Raindrops of Sapphire
Lorna

A Fashion Blogger With M.E – Temporary Paralysis

For the next post in my Fashion Blogger With M.E series, I wanted to cover something that plays a huge role in my life and that’s temporary paralysis. To a lot of people, it can be extremely daunting and scary for them to experience someone with M.E going through this, as they can feel completely helpless, so I wanted to explain a bit more about it and share everything I can on the subject so that it can be helpful to anyone out there suffering with M.E or anyone looking after someone who is going through it. Not everyone gets this as a symptom, but a lot do and it’s one of the scarier and harder ones to handle. What is temporary paralysis? This is literally where your body shuts down and you can’t move. The only way I can explain it would be very similar to a coma in terms of your body being completely lifeless, but your mind is fully alert. You can’t move anything, you can’t even keep your eyes open or move a little finger when it’s full blown, but your brain is perfectly awake and this is extremely frustrating because you want to move, you want to speak, you want to tell someone you are ok, but you can’t. You can’t do anything. But… it’s temporary. Why does it happen? For me, it usually happens after I have exhausted myself too much and have done too much. This can be many hours before and you don’t really get a warning until later at night. I think your body gets so exhausted from doing everything before…

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Lorna

A Fashion Blogger With M.E – Anxiety & Depression

I wanted to start my ‘fashion blogger with M.E‘ individual posts with anxiety and depression. This is something that has played a huge part in my life for many, many years now so it’s something I’d like to share in great detail with you all and I hope it can help some of you out there in similar situations. When I first started to get sick around the age of 13/14, it was really difficult for me to take on. Being so young at the time, I didn’t really understand how to take care of myself and how to balance things out at all. I mentioned previously that everyday for me would be filled with some type of sports outside, it didn’t matter what I was doing, I just loved to be active. Even if I didn’t have anyone to play with or anything much to do, I would run or do athletic sports instead. I was one of those kids that loved the outdoors and being active, so when I started to feel ill and tired a lot of the time, it would really get me down that I wasn’t able to go outside and play with my friends or be active in general. It would truly make me agitated and restless just staying in and watching TV or reading a book. As the months went by, there were a few days here and there that I could go out and socialise with my friends gently and just get out for a bit, but it was short lived. Over time I lost a lot of my friends as I…

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Lorna

A Fashion Blogger With M.E

There are a lot of you out there who have followed my fashion blogger journey since it began in 2010, which I am incredibly grateful for, and there are so many of you who joined me a couple of years, months, weeks or even a few days ago. Since my blog is so personal to me and I feel like we have built up a little community here which I trust and feel safe with, I wanted to explain to you something about my life that I have kept hidden from my blog all this time. This wasn’t because I didn’t trust anyone or because I’m ashamed, it was mainly because I wanted to make sure I could succeed in doing what I wanted to do without any sympathy votes or without it having an impact on my progress. 5 years have gone by now and I’m ready to explain things to you all, now that I know it wont have an impact on my blogging life and work. I have M.E. Kind of similar to CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome), but a lot more symptoms are involved. I started getting ill with glandular fever when I was about 12/13 years old and after months, it had developed into M.E. I was going back and forth between hospital and doctors appointments for just over a year, trying to figure out what was wrong with me but after countless tests, studies, examinations and everything else, nobody really knew what was wrong. I found another doctor to visit and she ended up being my life saver. After a month or two of seeing…

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Lorna

An Update On My Current Health

Quite a few of you have been requesting a health update from me, mostly explaining what I went through as a teenager and how my health and illness shaped my life, leading me to do what I’m doing today. While I will write that for you at some point over the next few months (it’s going to take a while to put together), I wanted to give you a current update on my health at the moment just in case I’m not able to make posts as frequently as I should or in case I start looking really rough around the edges. These photos aren’t a representation of how I look right now by any means, but my current state is not something I’m going to share with you all, ha ha. So these ones are much more fitting. So, onto what I was going to say. I had been feeling extremely unwell for the past month, with stomach aches, bloating, nausea and pains in my digestive system, causing lots of trapped gas too which has been absolute agony. Truthfully, I’ve never felt pain like that before and there were a few times where I thought I was actually going to pass out and have to go to hospital. It’s been on and off for the past year I would say, coming and going in waves, but the past couple of weeks have been the worst. I know it’s not nice to hear, but I started bringing up vomit in my mouth and the pain from the acid there was excruciating in my throat and in my stomach as I…

