's own terms. It had such a resonance with my own story - in fact brought me to tears as I sat in a cafe on Highbury Park eating a cooked vegan breakfast - well I say cooked vegan breakfast but actually it was a compromise for a living foods vegan. Oh, the shame of the relapsee! More about that later but back to the article and being moved: when I got home I went to the author's blog to make a comment, as for some reason I could not comment on the Guardian site, and found this blog that I had started some time ago. This was to replace the original one I had created that was called something like Sally's stuffing recipes or words to that effect. Of course that was all years ago before I became a professional sick person......

Well back to the vegan breakfast. Saturday mornings our cleaner comes to spend three hours doing hoovering and mopping and other stuff that I have been advised against doing. Can you imagine how wonderful that is? It's almost worth having a life threatening illness to be told that you can no longer dust, touch cat litter or change nappies. Monika is our cleaner and she arrives at 9 am each Saturday morning. At this time I have to get out of bed and vacate the house. I could of course stay in bed - in fact I did for the first few weeks post hospital discharge - but now it would be far too embarrassing to actually lie abed whilst someone else cleans my house. It would further render it impossible for her to change the bed which is such a luxury. For the past 5 months I have been going out to breakfast and have explored several of the cafes in the vicinity of N5 and N16. There are absolutely dozens of cafes in the area and new ones seem to spring up each week but I am constrained by my raw vegan diet. Actually my diet does not include breakfast other than green juice and it certainly does not include coffee but I allow myself generous amounts of time off. Still, I like to try to keep to a vegan breakfast.

On Saturday as I read the Guardian article I ordered a cooked vegetarian breakfast and asked them to hold the egg. They gave me an extra hash brown to compensate. It came with baked beans, mushrooms, spinach and grilled tomatoes and a slice of white buttered toast. I tend to ignore the non veganess of butter as it is reputedly more healthy than some processed oils that go under the guise of vegan spreads. For the most part I do try to be gluten free or at least avoid white flour. Sometimes I think that my new Austrian stem cells have bestowed on me the ability to digest gluten - after all isn't Austria the home of pastries and cakes? To wash it all down I had a cappuccino made with milk (they did not have soy milk although I usually ask for this despite it being a Hippocrates no no). I followed this up with a black coffee which I drank with a grimace. By this time there was a family with two small children sitting at the next table. One of the children was coughing and spluttering and this prompted me to take my leave.

Many things have changed since my leukaemia diagnosis. In just over a year I have been forced into early retirement and have become a grandmother. My body has changed in all kinds of ways (not just the DNA) and after almost a year of baldness I now have a head of curly, white hair. Prior to the illness I was just coming to terms with getting through the menopause and was planning my next career move. Now it appears that I have been propelled into old age and grannydom and am not quite sure how I got there. Ok, back to the blogs - now that I have rediscovered this one I will be on here from time to time - well until I lose the password ....