It’s now 15 days into 2023 and I’ve been thinking, since NYE, what happened in 2022 that I have to be grateful for. Besides the usual; my awesome wit, good looks and an appreciative man, I’m grateful for Rohan. So here’s the thing… Going back to 2007 when I married said appreciative man, our honeymoon was a fantastic East Coast adventure. Up to Bundaberg we tootled. And back down to Sydney in a broken VW Caravelle. Along the way home we stopped in at Wet n Wild and in our youth and craziness, we hit the big drop slide. It hurt! My back hurt the whole way home. It hurt for days. And then weeks. I finally went to my GP in Redfern who sent me to a specialist in Camperdown. Many visits (at $240 a pop), scans, x-rays, MRIs and he couldn’t work out what was wrong. He dismissed the waterslide story and decided to diagnose me with psoriatic arthritis. He put me on painkillers and not sure what else, but I ended up in hospital with a fried liver. It’s not very pleasant when your new husband comes home from work to find you shivering and barely conscious and tells you that you stench like rotten meat. I was yellow and still… my back hurt. Afraid of taking more drugs, I went to a naturopath. Taking the specialist’s diagnosis into account and $1000 later, she had me on a special diet and consuming 22 tablets a day. This was hugely depressing and unsustainable. 15 years!!! 15 years of being incapacitated meant I stacked on the weight and was depression kicked in due to back pain. Some nights the pain in my back was so bad it came through my chest, and I thought I was having a heart attack. The weight gain has left me with high blood pressure. The blood pressure medication has a side affect of weight gain… fucking stupid! My poor husband. I was always apologising to him (as he rubbed menthol creams on my back and stained the mattress) because he’d married a dud. I managed to maintain the pain with Mobic, Panadol and bed rest. I wasn’t able to carry out full time work where I was expected to arrive on time every day and pull off a normal working day. I spent many years on disability and ended up creating my own work where I could function on my own timeline. Granny Mel’s was great! Melting Pot Catering is better. So what was so mind blowing in 2022? My GP at Access Health in Wingham, who I love to bits, sent me to the Physio dept at the Mayo Hospital where I met Rohan. After a 5min conversation with Rohan, he stood me up, folded my arms in front of my body and went POP! 15 fucking years!!! And the pain was gone. I had a slipped disc. 15 fucking years!!! 2023…… time to lose the belly fat. I’m in my 50s now, perimenopause has kicked in. HRT has another weight gain side effect. This is going to be a slow journey.

Hi Everybody!!!!! OMGoodness, I’ve missed you all so much! Heaps has happened since the 2019 bushfires cleaned us out and gave us a well-earned break. We moved to our mountain in October 2020: lovingly known as Mount Karate Nunchucka, also known as the impossible block (why the fuck would anyone buy that piece of shit land?) Bought in 2018, we couldn’t even get onto it without cutting our way up hill and down steep valleys through lantana and other spikey horrors. Even the real estate guy warned us not to do it. We absolutely busted our nuts getting the 30% deposit together but with the small price of 95K for 100 acres, it ties in nicely with our want to a) live debt free and b) if the shit goes down (as it does) our mortgage will be affordable on the dole. The crazy thing is, the only access to our land is via a 20m x 450m Crown Land easement. We were not allowed to put a road in or dig or bridge the waterways… just mow and maintain the 2 acres. It was basically classed as a 4wd dry weather access. Had lots of meetings with Crown Land who tried to flog it off to Mid Coast Council and got nowhere. After 8 months, the suggestion to buy the 2 acres came up; people told us it would take 7-11 years to buy Crown land, but it was our only hope (Obiwan Kenobi). Ha! In your faces everybody. All it took was 4 months and the 2 acres with Nowendoc Rd frontage and a waterway cost us less the $3000 ($1500 of that was paperwork). Cheapest block ever!!