London's Burning - and it's spreading fast

Hi everyone, as I'm sure most of you around the globe have heard from the news, it seems that London is under attack by its own youth. I know this has nothing to do with M.E. but I felt I had to comment on this.

I am absolutely appalled that the youth of today are so misguided that they would do this to their own hard working neighbours. This is not a revolution, a revolution is when the people rise up against a corrupt elite force. This is just mere selfishness. I do not accept excuses anymore for these kids, saying that they are "misunderstood" and they feel like they are not "respected". Respect is not earned by burning peoples houses and livelihoods to the ground, and I'll tell you who is misunderstood: the children on the streets of many unfortunate countries, all alone with no parents, no food, no roof over their head, dieing of  starvation and illnesses, and no warmth. They are the misunderstood. Not these thugs with their iphones and HD TV screens.

A person with a roof over their head and food in their belly paid for by their parents/parent are not "misunderstood". Open your eyes. Your lives are a picture compared to the world out there.

Education is given free in the UK, its time these children started using it and not blaming everyone but themselves for their failures. If you are a healthy individual in the UK, the world is your oyster, there is always a way to rise. It actually makes me feel sick.

Yes, we are ALL angry about the cuts, the student fees, and the taxes. We are angry about unemployment and limited opportunities. And yes we SHOULD protest about it. But this isn't the way. Peaceful civilized protest is what will get our voices heard in a dignified manner so that what we are asking for is actually listened to. Be classy in your manner and you will achieve what you want. Martin Luther King, Ghandi, and many more never used violence to get their voice heard. When voilence comes into the picture your voice is no longer heard, you just become a criminal and no one wishes to help you anymore.

A lot of people are playing the race card and it is nothing to do with this. I've seen footage of looters of all creeds and colours. Do not put this on one race as that's wrong and incorrect. The reason for this "riot" is merely due to children having absolutely no consequences for their action from the day they were born. At school teachers are not allowed to discipline children properly (I am not talking about using violence I am talking about punishment for their actions in non-violent ways) they can be rude, evil and violent towards teachers and fellow students with absolutely no consequences. So they get away with it.

They must be treated as "equals" and with "respect". Apologies, but if you are 15 years old and you're running around like a mini thug you haven't earned any respect yet, your parents and elders and teachers DO NOT have to treat you as an equal. They are there to teach you how to BE equal. Teenagers can go on the street and be violent to members of the public, stab, and kill - no consequences. Perhaps a slap on the wrist and a "don't do it again" from the police. They can do whatever they wish and get away with it, the worst that happens is a little community service. So I suppose it's no wonder they think they can get away with all this - and they are right. They can get away with it.

These children grow up to be adults, and they run the world through the selfishness they've been allowed to get away with all their lives. Me me me.

 People have said that it hasn't been just young teenagers looting and burning houses down, that it was also older men and women in their 20s and 30s. This is because they have grown up with no consequences, and everything handed to them on a plate. This is so wrong and not good for anyone.

The government needs to stop this "nanny state" syndrome and actually start punishing people severely for violent behavior with long prison sentences and NOT let them get away with community service and letting them out early. Make an example of bad behaviour. Get the army in and stop these thugs from getting away with anymore horrific violence. This is the only way that people will learn if there will finally be consequences to bad behaviour, and others will not want to follow suit.

Life has consequences, and its time children in this country learnt this. This is the only way that we can regain our society back.

Update

Hi All,

It seems I am unable to reply to comments which is really annoying! Everytime I log in, it asks me to sign in, then when I do it takes me back to my comment and asks me to type in the verification letters, I do so, and it takes me back to the log in page - this goes round and round in circles with no comments being added hah! Anyone know how to sort this out?...

So apart from being in the book 'Catch 22' in regards to the comments, I've had an interesting few days. Energy levels seem very up and down, I've been feeling very queezy and dizzy due to having to take the medicine Tramadol (for an unrelated condition) so this is probably contributing to the fatigue!

I have managed to go to London though and do a bit of shopping in Selfridges without feeling like I'm no longer alive the next day. This is a massive plus, because a girl can never have too many shoes or bags, and its absolutely amazing not to feel terrible after doing something so pleasurable. :)

I DO think however, that ever so slowly the main Gupta retraining programme is working. Although I'm not sure I have enough "negative thoughts" to actually do it enough (which you would think would make things easier) and seem to keep forgetting to go through all the steps.I'm a bit confused about how it works. All I know is that I know someone personally who has recovered using this method, so I am still willing to go along with it and try. I think every little helps and even if I am doing it as and when I can, it IS having a positive effect.

