My London Home

As you all know, I have recently moved to the other side of the world.

I thought I would take some time to show you just how tip top Engish living is. 

This is the facade of my new London home. Now, it does look abit like one of those houses that you would cross to the other side of the street to avoid walking by it, but it's not that bad! 

The top two windows span my whole room! I am sharing with another girl, so this is my side of the room, in both clean and messy. 

This first photo is from the first day I moved in, when everything had it's own place and I had just bought all my new bedding.





 








This second photo was taken today, after I had spent most of the day tucked up in my blankey watching episode after episode of Heartland. 

I scored a new chest of drawers as well to go with my broken set. The most exciting thing was getting so much more surface space for all my crap!

This next photo is of the main bathroom. i'm sure Dad would be pretty impressed with the tiling job in the corner there! :-)









 



 Our wonderful lounge room. We have an armchair, a 2 seater leather couch and two fold out couches - Phil this will be where you're staying! 
Luckily, that thing on the wall is part of the central heating. It gets pretty warm, especially with nine people living in the house. 

  



Our kitchen has everything a kitchen needs, as well as houses our washer and tumble dryer.

The oven is a bit hard to work, as it is gas and doesn't have the temperature gauge, but goes from 1 - 9 in heating. 

It's pretty much just a guess on what heat you need the oven and just pray that nothing burns!





 One of the newest things that we have discovered is that where our tumble dryer is, it looks like it used to be a bit of a shower. Which we thought was a bit weird, because if the kitchen had been built on after the house was built, you would have to exit the home and then walk around to the 'shower' room. 

This is a photo of the new discovery, complete with soap dish!

So that's pretty much my new London home. Besides the backyard. Which, at the moment, looks a bit like a jungle. We even saw a fox out there the other day! Nobody goes out there, I think we might be too scared we're going to step in some month-old vomit or something. 




















 

The Tale of the Infected Finger

My swollen finger of last week

front view

2 weeks ago I started noticing my finger swelling up. 
I went to the doctor who gave me some antibiotics and said see how it goes.

As you can see, my finger swelled up to about the size of a balloon  <<<<<

I couldn't straighten it fully, nor could I bend it more than 90 degrees from the top knuckle. 
It got all nice and shiny and and hurt like a bitch!











Finally, after a week, I went back to the docs, who sent me straight away to Accident & Emergency. Up near the fingernail, to the right was this massive yellow lump. The nurse at A&E was a bit shocked that I had waited so long to go in, and gave me the dreaded news that she would have to drain my finger. 

3 needles of anaesthetic

First, the nurse did a 'ring block' of anaesthetic. She injected it on the left side of the finger, then on the right and then one over the top of the finger. 

The top prick felt the weirdest, it was like the needle was pulling my skin downwards. It  took about 5 minutes for the anaesthetic to kick in and then the nurse got out her scalpel.

After the cut

The first thing the nurse did was make a cut on the corner of the fingernail where the yellow lump was.
The wet patch under my finger in the photo is actually all the pus that came out of my finger, as well as a little bit of blood there. >>>>>>>>>
After the cut, the nurse gave my finger a bit of a squeeze, just to make sure that everything had come out, then she used some forceps to make the hole bigger. She then cut a strip of bandage, dipped it in iodine and then shoved some of it in the wound, describing it as 'domestos for the toilet cleaning, iodine for wound cleaning'. A little bit of the strip hung out of the wound, sort of like a tail.

The first dressing

After she had finished torturing me with the forceps, which hurt like a mofo, I got a nice clean dressing, which was promptly dirtied by the iodine leaking through the bandage.

The white 'coverall' was professionally called a 'finger condom' by nurse, lolz. 

I had to leave the bandage on from Friday until today (Monday) and made sure not to get it wet.

Today I had to go back to a nurse and get the dressing changed. 

The finger hole

The new nurse was quite gentle taking off the dressing and when she took out the packing it didn't hurt one bit, thankfully!

Although it does look quite ewwy, as you can see >>>>

The swelling has gone done a lot since Friday, probably due to the new antibiotics, that are A LOT stronger than what the doctor gave to me in the first instance.

New dressing

The new nurse discarded with the 'old school' dressing, and now I have this little hat dressing on. Still have to keep it dry, but the hole should close up by itself by the end of the week and my finger should be back to normal! *fingers crossed!*