So I packed up and moved down south. I don’t think I had much stuff, couple of bags of clothes and a few small boxes of personnel items.
The first few weeks I was staying with people, a few nights in a B&B and I think I even had a week stating at the YMCA! Managed to rent a room in a shared house eventually, flats and apartments were just too expensive to rent.
Life was obviously quite good at that time. Roof over my head, finally had a job and with the love of my life! Things got even better when I asked Hales to marry me and she said yes! 😁💑💖
We eventually moved in together, actually in the shared house. So we started life together living in 1 room in the shared house! Wasn’t exactly the start I would have chosen for us, but we were happy and deeply in love.
The happiest day of my life happened on the 20th August 1994, we got married!
The first year of being married was pretty good. Yes we still lived in the shared house, but we were both working and very happily married. For our first anniversary we went on a coach trip to Paris, not a bad place to celebrate our first year being married!
Unfortunately thing were soon to take an unexpected life changing occurance! In the December 4 months after our anniversary, I started getting the first symptoms of MS. Obviously to start with we had no idea that’s what it was. The first 8 months of 1996 I had numerous test and scans, until finally being told in the August that I had Relapsing Remitting Multiple Sclerosis!
Life for both of us changed from that day. Apart from the 2 initial attacks and 2 other relapses I wasn’t too bad in the first year. I was still able to work full time, and most of the time it was hard for people to see any real problems that I had.
For the next 11 years we carried on as normal, I just had regular check ups at the hospital every 6 months. Luckily it didn’t impact our lives very much, and I managed to hide any small problems I had. If you knew me back then, most people couldn’t really tell I had anything wrong with me.
In 2004 we went on holiday to Cyprus for our 10th wedding anniversary. I had a really good friend who lived there, and I had already visited him to go Scuba diving. At the time it didn’t even cross my mind about moving there to live!
In 2006 we had managed to get ourselves in quite a bit of debt, and the house we had bought was looking likely to end up being repossessed. Rather than let that happen we decided to sell the house first. We talked about what we would do next, stay in the UK and rent somewhere or just try something new and move to Cyprus!
Cyprus won. So in 2007 we had sold most of our belongings and we had a buyer lined up for the house. With only a few weeks left till completion we left the UK for a new life in Cyprus.
To be continued
Rob
My Life and My MS 