Day Five Diary - Living in a Homeless Shelter

Today I am absolutely exhausted, did not sleep to well last night, kept waking up with pins and needles in my hands which is a regular occurrence for me. I don't sleep on my hands so there is no reason for me to have the pins and needles, but never mind!

I am also in lot of pain with my leg today, after a long day yesterday and little sleep last night a condition I suffer from in my right ankle has flared right up. I have a condition called Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome, which developed after a severe sprain in my right ankle. When my body tried to heal the signals from my brain got confused, leaving on the sympathic system, which tells your body you are injured. Therefore even though there is nothing wrong with my foot my body releases all the signals to my foot to try and heal it.

This system sometimes resets itself in time, but mine has not. Thankfully the condition has not spread through my extremities like it can, but the pain some days is really bad others its bearable. The best things for the condition is exercise to try to reset the system and to keep the ankle as strong as possible as of course because when the body is injured you get muscle wastage, brittle bone, swelling etc.

The condition is part of the Muscular Dystrophy family and general pracitioners struggle with understanding the condition as it is quite rare. I take medication daily to control the pain as much as possible.

I have recently been having problem with my right knee and hip and will be going to have the test to check the condition has not spread shortly, but I think it is mainly due to the way I walk more than anything.

The only time I had relieve from the condition (its was bearable anyway) was when I was in the US and I cycled, hiked and did all the things I used to love doing without any real problems. This was when Steve and I spent 3 week travelling down the west coast visits, San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, Mammoth Lakes, Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego and Palm Springs. We drove all the way and had a wonderful time.

We are determined to hire a Camper Van (or something like it) and do the same trip with the children during the whole 6 weeks summer holidays when they are old enough. They are both very active children and we are sure they will love the trip as much as we did. We would also take them to Death Valley and Yosemite which we did a couple of years after the trip stated.
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Thursday, 16th April 2009

Today we got up a 8am and its raining which means hell for me as the children cannot go out and play and as they are very active children they have no room to let off stream. Thankfully we have a couple of very soft balls which they kick in the small corner and obviously the Wii which my daughter, Taylor loves. They also make use of our mattress and pretend its a boat and they are sinking (Taylor has an amazing imagination), but otherwise they stare out of the window.

Mum is bringing colouring things later when we go to meet her, so they have that to do later.

The Shelter is like a ghost town today, no-one around at all.

Steve takes things to our on-site lock up which we don't need, but nothing exciting is going on at all.

Everyone on the site has a small allocation of space within a large lock up for their things. An inventory is taken when things are put in and crossed off as removed.

We received a letter today informing us that we can start bidding on 7th July 2009 and explaining how it works. I have talked about this already, so from 7th July 2009 we have 2 months to bid, 2 bids a month and if you are successful off you go, if not then the Council will bid on your behalf for 1 month and then after that you just allocated a place. How exciting!!!! Sorry feeling a bit down today so even this letter could not lift my spirits.

Still desperately trying to work out how I can get some money together to start to do PPC advertising, so any ideas would be great? I am going o give it a proper look over the weekend again.

This afternoon we went off to meet with the Development Officer as Casey keeps tripping over as his feet turn in. Steve was hoping to come, but my mum is coming instead as Steve could not get the day off work. But the doctor is not overly concerned as Steve had the same problem, so if it does not correct itself by school age they will then look again.

Just through other things to do while we are out but nothing exciting, until mum said "Would Casey like to go for a sleepover?" Yippee, a good night's sleep for all! Except mum and dad of course, but they love it!

So Taylor wants a girlie night, so we go to the supermarket and buy pizza, ready for a night in on the Wii, Colouring and watching High School Musical 3 on the Computer. Until the fire alam goes off again and we are standing outside for 45 minutes waiting. Back indoors and the girlie night continues. Its lovely spending some time with just Taylor.

At 8pm she will go off to bed and I will settle down to a pile of iron and catching up with CSI and CSI NY on the internet and then I think an early night for me!

Sorry nothing exciting happens today!

See ya tomorrow