Posted on March 02, 2009 by sonjabarrie

Nothing is ever easy is it?

It has taken me a while to get this written because sitting at the PC starts to send shooting pains into my eye after about an hour so when I am sitting here I have to do that horrible 4 letter word ‘work’ which precludes me from writing my blog.

However, although Friday was really bad, Saturday wasn’t too bad, Sunday was much better and today I feel great, so that’s the good news! Keep your fingers crossed it keeps up.

OK so what did the Doctor say? Before this last appointment Tim and I did some research and talked about why it is taking so long to get this thing under control (its been over 2 years now!) when I usually only take a year or so and it is calmed down and back to its dormant stage. One factor is that my last outbreak was in the UK back in 1984 and I was NEVER on any pills during that outbreak. I actually had ointment to put in the eye, which was horrible, greasy and made it look like I was trying to see through Vaseline but it worked. So why haven’t they put me on that here?

Come to find out that you can’t get it in the USA! It has been in over 30 countries for over 30 years but the FDA has never allowed it here, in fact there have been no new ointments or gels released in this country for 30 years! The French have since come up with a new gel that works better and is tolerated better; again this is in over 30 countries and has been since 1996! Apparently the FDA in its wisdom has decided that this new gel is OK and it should get approval in the USA some time this fall. Maybe!

In the mean time: we went to the Doctor and gave him our findings, he agreed completely that we should try to get some of the gel, he is absolutely stumped as to why the pills are not working on me. Most people have to take TWO 400mg Acyclovir pills a day. I was on FIVE 800mg pills a day. Thankfully he has dropped my meds to FIVE 400mg pills per day, still a lot but tolerable along with all the eye drops.

Here’s where the BUT……………..comes into it.
The outcome is we are trying to get hold of a British eye Doctor who can take the prescription that my US Doctor has written and exchange it for a British one as UK Pharmacies won’t fill a US prescription. Failing that we will have to fly to the UK and actually see an eye specialist there so they can prescribe the gel.

Now here’s where the weird irony comes in.
We have spent all these years becoming American citizens in order to go back to the UK for medical treatment.

How weird is that?

A couple of posts ago we put in a picture of my eye. If you click on the eye you can see all the scar tissue: really weird!

On a high note, Jeanette made a quilt over the weekend, she is obviously a natural, she went and bought some flannel fabrics, random yardage, she just knew what colors she wanted. She took a scrap piece of paper and designed the whole quilt, went to the cutting table and cut it all out, went down to her room and sewed it all together and all before 5pm in the evening!

Here’s her scrap of paper with her quilt design!

She then put it on the quilt frame with a little help from me as she has never put one of the frame before. I showed her how to use the longarm quilting machine and off she went. She had half of it quilted by 11pm and finished it by lunch time the next day. After taking it off the frame she sewed on the binding on the right side of the quilt and then we both sat on the floor and hand stitched the binding to the back.

Voila, one queen size quilt done! She was more interested in getting it done quick rather than perfect (she left on the selvage so you can see NOT TO BE USED FOR CHILDRENS SLEEPWEAR in the bottom of some blocks but she didn’t care) some of the blocks weren’t lined up exactly and her hand binding stitches could be seen. As I said she didn’t care, it was DONE!

Here’s the final quilt.

and here she is doing the quilting with ‘The Beast’

Here’s the quilt after it’s been quilted but before the binding goes on.

This is the Wedding Invitation video showing my daughter Claire, Gianni my son-in-law and Leo my grandson (in case you are wondering they were married in a civil ceremony in Germany early last year!)

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