- Hello and welcome to the floor
of my living room/dining room/kitchen.
It's the room that we've been living in now
13 weeks of lockdown,
for the rest of our house has building work done to it.
It's great. It's fine.
It's not at all awful.
Especially six of those weeks,
I've had a really bad back cause I injured it.
Then I went to hospital.
It's been an adventure.
You may have seen my video "Baking in a Building Site"
in which I baked in a building site.
Not click bait.
Look I mean, I just love baking
and we haven't had a kitchen for the last four months,
because of the building work and the pandemic
and the thing and the.
But you know what, that's not going to stop me
because it's pride month, the end of pride month.
It's still pride month though
and I'm going to bake a rainbow cake.
So thank you for joining me to celebrate pride month
in cake form,
and also to Surfshark for sponsoring this video.
Rainbow cake in a microwave you say?
Can it be done?
Let's find out.
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Well, hello.
Yes, I do have a dress with a matching mask.
In fact, I have many.
They come from British Retro.
People always ask me where these dresses are from.
Um, and now you can tell you where my mask is from.
So, let's get to baking our rainbow cake,
while I tell you all about the fun I've been
having recently during lock down.
And by fun I mean excruciating pain.
All right, we're going to use the creamer method
and we're going to measure things
based on the weight of the eggs
because that's the way my grandmother did it.
So I have all these colorings, and also these.
They're silicon molds that you can put in the microwave
or in a regular oven.
Hopefully this will all be fine.
It will all work out well.
All right so our eggs have been weighed, 220.
Those of you who are like oh my God Jessica is sitting up
without the aid of cushions or on her bed.
I know we'll get to that in a minute.
So obviously because I can't handle sugar
because obviously like there's one
thing my body could do right, no.
We are going to be using granulated sweetener.
I highly recommend Sucralose, it's the only
one that does not taste like a rat died in your mouth.
When cooking with artificial sweetener just knock a zero
off the end of all measurements.
So instead of trying to put 220 grams worth
of artificial sweetener into this cake,
which I don't know whether that would
kill you but it would make you feel like you died.
We're going to put 22 grams in.
So I injured my back and I have absolutely no idea how.
Not even in the sense of oh I was doing a sport
and then was injured, no.
I went to the toilet.
I yelled "Ow!" on the way back.
I walked into the room like "ah!"
My wife's like what happened?
And I forgot in the two steps
from my injury back into the room.
So I don't remember how I was injured
but there we go, apparently I was.
And so for two weeks,
I just kind of ignored it which is what I tend to do
something goes wrong with me: ignore it for two weeks.
Pretty standard.
I started to lose sensation in my legs,
which is not that out of the ordinary for me.
All right, we're going to put 220 grams of
not real butter in there.
So anyway, I started to lose sensation in my legs,
which most people should probably panic about,
but I have a condition called
Hereditary Neuropathy with liability to Pressure Palsy.
But not only is a mouthful,
it's also plea annoying because it means that
my nerves when put under pressure of some kind,
like if you lean on it, rest something upon it,
they paralyze palsy. It's in the name.
And paralyze doesn't just mean
something that stops working,
it could mean nerves on your skin as well,
there's a touch sensation.
And also the nerves that carry signals and
information up and down.
All of your nerves, your nerves basically.
Annoying.
And then I stopped being able to pee, more annoying.
And not only that, when I was then reminded
by my wife that I needed to pee.
Really hurt, like really hurt.
Like someone was taking a red hot needle,
and then once I had peed it was like
I've been punched in the stomach.
It was bad, it was pretty bad.
Yeah, kinda sucked, kinda sucked.
So we went to A&E
and they're like hm that does indeed sound worrying.
Let's get an MRI and see whether your spinal column
is being crushed by a herniated disc.
Good to say, it was not.
They're like okay so it must be your nerve.
That means it's neurology problem.
Unfortunately however,
my local hospital doesn't have a neurology department.
You don't have neurology department.
They have a neurologist that they share
with other hospitals.
I live in a city.
It's a big city, okay?
We don't have a neurology department.
I've got admitted to the renal ward,
which is kidneys if you don't know,
and they're delightful by the way.
They've got the renal ward
at the Royal Sussex County Hospital.
However, I was told that I could either stay in hospital
for an indeterminate amount of time
and see the neurologist when he next,
but they didn't know when that could be,
and it could be in a week's time.
Or I could go home and see the neurologist
when he was able to see me.
Unsurprisingly, I did take the choice to go home
and waited for neurology to get in contact.
It took a month to see the neurologist.
During which time, excruciating pain!
They were nice, they did give me some painkillers though
on the renal ward, but not much.
Not a lot of painkillers,
lot of time in bed,
fighting the people around me about
how much I wanted to work.
They were like "No! You are not doing well, please stop."
You don't understand.
Working just means a lot to me, okay?
And I know that my job isn't saving the
world or anything but making my Instagram cohesive
brings me joy.
