Moving on and on...

So now I'm looking to the future, L and I have been together just over 2 and a half years now , we have a mortgage, a beautiful springer spaniel Bonnie and on november the 13th 2009 ( friday the 13th ) infact Luke took me out side the hotel we had booked for a romantic weekend, in the rain and the dark! and got down on bended knee and asked me to be his wife , at first i was so shocked and thought he was joking i stood there in silence waiting to see if he produced a ring in case he was joking, i soon spotted a twinkling in the area of his hand and realised he was serious , by which time Lukes knee was getting soaked he got up and asked 'is that a yes then 'and all i could screech was ' OF COURSE!'. So we returned to our hotel room where we realised that due to the weather the window had blown open with the pane landing on a glass luke had clumsily broken earlier in the day ( which had consequently broke the window pane!,) all we could do though was laugh , so we shut the curtains and ordered the champagne! I didn't sleep much that night- and i'm not being saucy here all i could think was ' i'm going to be his wifeeeee!! I'm going to be Mrs H and also how much i'd have loved to share the news with my brother , it was incredibly emotional weekend away but i loved it! I was so pleased that he'd asked my dad for permission and also asked my mum for ring advice and he went with the ring choice that she favoured so it made them feel special and involved too, i really wouldn't have had it any other way. I can't wait to marry my husband to be on 10th september 2011!

Organ Donation

Ok so I have just looked at the blog and have realised there is absolutely nothing on here to explain why i believe in organ donation. The reason i have such a great belief in it is primarily because as a nurse and a friend, i have seen the radical difference that a transplant can make to the life of someone who desperately needs to have one. I have seen the hope return to the eyes of a recipients family and most of all because i have recieved letters of gratitude from the recipients of my brothers liver kidneys and pancreas.

Raising Awareness

Although I have been the owner of this blog for a while now i have not utilised it yet in the way that i intended i wanted a degree of anonymity as i feel that aspects of it are very personal however by keeping it so private i am not raising the level of awareness that needs to be raised so hopefull if i open it up it may either help others in similar situations or may make others think more seriously about joining the register. If you read this blog and don't like what i say all, i will say is these are my own opinions and my own reflect on what has been an extremely difficult and personal journey my intention is not to offend those that disagree with any aspects of what i have to say.

Times move faster than you think

It's been along time since i wrote in my blog and i still haven't finished saying what i need to say about my brother and his departure or his legacy and i will get to it but i think because its has been such a long time since i wrote i should say why that has been .You see after my brother died i went through a very black period of grief where it was all i could do to get out of bed and go to work it took me about a year and a half to come to terms with my loss and it wasn't until i'd come to terms with it that my life took a turn for the better . You see i decided that one of the things i need to do was heal myself which i did slowly by doing things that made me laugh childish things like jumping in puddles and finding my enjoyment in life and finding new hobbies and interests . One of the things i i craved was to meet a partner who could understand me and my situation and following a recommendation from a friend i joined a dating website after a few false starts i started messaging L at first he seemed to good to be true but slowly, actually, not slowly at all - after about two months of dating we realised we were madly in love and within 9 months we were living together and still are . I can't help but feel that as much as i had craved for this level of happiness it didn't occur until it was meant to. I don't know if my life had a preset road of where it was meant to go but given some of the harsh elements it has contained I do feel lucky to be able to say that i am happy again although i do say that with an element of caution as I would love for my brother to be able to see me as i am now , I miss him always and i will tell his story but I also needed to tell you mine.

Choice Taken

My Late Brother, he always was late in fact late for work, late home, late with homework , late full stop. The only difference now is that i'm talking about a different kind of lateness, the late that can't be reversed the late that in fact is way, way too early.

My brother was taken from this world to the next, way too early.

A normal healthy 20 year old planning for his twenty first birthday in two months time, his life was changed forever in August of 2006. Although we lived in the same house we'd not seen very much of one another for a few weeks I'd recently started an exhausting new job and he was always out with friends or locked in his room fiddling with computers. I'd heard mum mention he'd had some trouble at work as his right hand was "playing up" i'd thought nothing of it , even on the fifth of august when he came home early from work because of it i wasn't worried , he'd started to help me put the new bumper on my car as soon as he came back "so it couldn't have been that bad could it?" No of course not.... how very wrong i was ...

You see the next day he was sent home again, mum had been at work in the morning and i'd been to the supermarket and bought random barbeque style items that I made into a cooked sunday dinner for us all. It was at this meal that we realised how bad my brothers hand was , he was unable to cut his meat and in the end mum had to cut it up for him we laughed and joked about it at the time referring to certain rude things that may have caused the hand problem and also the possibility that it was repetetive strain injury due to his unhealthy computer addiction at this meal mum and dad asked him to see the doctors before they went away for a few days the next day, i was due to go away for two nights myself from the tuesday , we joked that we'd have to leave meals cut up in the microwave so that he only had to press the reheat button while he had the house to himself. During the course of the meal Christopher mentioned a problem with speech slurring we joked about him being to lazy to talk properly none of us realising the importance of such an odd symptom.

The next day i went to work for a study day it wasn't until i was on my way home that i found out something was very wrong indeed..............

I sat on the bus and called my mum to see where she and dad had driven too forgetting completely about my brothers hand problem when mum told me Christopher was at hospital having tests ... they'd gone no-where.
As i got off the bus just a 5 minute walk away from home i recieved a call from mum telling me that something was wrong with one of the scans and that as i was so close to home she'd wait so that we could go to the hospital together, I ran home to find my mum ready to get in the car .

When we arrived at the hospital we found my brother in his bed behaving like his normal cheeky self although a little slower than usual -why hadn't i noticed this before?
When the doctor and nurse came to see us they drew the curtain and mentioned a shadow on the scan the t - word wasn't spoken but i began to suspect it was what they were referring too although my own brain appeared to be failing me at the time and i hadn't put all the pieces of the jigsaw together.

Just an Ordinary Girl

I'm sat here with an open page , thinking about what i could write that would be of relevance to me and of interest of you,- the reader, and to quote a song " i still haven't found what i'm looking for."

Shall I tell you about my dating disasters (Bridget Jones Style) , my interest in the promotion of Organ Donation in the uk, or my family and my late brother?

I would start from the beginning but then that would be 1983 and i really can't remember that far back.

Secret Diaries

Have you ever had a secret diary? Or have you ever wanted one where you could pour out your every thought or idea and somehow find the answers to all your questions just by writing them down? I tried to keep diaries, more than once, i tried to write in them every day but it didn't work. I soon got bored tore out the pages, got tired of jotting down the same questions and not finding the answers , i think the problem may be that diaries, especially secret diaries, they don't talk back , not like this one this one has hope, this one - It just might....