The Ramblings of an Accountant

So that's Christmas over for another year. I'm currently somewhere south of Grantham, travelling back on the train down to London to be with my honey again. Saw the sis this morning, so the text I received on Christmas morning (a picture of my Christmas pressies, still sat in Lincoln due to bad weather!) physically manifested. Which is great!

The pressie haul was pretty good this year. As well as the Inspector Morse DVDs from the parental unit, I got both Queen Greatest Flix DVDs as well as a lovely collection of terribly hilarious Hammer Horror Dracula DVDs from C. (She knows I fancy Christopher Lee something rotten, and only teases me about it occasionally*. Star pressie this year was from not_here, who sent me a beautiful stainless steel casserole dish, so I can bore you all even more with new recipe cards in the New Year. Wasn't that thoughtful of her??!

There's still New Year to go, of course, so I'm not stopping there with the 'carols'. Although this next one can't really be called a carol, but it's definitely one of those songs that makes the season! I've picked this version because the singers are obviously having a fantastic time. So, here's The Spinners singing The Twelve Days of Christmas

* Only once or twice a week, in fact.

An interesting thing happened at the weekend, which I completely forgot to mention.

I did mention that J, A, cuvalwen and I skipped off to the Science Museum on Saturday and had fun in the Launch Pad. What I failed to mention was what happened there.

Now J, my sister, has Reynaud's Syndrome and from reading the Wikipedia article, I can pretty well confirm that it's primary and definitely genetic (Mum makes a mean pastry and I remember my sister's fingers turning dark blue when we picked sprouts one Christmas morning). And yes, it has been properly diagnosed. But, as with all 'quality of life' conditions as opposed to 'quantity of life' conditions, it remains untreated as it hasn't been researched enough yet.

It was interesting to read the article where it talked about "avoiding attacks" as if this is something that comes and goes, like migraine. It's not. And the best proof I have of this happened at the weekend.

There was one of those infra-red cameras set up so we were all poncing about rubbing each other in (mostly) publicly accessible places. J was stood there and then A noticed her hands. While we were all radiating mostly red in cooler parts (i.e. where clothing was present) our exposed skin mostly radiated white (except my cheeks which were a nice pink, thank you very much!), J's hands were purple. It was warm in the room, her hands felt fine (she was not reporting any pain) and yet, there for all to see, was absolute proof that her extremities were cold.

So no, Wikipedia, one does not suffer "attacks", it's always there. Just once your extremities get below a certain temperature it starts hurting. That's all.

Actually, I think I've got enough scientific evidence for New Scientist here. *cough*

(Disclaimer: I appreciate that Reynaud's Syndrome does encompass both extremes – sufferers can be prone to flushing as well – it's more a problem with body temperature regulation, but the article linked to doesn't mention this and it's not something my sister suffers from, so I'm not mentioning it explicitly…)