To those who have followed my journey for a long time, you will know that I have spent an inordinate amount of time in hospital. As you will read in A Girl in One Room, I really did flit in and out of emergency situations for years. The thing is it was always me who was being rushed into hospital, me having ambulances blue lighting me to A&E and resus, with medics surrounding my bed. But in the past year, it hasn’t been me nearly as much. The emergencies that my body always seems to get to have subsided and most of the time I’ve learnt to manage my poorly body at home. However, the emer ..read more

The past couple of days haven’t gone to plan. Valentines Day and Samuel was in A&E then yesterday it ended up being me. I’ve had a very sharp stabbing pain in my back which has been making it challenging to take a deep breath and I woke up yesterday morning hardly able to breathe due to a weight on my chest. I tried to just take some pain relief and continue on because the reality of having a condition like M.E. Is that we have been gaslit so many times that we’d rather just deal with innate suffering at home, as much as is humanely possible anyway. My parents both told me that I needed to ..read more

So I’ve now been blogging on and off for ten whole years. I started my writing on my Facebook page and continued it on my website, but I’ve been writing for pretty much the entirety of my chronic illness journey (nearly 16 years now!), I just spent a lot of that time writing in my head because I was too unwell to do it physically. I suddenly thought that whilst I’ve blogged about my life and about subjects that are close to my heart, I’ve never sat down and written about writing and why it’s one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done with a chronic illness. You see, I’ve always wanted ..read more

I must be getting older because it feels like the years are passing even more quickly. 2021…where do I even begin? It has been a year of incredible – and very personal – highs mixed in with some lows that threatened to take the stuffing out of me. On a personal level, I moved house into a little bungalow with a garden and my life changed. Having spent the first three lockdowns very much trapped in my flat with no escape. That time had been difficult but precious as I got to be in a bubble with my daughter and watch her explore. But here, I feel at home. I can sit in the garden or lay on th ..read more

To all you lovely lot… The wonderful online family of mine, Thank you from the bottom of the heart for the love and support you have all given me this year. I just wanted to share a little picture from today and a little message to wish you all a very merry Christmas. I love Christmas and I’ve spent Christmas in many different places: medical wards, a&e, pre op, long term hospital life, being fed my Christmas dinner through a tube into my stomach, on high numbers of drugs… I am now able to spend it with my family… My little trio that bring me so much joy. Although I truly know how u ..read more

Erm guys guys guys... I did a thing on Tuesday... A big thing... A MASSIVE thing! I had my hair cut and coloured at a salon down the road from me! Party time! I turned 30 this year and it was a pretty momentous occasion for me because there have been so many times where getting to this age wasn't actually a guarantee, more like a dream. But it also brings a lot of strange emotions that are almost alien to me... I've spent half of my life living with this condition. 15 long years... And I'm grateful beyond belief... Truly I am... But the suffering is still here every second of every day...som ..read more

Oh my life. It seems somewhat ironic that on the day I was about to finish off my latest blog on being on the other side of an emergency, that I ended up being taken into hospital by ambulance with severe chest pain. It was odd because yesterday the tightness in my chest following a week of oral steroids, seemed to be increasing. It wasn't an asthma tightness but I couldn't take a deep breath and it felt like there were a tonne of bricks on my chest constantly. It got particularly bad and I ended up calling up my bro to get help. Long story short, ambulance came and I was whisked off t ..read more

So if I were to say that in the space of one week, the Taylor-Bearman's had been to A&E three times, once via ambulance with an internal bleed, once for a potential secondary bleed and the other time a doctor rang and said to get to a&e for urgent blood screening on the same day that I did a talk to 400 school students.... I'm sure you'd think I was having you on... That it was impossible for so much to happen in one week... Well I'm not...this has seriously been our week. Since Samuel did his stem cell donation, we have certainly had a lot of drama in our lives but I wasn't expectin ..read more

After writing this blog post on my phone nearly three weeks ago, I ended up having to scrap it because my brain was so fogged that I couldn’t think… Or move… Or breathe without being in immense suffering. I had just got the news that a much- awaited consultant appointment with rheumatology had been cancelled. .. AND that they had to fit in 500 patients before me… I then ended up in A&E a couple of days later because I didn’t know how I could continue with the level of agony I was in. The A&E staff took it really seriously and saw me quickly. I’m now back on morphine to try and control ..read more

I’m used to living a very restricted life and even I’m struggling to manage. Before the pandemic hit us, I had started to venture outside more often and had managed to go in a shop. As you’ll see in my latest book, I didn’t even enter a shop for YEARS… I literally didn’t go into a shop until 2014 and even then I was laying on an ambulance stretcher with ear defenders and massive dark glasses and no one else in the shop… So you can imagine my excitement at being able to go into a food shop for a few minutes and choose my own meal, or to go in the home department and choose something for our fla ..read more