If anyone would like to know more about the Gupta method he has some videos from the DVD uploaded to youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fXqok9sYt8

Even if you decide you don't want to buy the DVD I think he gives a really good insight as to how M.E gets hold of the body, and what's actually happening.

In regards to 'Soften and Flow' someone commented that the idea IS to embrace the symptom but I don't think this works for my body if I am honest. It just makes things a lot worse than they originally were in the first place so I don't think this is the road to go down for me!

I am due to meet a friend for a drink (a non-alcoholic one as right now the thought of alcohol makes me want to die) in about an hour and feel like sleeping instead. I wonder if I will be able to make it.

*fingers crossed*!

For those interested, here are the new shoes I got from Aldo, I have been looking for a nude pair that are actually comfortable for absolutely aaaaages, so girls if you like to be glam but comfy I recommend theses! (For some reason it wants to upload sideways - me and blogger are currently not friends!) :

Soften and Flow...

Hi All,

Apologies that my updates have been so sparse, I've had so much to do and keep getting knocked back exhaustion and secondary illnesses (I'm sure you all know what that's like!) that I just didn't have the will or the energy to watch the rest of the Gupta DVD, but last night I managed to watch the session on "Soften and Flow". I actually have mixed reviews about this part of the programme.

I'm a big fan of the main Gupta training method, but I'm not so sure on "Soften and Flow". This is a meditation technique, but asks you to somewhat immerse yourself in a symptom that you are currently experiencing, to look at it from the outside, to really feel it, and to then soften and flow it away. The concept is that it confuses your amygdala (part of the brain responsible for keeping the symptom cycle going) into thinking that if your conscious mind is prepared to face the symptom head on, then it doesn't need to take notice of it anymore, and therefor it should in time disappear. This does make sense, and perhaps this is just a coincidence, but for me, the symptom I used to do this with has become severely worse today when I woke up!

In my head I'm wondering if giving it so much attention has had the opposite effect and just made it worse! I could be wrong, and it might actually have nothing to do with the meditation I did last night, but it does seem strange. I also know that "Soften and Flow" has really helped a lot of people, and seems to work for the majority of sufferers so I have hope that maybe it will in time.

In the mean time I am using the main Gupta retraining method and this seems to be going well. I should probably be doing it more often that I actually am, but it can be difficult to keep thinking about it.

If anyone has any questions you are always more than welcome to contact me or comment on this blog!

3am Wine Time

Hey guys! Well it's 3am and I'm awake. Not surprised considering the messed up sleep I've had over the past few days but I thought I'd take the opportunity to do something productive and update you all. Oh, I'm also sipping a glass of wine, had a bottle left over from my birthday and yes I know I'm not suppose to drink alcohol as an M.E sufferer (apparently it makes us even more spaced out - if that's even possible :P ) but I've allowed myself to come off my nutrition plan for my birthday weekend that just passed, so whats one more day hey?

So I had a great birthday weekend, went for dinner and cocktails with my friends and manged to go clubbing after but kept having to sit down to make sure I didn't over exhaust myself. Now usually the next day, and for the next few weeks I'd be feeling like death after such a night, but surprisingly I've not been too bad apart from the insomnia. Usually even the getting ready to go out part exhausts me, so I'm pretty chuffed that I'm not stuck in bed! I'm wondering if the insomnia is due to a pain killer called Tramadol though, as I tend to experience this when ever I use it. Anyhow, all in all it seems that things might be on the up.

I'm going to try and get further ahead with the Gupta DVD tomorrow and watch sessions 7 and find out if I have the 'Accelerator' DVD that a lot of people have mentioned to me. Yes, I'm so unorganised that I don't even know.

Just to update everyone I did quit my job last week which I wasn't happy about at all, but they were so great about it and I'm hoping it's going to help me recover. I've managed to take upon myself a few music jobs that I probably shouldn't have, but I just find it so SO hard to just not do anything. I'm always aware that time is ticking and I'm getting older with every month I let go by and it scares me that I've not yet achieved anything I actually wanted to. Anyone else feel that way?

Right so, I'm actually going to try and sleep now, and will update you with my thoughts on the rest of the Gupta DVD tomorrow once I've watched it. Also I have tried to comment back in reply to someone on a previous blog, but it won't let me and keeps telling me to sign in - hopefully I can get this sorted. Before I go here are some pictures from my bday, it was a fabulous night:

Gupta,manicures and birthdays

Good morning! So I have got through the first few sessions of the Gupta Programme DVD and am now at session 6 where I've been taught the main retraining tools and can't wait to start using them. I think I need to watch a little more before I grasp it though as my memory is pretty terrible, but I wil get there I'm sure. So far everything has made sence in Gupta's introductory sessions and he's very good at explaining things.

