5th old blog

So we were finally able to spend all our time at the villa. Hales was happy to be at home working instead of at somebody else’s. The cats were settling into their new
life in Cyprus, obviously after keeping them in for a couple of weeks. It took them a few days to get used to us again, after being stuck in a cattery for nearly 3 months
then the trauma of being flown over here!
I seemed to be doing OK so far without the medication, but it had been several years since my last relapse anyway so I was unsure as to whether the medication
had been helping anyway. I was doing fairly OK at the time, legs ached a bit but not to noticeable most of the time. I had learnt that as soon as I felt a need to go to
the loo that I should go straight away, so that was pretty much under control.
We had lost some money with having to re list the house and the extra time it took for the sale to go through. When we had paid the mortgage and loan off etc. we realised we still had a substantial amount of debt. Credit cards, store cards, catalogues and an outstanding tax bill added up to over £20k! In hindsight I should have declared myself bankrupt before we left the UK. But I was too proud and
stubborn and wanted to sort my own mistakes out instead of letting someone else do it.
So we contacted all the people we owed money to and arranged repayment plans with them. A few of them had gone to debt collectors so that actually made it
easier to sort a plan out. We knew it meant it would take several years to repay them all, but also that we would have a sense of achievement when we had finished. It did mean that we would probably be short on spendingmoney till we had finished but would have the satisfaction of knowing we had sorted our own mistakes.
I had made friends with a local pool cleaner (Martin), while at the villa and he had offered me a couple of days work a week. It was difficult to start with learning a
new trade but I soon started enjoying my self, and Martin was a patient and good teacher. We became really good friends and started having loads of fun working together. He gave me a few extra days work when he had extra jobs to do, he did property management as well so a few extra jobs came up.
Apart from me having to disappear behind a bush or a wall for a pee my MS didn’t really affect my work too much then. I quickly got into the pool cleaning, and Martin and I became a good team and worked well together.
Everything else was going good as well. We had made some good friends on the estate we were on, particularly John and Hazel who became our Cyprus Mum and Dad! I was doing more diving with Emil and even helping him when he was teaching new divers. The plan was for me to continue my own training and eventually we hoped to set up our own dive school.