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.

I had been to Cyprus a month earlier to sort out accommodation for us, so when we
arrived here we moved into a nice 2 bed villa with it’s own pool and sea views.
Hales thought it was great because she had thought we would end up on an
apartment somewhere, so a private villa was more than we had hoped for.
3 days after arriving in Cyprus I received a call from the estate agent to tell us that
the buyers had pulled out at the last minute! We were devastated, we had only
managed to scrape enough money together to last us about 3 weeks as we had
expected the sale to be all done and dusted within 2 weeks of getting here. I told
the estate agent to put the house straight back on the market and see what
happened. We didn’t really know what to do, stay and try to sort it out or go back
to the UK.
Hales had managed to persuade the company she worked for in the UK to take her
on as a remote worker, but had told them she would have a month off before she
started while we got sorted in Cyprus. We had no Internet at the villa as the road
had not been finished so no telephone lines were laid yet.
Emil came to our rescue by offering for us to stay at his house in Nicosia during
the week so Hales could use his Internet to work. He also said he would take us
back and forth to the villa at weekends so we could have the time to ourselves. We
gratefully took him up on his offer as we really didn’t want to go back to the UK!
This is one of the reasons I regard him more as a brother than a friend.
We struck really lucky with the house as well, and within 3 days of it going back
on the market we had new buyers in place! It just meant we would have to survive
in Cyprus for 3 months while everything went through.
Hales went straight to work and we started spending the week days with Emil and
his wife in Nicosia. I even managed to find myself a part-time job delivering
pizza’s for Pizza Hut in Nicosia. That was actually a fun job, bombing around
Nicosia on a little moped with a pizza box on the back! Pay was rubbish but it was
more to give me something to do than anything.
I had decided not to look for a permanent job till we were living full time at the
villa, so we made do with the little Hales earned and a bit of spending money I
earned. We obviously had to still pay the rent for the villa and we also had our 2
cats in a cattery in the UK waiting for us to have the money to fly them over, so
that was an added expense too.
Everything went smoothly with the house sale this time, and almost 3 months after
arriving in Cyprus it was all done and dusted. We paid off the mortgage, the rather
large loan secured on the house and I think I cleared my overdraft as well. That left

Life was quite good around then. I was employed as a class1 delivery driver at Stan Robinsons to start with but the manager soon decided I was quite good at helping to route and load the smaller delivery vehicles.

I ended up spending more and more time helping in the office as a traffic operator and not going out driving very much. I didn’t mind as I had found a job I quite enjoyed doing, and a bunch of workmates I got on with really well. Several of who I still keep in contact with after more than 10 years!

My MS seemed fairly under control and I don’t think many people realised I had it as I worked just as hard as anyone else. Obviously I had quickly learnt to hide how I was feeling even when I had times when I didn’t feel 100%.

We had our own house which opened up the doors to credit cards and loans etc. That was my downfall as I was useless with money and whenever I was offered a credit card or loan I just said yes. I didn’t realise it at the time but my debts just spiralled more and more out of control.

I was happy with how my MS was going and a lot of the time I could almost forget I had it. But it was slowly getting worse and my legs in particular gradually got more achy. Of course I just totally ignored it and got on with life as normal as possible!

I had made friends with Emil via an online game we both played and we became really good friends straight away. He mentioned one day that he worked as a scuba diving instructor in Cyprus, so I told him it was something I fancied doing. So I booked myself on a course in the UK to do all the classroom and pool work for the PADI Open Water course.

I had already arranged with Emil that once I completed that part of the course I would go to Cyprus for him to complete the course for me. I finished doing the part of the course in the UK then booked a weeks holiday in Cyprus to complete the rest. As soon as I physically met Emil for the first time I knew I had found a friend for life. I completed the OW course and did another couple of courses in the week I was in Cyprus.

I had fallen in love with Cyprus while there and told Hales all about it when I got back home. We decided to have a holiday together there, and that is when Hales fell in love with the island too.

We talked about moving out there but it seemed a bit of a pipe dream to start with. My MS was slowly getting worse so we decided that the climate in Cyprus would help my MS. Our finances had gotten worse due to my stupidity with money and
we realised that the only way forward was to sell the house to try to pay off some of our debts.

We then realised we could either stay in the UK and rent or just up sticks and try Cyprus instead. Not a hard choice to make, so we sold as much stuff as we could, put the house for sale and luckily quickly found a buyer. We packed everything up and 10 days before the completion date on the sale we flew out to Cyprus.

Tried to condense it a bit to stop waffling on too much! I will continue with the start of our Cyprus journey in the next blog.

Rob

The first year being diagnosed was a slightly difficult one. I had to accept that my life was completely changed now and I had no idea what direction I would go. Hales was constant support to me and without her there is no way I would have got through it.

We had only been married just over a year when it all started, learning some of the things that were likely to happen to me was difficult. I’ve never really known how Hales coped with it all and how she felt knowing what was likely to happen.

I must admit that when I was at a low point once I did debate leaving her to spare her having to go through it with me! I quickly realised it was not up to me to decide her life, she had obviously decided to stay with me despite the future and that only made me love her more than I already did.