I'd like to get stuck in today but its my birthday tomorrow and I have a million things to do to prepare-by the time I'm finished tidying this place and running around town to beautify myself I know I'll have zero energy to actually celebrate it tomorrow so I'm not sure why I do these things but hey - you can put M.E. into the girl, but you can't take away her love for glamour lol.

Which reminds me, I will have to post some pictures up tomorrow of the celebrations!

I pretty much just want to go back to sleep though right now but I have a hairdresser coming over who probably won't be impressed with the bomb that has gone off in our little house...

Don't Judge M.E.

Welcome to my first blog post!

I have suffered from *M.E (Myalgic encephalomyelitis) for 9 years, and I feel that it is one of the most misunderstood illnesses of our time, and that there is very little information and hope out there for people who have this illness.

I want this to change.

We have suffered in silence for long enough. Don't you think?

Below I will give a brief summary of who I am, and how I have come to this point in my life, if you wish to skip this part then please go to "The Present Day".

A little about me

I grew up on the island of Cyprus, where I had a full and fantastic childhood. From a very young age I was really active, and loved music - I had piano lessons, was part of a professional theatre troop that performed musicals around the island, and loved to dance. I was always one of my teacher's favourites in ballet lessons, which I took from the age of 3 up until 14 when I had to stop due to a sudden inability to balance properly, and a sudden onset of acute dizziness. Doctors always put this down to hormonal changes and said that it would pass, but as time went on my frustrations grew, and my teacher would say things like "what happened to you?! Who are you?!" which would make my anxiety towards not being able to do what I once excelled at even worse. So I sadly quit, much to my teachers dismay, and the ballerina dream died. I jokingly say now that if it weren't for the balance and dizziness problems, my post puberty new found curves would have killed that dream anyway.

Despite the dizziness and balance problems, I was still leading a pretty normal life. I had always had chronic asthma since a baby which I was on steroids for, and this meant hat I was quite susceptible to virus' so I was often on antibiotics - but this didn't effect my quality of life as I had become used to it, and I never worried too much about it. I still had my energy. I'd be going to school, socialising - I even headlined in a professional musical at 15, while at the same time achieving 11 GCSE's all grades A-C. I worked hard for all my dreams and achievements, but I loved it, and I loved life.

Once I moved to the UK at 16, I found myself catching every virus in sight, and doctors put it down to me not being used to the "bugs" over here. I was extremely unhappy when I first moved, I'd gone through a break-up with the "love of my life" from back home, and hated everything about the UK, the weather, the people, my new school, everything seemed so new and uninviting, and life became quite stressful. I then caught glandular fever 3 weeks before my mock AS levels. For weeks after I was still feeling like I'd been hit on the head with a frying pan, and could barely get out of bed. Doctors said it was just post-viral fatigue and that it would go. As the months went by, I slowly began to deteriorate.I could hardly bring myself to get up in the mornings to get to school, and felt like I was in a permanent state of a drug-like hangover mixed with the flu. Nothing would shake it off, and the new friends I made slowly began to disappear. I would watch them on days when I made it into school and just wonder how they had so much energy, and just wished I could have a fraction of it. "Christina I hardly recognised you, you're never here!" they would say. My new boyfriend of a couple of months would tell me "you need to get out this house, you're just laying here all day doing nothing, you need to get out, socialise, no wonder you feel terrible you're not getting any exercise!". I tried SO hard. I wanted so badly to be like all the other teenagers. But I just couldn't keep up, and ended up fainting at a friends house after school.

This was the beginning of my M.E.

If only I was given the right treatment then, I wonder if I would be in the situation I am in now. The doctor I visited kept telling me how "normal" it was, and didn't seem to understand or even care that what I was experiencing certainly wasn't normal! So I soldiered on. I managed to get my Alevels by the skin of my teeth, took a gap year thinking my symptoms would miraculously disappear (I hadn't even heard of M.E at this stage) and went to Uni the following year. I went to the Academy of Contemporary Music, where after a year I had to give up due to my ill health. I felt like such a failure. How come everyone else is coping? I must just be lazy.

Come on. You're a winner. Why are you acting like such a looser?

