contemplating independence

well it's been a tough but productive time since my last blog. I saw the MS nurse team. They were, as anticipated, the most clued-up and approachable face of the NHS to date regarding my MS. I now have a number for their bat-phone, so can now have some advice and support when I actually need it (assuming that I will need them in the future sometime!).
Symptom-wise, I'm not feeling so brilliant. I'm not sure if it IS the MS, but my arms are killing me. To the point of wanting to just strap them down to my body so I don't even have to use the muscles to hold them in place. As I'm typing now, it's paining my biceps, which in turn is making my fingers move lazily, like the tendons are affected or something (many careless typos later!), and my right shoulder has kept me awake at night for the last couple of night with some searing throbs. I will give it a week and see if it starts to clear up before I dial up the bat-phone!

On a positive note, I've at last got around to approaching the thorny issue of diet-change. I've been trying, but not really, to change my diet to a more MS-friendly version, but something clicked inside me about a week ago, and I have finally thrown myself into it wholeheartedly and hopefully permanently.
I have to declare now, I hate diets! I have the wrong personality to adhere to such nonsense generally - if it involves will-power then count me out! But,though I say that flippantly, I am not so silly as all that, and am prepared to give it a go - it's a healthier diet than my previous one...which I would say was healthy-ish, but too much convenience stuff if I was entirely honest with myself!
So the regime I have imposed upon myself, after some research (though not yet exhaustive), is this...
Absolutely no red meat or dairy products. At the moment I'm eating stuff with eggs in sometimes, but that's subject to review. I am eating fish pretty much every day, and trying to eat green leafy stuff twice a day (plus all the usual 5-a-day malarkey). Where possible I'll have the green leafy stuff with a little olive oil dressing, as this helps absorb the green leafy nutrients apparently. I am also increasing my seed intake - linseed, hemp seeds, sunflower and sesame seeds are used as much as I can squeeze into a dish. I've been baking healthy option snacks, which are delicious and taste even better thinking it might be benefiting my body...though that's possibly the root of my poor arms. We use a pestle and mortar to grind our seeds, and we have a hand-cranked coffee grinder....hmm! I might need a more sustainable approach to grinding seeds!

So it's all good really, the garden is looking lovely, the sun is shining and life is pretty damn good. We had a hectic weekend of puppet shows and open air gigs, and by Sunday night I was absolutely shattered. I felt very smug on Saturday when the school we were puppet-showing at provided us a lunch of ham rolls and cakes and sausage rolls...I had a salad wrap with soya cheese out in the sunshine instead, washed down with hand-ground coffee and my home-made apple and cinnamon flapjacks (I will most definitely make these again - in fact, I shall dig out the recipe and post it here - even if no-one else ever reads my blog, I will at least know where to find the recipe next time I'm baking!) :)

http://www.lylesgoldensyrup.com/kitchen.php?recipe=64

(I swapped the sunflower seeds for linseeds. If I hadn't run out of sunflower seeds, I would have put them in as well!)


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