The MS had kind of settled down after the first 2 relapses and the next few years were fairly normal. I had lost a slight bit of vision in my left eye, but I wore glasses anyway so it made little difference. My legs were weaker than they had been, but I wasn’t planning on running any marathons so that had little impact.

I carried on working full, doing long distance trucking. I had check ups every 6 months and every time I was told I was working too much and should be doing a job 40 hours a week! I did tell them that if they found me a job earning the money I did that only required 40 hours a week I would gladly change! Obviously that didn’t happen!

I had another relapse, this time in my left arm. I was quickly admitted to hospital and a course of steroids quickly sorted it out.

That was the last relapse I remember and life just carried on as normal as possible from there. I did start having other symptoms, but they came on slowly not like a relapse. I started having Urgency when I needed to go to the loo and had to find a toilet fairly quickly when I needed to go. Luckily there were no accidents them days and I learnt to find somewhere to go as soon as it started.

The other symptom I started getting was erectile dysfunction. I’m not embarrassed to talk about it as there is nothing I can do about it so why dismiss it! It was very frustrating (both ways) and is still the symptom I hate more than anything else.

We had finally managed to get ourselves a mortgage and bought a lovely little 3 bed semi in Ipswich. I decided that being away from home all week was not what I wanted any more so I found myself a job doing local deliveries so I could be home with Hales more.

Enough for today, more to follow.

Rob :o)

Thought I would just explain why I chose Burtified as my domain name.

The Burty part was my army nickname. I presume because of Ro-bert and Burt-on, so Burty. 

It really stems from when I’m cooking. I am allergic to onions, I know it’s a weird thing to be allergic to. And it is a really awkward thing as well, it is really surprising how many things have onions, onion extracts or onion powder in! 

It doesn’t make me really ill, just varying levels of being or feeling sick depending on what type and amount are in. Varies from projectile down to a bit of stomach ache and the taste repeating on me.

A lot of the food I particularly enjoy normally contains some form of onion. Spag bol, lasagne, chilli, curry, pies, etc. So a long time ago I started making my own versions of them.

I don’t particularly follow a recipe, I will browse it and then adapt it to how I think it will be OK without onions in. Most of the time it will be fine, I have obviously had some disasters though but not too many.

So basically when I was cooking my own recipe instead of saying that I was adapting it I would say that I was Burtyfying it.

It’s not just cooking that I use it with now though, anything that I adapt to make things easier for me is now classed as being Burtified.

So there you go, that’s why my website is called Burtyfied!

Rob

Somebody said to me ages ago that I should document my life so I thought I would try doing a Blog. Not too sure what I am going to write yet so bear with me for now.

I am 43 years old, very happily married and I have MS.

The first symptoms of my MS appeared in December 1995. At first I thought I had been spending too much time watching telly or playing on my SNES!

I started getting an ache and a bit of blurry vision in my left eye. As a typical man would I chose to ignore it at first, but after it started getting worse after a few days I decided I had better get it checked. So off I went to the GP and after telling him the problem and a quick check off my eye he decided it was probably a virus. I was told if it had not improved in 4 or 5 days I would be best going to the A&E department to get it checked out.

The pain and blurriness gradually got worse the next few days so I took myself to the hospital. I was referred to an eye specialist by the A&E department and then started loads of prodding and pocking and numerous tests! I think they must have given me something for the pain as I don’t recall it getting too bad.

The blurriness was another matter, it steadily got worse so in the end my vision was totally black in my left eye. It was Christmas time by then and we were due to travel from Ipswich to Hull to spend it with my family. I knew I shouldn’t really be driving but decided to do the journey anyway.

The night we decided to travel to Hull just happened to be a night with thick fog and freezing temperatures. I remember being a bit apprehensive at driving in the fog with the use of only 1 eye but we did the trip anyway. I can’t remember how long we stayed in Hull but I remember that when we got back to Ipswich I had more tests and spent a few days in hospital while they gave me steroid treatment to try to speed up the healing process in my eye.

After several more tests including a lumbar puncture which was very painful, I was told by the neurologist I has been seeing that I had Relapsing Remitting MS. Obviously it was a shock to myself and Hales and we had quite a scary time reading about MS as all the information and leaflets we had seemed to show people wheelchair bound and not doing very good.

We did more research on the condition and realised it was not all doom and gloom and it would probably be a few years before I got too bad. In the meantime I had had another relapse which affected my legs quite badly so the neurologist decided to put me on a drug trial that would hopefully limit the number of relapses I had.

Well that’s quite a bit to take in for my first blog so I will stop here for now and continue with the story sometime soon

Rob

I started doing a blog several years ago but I somehow lost interest in it and gave up.  I now want to get back to doing it regularly so I’ve decided to give it another go.

You will have to bear with me in the early stages as I try to get used to it and develop it as much as I can.

I’m not the sort of person to restrict what I want to say so I warn people now that some of my language/thoughts may well be quite controversial. So basically if you are easily offended and something I write upsets you tough! This is my blog and I will say what I want when I want!!

To start with I will republish my original blogs and try to add new content when I can.

Any questions or things you would like to know please ask, I only bite when asked extra nicely!!

Apart from that I hope people find some of it interesting or helpful, even if just to understand my life a little better

Rob