I would beat myself up about it daily. I just couldn't understand why I'd become so "lazy". It wasn't until I was 22 that I first heard of M.E, but every time I enquired about it to my GP I was always told that I didn't have it, that what I was experiencing was just a "phase". By now it had been a 5 year phase. I was always brushed off and told to just carry on, so I did.

I started a girlband at 23 with another singer, and we recruited others to make a 6 piece all singing all dancing band, and in a small space of time managed to support some big US artists, and do a tour. I cannot tell you how awful I felt, making myself dance, and making myself endure the late nights and early mornings, but I was so determined to succeed and I loved this band, I lived and breathed it. Some days I just felt like I wasn't even present, and on our Cyprus tour I couldn't get out of bed in the mornings so I'd just lay there crying or sleeping while the other girls lounged at the pool before rehearsals. I'd lay there wondering how I could bring myself to move my muscles that constantly ached, and panicked at the idea of having to get glammed up and dance in heels. Yet I wanted this so badly. By this time I knew I had M.E despite what the GP would say, I knew there was something seriously wrong with me. I would try to explain to the girls but they didn't really understand, and I didn't really expect them to at the time, as every day I was faced with people who just kept telling me to "man up" and "carry on" and so I did. Eventually it got to the point where I had to put my health first and no one was understanding that I needed the agreed summer break that we were supposed to have from the band. The girls wanted to carry on rehearsing new material, and no matter how much I begged for just 4 weeks to recover, my voice just wasn't being heard. After an altercation with a band member I started to realise that this wasn't for me,and that these girls weren't going to take no for an answer, so I left.

Yet again another heartbreak, another thing I had to quit. I hate the word quit.

But it felt like it's all I ever did. I went back to my GP and explained yet again how ill I was feeling. I was told that M.E didn't exist and was all in the mind. "If you faint at the gym just get back up and carry on". I felt so angry that he would say these things to me, did he not know what it was like? I started to believe that if I pushed myself to get through this that I'd recover. So I started going to the gym more frequently, which in turn made me even worse. The day after I'd be unable to move from my bed, would have a temperature, and be vomiting all day.

I didn't get any real help until I was 25. My mum who I lived with, and relied on to survive, decided that enough was enough, and made my GP refer me to a CFS specialist in Oxford. It was a massive relief to talk to someone who was not telling me that it was all in my head, and confirmed to be that I did infact have M.E. and it wasn't something I had made up. However, his suggestion of supplements and vitamin B injections unfortunately didn't seem to have any effect on me. During this time I tried various alternative therapies, potions and supplements, but nothing seemed to work. In the mean time I was working part-time in an office as a PA, and was struggling to keep my job. This brings us to the present day.

The Present Day

I am starting this blog on the day that I have received my DVDs for a new treatment that I am about to try out. I have recently discovered the 'Gupta Programme' through a friend who recovered from M.E. by using this method, so I thought it would be worth trying. I've tried many other way wackier treatments (such as having oils poured through my nostrils by some Indian dude-yeah...it was eventful) so I'm pretty open minded about this. I like the fact that Gupta had M.E. himself and seems quite scientific with his approach (no psychologists please). In a nut shell, he says that it is the amygdala part of the brain that needs retraining so that it stops releasing adrenaline, TH1 and TH2 "killer cells" (these are the sells that fight an infection but in M.E they don't know when to turn off so carry on releasing their chemicals) which in turn is messing up my immune system and causing all sorts of havoc in my body. Sounds plausible enough to me. His treatment consists of learning how to retrain the amygdala to stop releasing these chemicals, and you do this by watching the DVDs that he sends which explain what to do. You also have the option to meet with a nutritionist and counsellor at his Harley Street clinic if you so wish. I can imagine what you are thinking, and I can confirm I am thinking the same thing! But I have nothing to loose, so I am going to just have to go with it!

Well, tomorrow will be my first day watching the DVD and I'm hoping to get started straight away. All I need to do is manage to get to work for one last day so that I can tell them that it is no longer realistic for me to work, which I am not looking forward to as a) I have no idea how I'm going to get the energy to get out of bed since I have had  terrible relapses these past two weeks and have been off work and b) I have been so lucky that they are such nice people and have been so understanding and I really don't want to let them down.

But it must be done =/ wish me luck...

For anyone reading this who has M.E. you WILL get better, I just know that there is something out there for us.

~Christina~

*For those who have come across my blog and are unaware of what M.E. is, please check out this link for an explanation:

http://www.meassociation.org.uk/?page_id=1685