meemalee

At the end of my first year at university, I began to get very ill. I felt exhausted but hyperactive, I sweated all the time, I had panic attacks and my hair fell out, I had chronic stomach upsets, I kept losing weight no matter how much I ate, and I even had the occasional black-out. What I found hardest to cope with were the palpitations and tremors - I couldn't even hold a pen without trembling, and I could constantly hear my heart beat. And if I lay flat on the floor, I could see the blood pumping through my aorta in my stomach as I'd got so thin. God knows why. but I didn't tell my parents what was going on. But when I developed a goitre and weird, bulging eyes, they worked out that I had Graves' disease - a hereditary illness, which my mother had also suffered from. Graves' disease is an autoimmune disorder where the thyroid gland goes into overdrive; the thyroid gland controls metabolism, so basically it was as if I was on speed . Thankfully, there was a tre...

"Till drowsy eyelids seem to see A-flower 'neath her golden htee The Shwe-Dagon flare easterly From Burmah to Kamakura " The tragic and frightening events unfolding in Japan will be familiar to you all, so I won't recount them here, except to urge you to view this piece by ABC News showing in stark detail the extent of the devastation so far. What I do want to tell you is that Japan has asked for outside help , and for a country as proud as that to do so (they were forced to accept foreign assistance after the Kobe earthquake in 1995 which virtually destroyed that city and killed 6,500 people), they must be in severe need right now - faced as they are by earthquake, tsunami, nuclear emergency and an erupting volcano . I have a vested interest - I love the country; I have family and friends who live there (they're all okay if scared); and I have been to Japan three times out of the last four years - and am meant to be going again in three weeks' time. But ev...