It’s been quite a while since  I posted here. The main reason was that everything came to a head at the end of March, and I ended up being admitted to hospital with an abscess caused by MRSA. This was actually quite a good thing as this resulted in a number of things happen.

Whilst in hospital:

  • I restarted my antiretrovirals (Truvada and Viramune)
  • the abscess was drained
  • my clinical psychologist arrived down (instead of me going to visit him)
  • my social worker arrived came in to talk about what would happen next
  • there was a referral to the Psychiatric Liaison service (prior to discharge) and
  • a large number of friends rallied around and helped support me.

After a few weeks of living between two sets of friends’ houses, whilst my house was getting sorted, I am now back living at home. It is so much of a relief to have the downstairs of the house in a clean state that words really fail me. I now want to be at home. I now enjoy being there – and have even had some friends calling in, as well as my mother.

There is still a lot of work to be done regarding my depression, but I am now taking my anti-retrovirals and the antidepressant that my GP prescribed last week. It is called Sertraline (and the dosage is 50mg once a day).

Following the house clear by my friends, I was forced to face up to the debt that I had accumulated. I am now working with a charity called Christians Against Poverty to sort out this. Last week I had my initial meeting with them and this week there is a second one. I was advised to open a new bank account and have just done that. I was amused when I tried to open a basic bank account with Barclays, I was told that I couldn’t have a basic bank account

I’m sorry we don’t think that you are eligible for a basic bank account, your credit score is so good that we would recommend a current account.

Obviously, given my arrangement with CAP, I was a little surprised, but nonetheless I am now a customer of Barclays, my mother will probably be pleased. During the week, one of the support workers from CAP took me to Tesco and we attempted a week’s shopping.

On Wednesday evening, for the first time in about a year, I cooked a meal for myself in the house. It was very simple, and was based on a recipe in Delia Smith‘s One is Fun! recipe book. It’ll appear on the Recipe page in a wee bit.

I have just been to Tesco again and bought some chicken, some bay leaves and herbs, and other bits and pieces. So there will probably be an update on recipes that I have tried in the next few days.