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Lorna's Style

Fitness & Building My Strength

(Leggings – Exact, Top – Exact, Shoes – Exact) This is a different type of post and one you haven’t seen before. I’ve done a few posts over the last 6 months or so about healthy eating and lifestyle changes, but one of the things I adopted as well was fitness. I’ve had a lot of issues with my joints and muscles in the past (not something I’ve really gone into on here) and part of my physiotherapists recommendation was muscle strengthening to help make my joints stronger. I used to be extremely active and addicted to fitness when I was younger, I would spend entire days outside, sometimes playing 3 hour football matches with friends and doing athletics, but unfortunately all that changed when I was 13/14 when I got a chronic illness. I’ve always kept that side of me quiet as it’s not something I wanted to be judged on as sympathy votes are not my thing, so I like to try and make it on my own. However, the illness has played more than a huge role in my life and it made my joints and muscles extremely weak, so that’s why I now love to try and strengthen them. I started out lightly just doing my exercises without any weight and on a minimal amount, even using my exercise bike (recommended again) and slowly it’s been helping me. I was then able to start doing my routine with a 0.5kg weight, and now I can use a 1kg weight for my movements. I do find that heavy sometimes on days I’m not doing too well, but…

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Lorna

3 Quick & Easy Home Made Healthy Snacks

So as you know, a while back in May I made a post about appreciating my body and changing my life. For those of you who missed it, you might want to check it out so that this post makes sense to you. Since a lot of you seemed to really like that article about how I was making a lot of health changes and really feeling positive about it, giving me energy and a much happier outlook on life, I thought it was about time that I shared some of my favourite healthy snacks with you. These are some of the easiest and quickest food options for me as I am pretty lazy when it comes to food. I don’t enjoy cooking, neither can I actually cook (without ruining everything anyway), I’m more into seasoning and making sure things are flavoured as best as can be. So, what you can definitely be assured about for this is that each of these little recipes take less than 5 minutes each! Just the way I like it!

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Lorna

Standing Up For Myself & Well Being

I did originally write this post out and was happy with the result, but as you know the server went down and it meant that I lost a lot of work, including this post, so I’m trying to remember everything I wrote, but go off of how I am feeling right now as well. Since I treat this blog sort of like an online diary and a place that’s mine to express everything I need to, I wanted to make this post as I’m hoping that it might inspire you or help you in some way too. Recently over the past few months, I have found myself in some really stressful and exhausting situations, through no fault of my own actually, but ones that I have been involved in. I noticed that during these really hard and difficult times my mood changes immensely and I don’t function like I should, losing inspiration and enthusiasm because the weight of the situation is bearing down on me. I’ve begun to understand that no matter how hard you try to get on in life, things will always be around the corner unexpectedly to give you a knock back to keep the balance, but how you deal with these issues is important. I’m actually lucky to have understood and figured out what I know now at such a young age, people a lot older than me are still trying to figure things out and deal with these types of burdens on a day to day basis, but what I have learned is that it’s ok to say no. I can’t stress this enough actually…

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Lorna

Appreciating My Body, Changing My Life

For so long I never really appreciated my body, I used to think negatively towards it, always focus on parts I hated, I even had diaries full of the latest diets I was planning to try out (or did try), the craziest regimes I would put myself on, lots of different fads through my teen years and even ended up being a size 24 in jeans, which is fine for some people, but for my frame, it wasn’t right. I used to think I was fat and I was really unhappy, even when I did lose all that weight, I thought I would be happy, but I wasn’t. I still had a lot of depression because my life just wasn’t right. I had many stresses going on around me, I hadn’t long been diagnosed with my illness and I wasn’t settled at all. All of this led to being unhappy (most part due to being restricted), but a lot to do with my lifestyle. I’ve spent years battling with anxiety and depression and even though I have refused numerous times to be put on anti-depressants from doctors (simply because I believe you can cure yourself), I was still lost trying to find ways to get better. [Sorry for the very open and depressive intro, but it’s necessary for where this post is going!] But, the older I get, the wiser I get and the more knowledge I take in, and it’s taken me all these years (from about age 13 until now, where I’m 25) to really understand my body, who I am and how I feel. I’ve always been…

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