Hello,

Just a quick one to give you a couple of updates. Firstly, I’m off to Madrid at the end of the week until next Wednesday so you won’t be able to enjoy my witty tweets for a few days. I thought I’d let you know so you know to keep yourselves occupied throughout my trip so that you don’t get too bored.

Secondly, on a less cheery note, I might not be updating too much in the next couple of months as I have very impaired vision at the moment. I don’t want to go into a vast amount of detail, but after a lot of umming and aahing from the medics and opticians, it has now been ascertained that I do in fact have diabetic cataracts in both eyes (where the lens clouds over). This is probably because I went for so long undiagnosed and my untreated blood sugars were damaging my lenses for a full seven months before I had any insulin, so now they’ve hit me quite hard.

I’m able to see very little at the moment. The good news is that it isn’t permanent and I will eventually have operations on both eyes. However, the cataract in my left eye is very dense and that eye is effectively useless for the time being and I can only see colours and shapes. The right eye is working a million times harder to compensate, but I still have to have my screen magnified several times and even then I can only read it when it is less than 30cm from my face.

Obviously this is extremely frustrating as I write for a living and I love reading etc. and it means I won’t be able to see much in Madrid which is a shame, so I’ll have to make up for it by overloading my other senses, by which I mean I will eat my own bodyweight in tapas (better book an extra few days…) However, I’ll do what I can to get this operation ASAP, but it could be a while yet as it’s quite a common operation and there’s a long waiting list. I was shocked by how expensive it is to have it done privately, so it’s just a couple of months  of being a bit blind unfortunately. Good old diabetes!

Anyway. If I’m not updating much then this is why. It came on really suddenly so it’s difficult to adjust. Maybe when I get used to it I can start posting more again, but I’m pretty gutted about the whole situation right now so sorry if I go AWOL for a bit. I will, of course, write a city review of Madrid though. Nothing stands between me and a city review!

Yours squintily,

Kayleigh