Since I started this blog in late November, I don’t think I’ve gone three consecutive days without posting, but I figure I’m allowed a mini-holiday over the Christmas break, if for no other reason than nobody’s likely to be reading it anyway, unless they got a new laptop for Christmas and are testing out their Wi-Fi.
This year’s celebrations have been entirely in keeping with the whole of 2006 before it: a total roller-coaster.
Christmas Eve was a wonderful day of chilling out and seeing friends. In fact, over the previous two days I’d caught up with a good number of friends, some of whom I’ve not seen for a while and some of whom I haven’t seen as much as I should recently.
On Christmas Eve two of my oldest friends came round to see me, which was unbelievably cool. All three of us are really quite rubbish at staying in touch, but whenever we do manage to meet up we have the best giggle and always pick up right from where we left off – something which I think marks out a true friendship amongst the ranks of acquaintances we make as we go through life.
It was brilliant to catch up with them and find out what they’ve been up to, although I always find it hard to update people on how things have been going for me. Luckily, the more tech-savvy of the two of them has been reading the blog, so she was pretty clued up and had, I’m guessing, filled in our techno-phobe friend on the drive over. It’s difficult to talk about how you’re feeling when it changes so often and talking about how hard thigs have been can be a really downer on any conversation.
We had a great few hours chatting, laughing and generally messing around. They’re both doing really well and always seem to energise me creatively when I see them. They’re both actresses and talking to them always reminds me of the passion I have for writing, performance, theatre and film – they always inspire me.
Things started to go awry that evening, though, when K woke up at midnight and spent the next 12 hours hugging the toilet. A few of our friends and relatives have had a vomiting virus over the last week or so and our next door neighbour had it on Christmas Eve. Her husband and son came over in the evening and that must have been where K picked it up from.
Once she had stabilized enough to not be sick for 30-40 minutes at a time, Mum ran her back home in order to keep her quarantined away from me. One thing I really can’t afford right now is to go 24 hours without eating, and any kind of a bug is bad news, but it was horrible to have to separate ourselves after all the planning we’d done to get through Christmas together.
What that meant, of course, is that our Christmas plans were totally shot. I think K was more upset about it than anyone, but it was really hard to be without her on Christmas Day. That’s now 2 Christmases in a row she’s been laid up in bed, and we had wanted so badly to celebrate together. It also marked our first 6 months together.
We did what we could to make the most of the rest of the day and carried on as normal as possible, down to just the 4 of us in our family unit again. It was really nice, actually, but having been up all night with K, I was completely shattered. I slept for nearly three hours in the afternoon and then we went up the road to a friend’s for Christmas dinner.
It was a really lovely meal and we all had a lot of laughs, but after a couple of hours I was past my stamina levels and had to get Mum to bring me home. They all stayed on and played games and drank copious amounts, while I chilled on the sofa with my Christmas DVDs.
Things picked up again yesterday, when K had managed to keep some food down and was really just struggling with energy levels from having had no food the day before. She managed to come over to join us with Dad’s sister and her Gang in tow.
We always have a fab time when my Aunt comes down – our two families are so similar in sense of humour and shared piss-taking that there is almost endless laughter whenever we’re together.
Three days of busy-ness were really taking their toll by the evening though and my chest was tight and protesting at over-working. We had a second-mini Christmas to share presents with K – we’d saved all the presents to her and from her to open when she was with us.
By 9pm I was beyond shattered and had to take myself up to bed, where I promptly fell asleep by 10pm and slept almost completely solidly through until 10am this morning – my body is getting much better at taking the required rest when it needs it.
This morning, my chest is still protesting a little, and I know a good few physio sessions are going to be called for, as well as a full-on sofa-day to let my body recover properly from the stresses of the last few days.
I’m really impressed with how I held up over Christmas actually. It was a lot tougher than I expected it to be, but looking back it was bound to be difficult as I was fitting more into 3 days than I done over the previous 2 weeks, so to expect it all to be plain sailing was perhaps wishful thinking.
Now it’s time to start planning energy-saving for New Year so I can make it to midnight to welcome in 2007 – the year of the Transplant.