About Me

My (online) name is Silver. I actually adopted it quite by accident, when I was first online I used to help a lady who had (and has, though I haven’t seen her in years now) Welsh (Section A & B) ponies. I was picking my first email address and I decided I wanted copper beech, which was the name of a colt she had. copperbeech was taken, so I played around a bit. Beech became beach which became sand and copper became silver. Thus, silversand was born! In chatrooms silversand was too long for people to type out every time so it got shortened to Silver and voila, it stuck!

I was born on 22nd June 1988 in the county town of Somerset. By cesarean, as it happens 😆 When I was at primary school I had a friend who was due on 22nd June and born on 27th – I was due on 27th and born on the 22nd which was quite fun! I have hazel eyes and brown hair which is generally quite dark though darkens and lightens throughout the year. It’s fairly long, a good few inches past my shoulders. I’m about 5′ 10″ tall.

I still live in the same town I was born in, with my parents and animals. At the moment I have two guinea pigs called Molly and Boris, a rabbit called Benjamin, a hamster called Pinto and a yellow labrador called Vale. I like most colours but a particular favourite is green. If you hadn’t guessed I love animals 😉 A particular obsession is frogs and I have an ever growing collection! When I’m not online I enjoy playing Sims 2 or Petz, sometimes I play Pippa Funnell: Stud Farm Inheritance or Pharoah. Online my most frequent haunts are PKC, ShowDog and Neopets.

I was quite a healthy child until I started to feel unwell when I was about eight. I ignored it and carried on reguardless! During the summer holidays of 1998 it got worse and I returned to school in September 1998 (my final year of primary school) to do the first week and then collapse. I was diagnosed with ME and there followed a year of ups and downs. I had home tuition for part of it and in May I took my KS2 SATS at home, achieving level 5 in maths, level 4 in english (the highest level I could possibly get as I only did half the paper) and level 5, just missing a 6, in science. Considering I’d missed a large part of the curriculum I was very pleased with those results!

I missed out on the school trip – a weeks adventure holiday – which followed SATS. I did manage our end of year day trip, though my only real memories of that are feeling incredibly poorly on the coach on the way back to school!

I wasn’t too bad during the summer holidays and I was desperate to have a fresh start at a new school in September, so not really understanding the illness thoroughly and being a stubborn so and so I went back, full time! I can’t remember how long I lasted but I know it wasn’t long – couple of days, maybe a week or two? I gradually did less and less, going in for maybe two or three lessons a day and then missing weeks at a time in between. My form tutor and my french teacher were absolutely lovely, which was fantastic. My french teacher in particular would go out of her way to check how I was and try and accommodate me. Unfortunately my year head wasn’t so good – I remember once he asked to see me at break and I can’t remember what happened but I know he really upset me and I left the room in tears. The whole of that year was a bit of a mix of that – some great people, some awful and some neither one way or the other. My RE (religous education) teacher was very nice but I never did RE. Likewise I never did history, PE (physical education) or drama.

So then, on to another summer holidays. Things were okay, not great but they could have been worse! I went on holiday (with my parents) to Flash – a little village in Derbyshire which boasts the honour of being the highest village in England. We stayed on a riding and trekking centre, I went riding the day we arrived and then slipped on a wet floor the next morning and broke my arm. Oh I’m talented! I couldn’t even groom with the other arm after that (it jolted the broken one too much) never mind ride! Still, had a nice time considering.

I went back to school in September 2000, did the first four days (on part time) and then was off ill again. I never went back! I had some tuition at home and in November 2001 reached my lowest point and went into hospital. I was only in there for about a week, I didn’t cope at all well and they decided I’d be better at home. Things stayed fairly static for the next couple of years and some time in 2003(?) my paediatrician was examining me and discovered I had scoliosis (curvature of the spine) which should have been operated on in 2004 but for various reasons couldn’t be and will now be done either late 2005 or 2006. I also have a shortening of the tendons in my legs but I’m keeping those more or less under control with physiotherapy at the moment. I have been back in hospital a couple of times since and numerous times just for the day!

I “left school” in 2004 with no qualifcations,

Eventually after so long with nothing changing they decided there might be more to it than just ME (if indeed it ever was in the first place) and so after I long wait I went up to Bristol Childrens Hospital on 12th September 2005. To be continued…

There we go, that’s far more information than you could ever possibly want to know about me!