Also she didn't know dentists in the UK are self-employed,
and therefore do not get put on photo,
even though my wife wasn't working for three months.
And I felt a lot of pressure as the
main breadwinner of the family.
So I finally get to go and see the neurologist last Friday,
and I'll be honest I was not doing well.
I was at that stage where, and this may be a bit dark
so I apologize.
If you don't want to hear something very dark,
you should probably skip about 30 seconds ahead.
I was in that bad place with pain,
where you kind of think if you got hit by a bus
it wouldn't be the worst thing,
because then at least it wouldn't hurt anymore.
And that's not a good thing to be thinking.
So we went in to go and see this neurologist
and I was just crying beforehand
because I was so sure that he was gonna do some tests on me,
or say that they've run this other test
and the results were nothing or inconclusive,
and therefore I had nothing
and just had to go home and deal with it
or something like that.
And I just really really wanted,
and I should probably tell you
that during my time on bed rest not only
was I playing a lot of Sims,
I was also watching a lot of Grey's Anatomy.
So I was crying because I wanted to go to the
kind of hospital they have in Grey's Anatomy,
where every episode it's one person's problem,
and all these different doctors across all these different
specialties talk to each other
and find out what's wrong
and then fix it or the person dies.
That happens sometimes too.
So I was so upset because I thought this
was just gonna be some other faceless doctor
that I would see once
and he would be like "blah blah blah.
I don't even know your condition,
I've never heard of it, and I don't care to learn about it.
You don't have one of the five things I deal with.
Goodbye."
I wasn't even looking my best,
you have to be looking your best, right?
Because otherwise they might just think
you're not trying hard enough,
and you might not receive the medical care that you need.
I can't say for sure whether that's true or not.
It's just my own personal experience,
that when I look nicer I get treated better.
So I get called into neurology,
we go in, it's a doctor I've never seen before.
He smiled at me
and he was like "I'm really sorry
that I left you sitting out there for 20 minutes.
It's just that I've been trying to look through your file,
and it's a lot."
He is like, "you seem to have a lot of
different things wrong with you."
He was like "yes it's all very baffling,
and you have this condition
that I've never heard of before."
But he was intrigued and he was like
"oh so you have this, but you also have this?"
And I'm like "yes, I know, I do. It's a thing."
And he's like "oh and you're also deaf?"
"Yes, I know."
And the different doctors are like
"oh why is she deaf?"
And I'm like " I don't care,
what I care about is the fact that I am,
and I have to deal with it."
"Oh and then your eye doesn't work?"
I'm like "yeah I know. Also a weird thing about me."
"Oh and you have this? And this?"
I'm like "Yeah, I know."
And he just went "how fascinating!
You know what, I bet no one's ever
properly looked at that have they?
Cause you've probably seen a lot of different
doctors about a lot of different things,
but have you ever seen a doctor who's
looked at everything altogether?"
And I was like, " Are you suggesting what I think you're
suggesting? Is this about to be a Grey's Anatomy moment?"
And you know what? It was.
It was.
He was like "this is fascinating!
I would love to hear your entire medical history.
We should get a coffee. I'm just so intrigued."
He was like "I'm going to sign you up as a new patient.
I've decided, I think,
would you mind if I switched over care
from your current neurologist to me?
So I can look at all of your different things together
and see how they interlink and interact with each other."
I was like "yes, please do so!"
And he was just marvelous and he is like
"you know I see people all the time
they've been to all these different doctors
and the different doctors."
Wow, was that almost perfect? It was.
"And the different doctors all say things like
oh well, if that's not to do with me
and I can't find on this one test,
that it's this one thing.
Then you must be making it up."
"I have some experience of that."
"I'm really sorry about it let's fix that."
And then he said something I won't tell you what
because well a personal be triggering.
So he said something and then I started to cry
and then he realized that he hadn't really like
meant to say it to make me cry,
he just was explaining something.
Anyway, I cried.
I know.
In all my years of seeing doctors not one of them
has ever reached their hand across the desk to me,
while I was crying, and he did.
And he like patted my little hand.
And I was like "can you be my doctor forever?"
So yeah, apparently I'm in love with the doctor now,
what's new?
Also male, that's very new?
I'm totally kidding don't worry.
I still very much love my wife,
she is the only human being for me on the planet.
And then the whole reason that
I was there in the first place was for
this back pain, which made my leg paralyzed,
although it's kind of a bit better now,
and also maybe not know that I needed to go to the loo.
Although that's also kind of it a bit better now.
I've just been waiting ten weeks,
not knowing what the hell's going on with me.
I'm kind of panicking that if I move at all,
that I'm gonna be making it so much worse.
And he was like "oh no, it's fine.
This actually happens all the time.
Generally we see it in older people over the age of 80."
I've always been a trendsetter, what can I say.
Bringing things for the new generation.
Yeah, apparently a lot of people over 80 get injured
and then their body just kind of stopped
to help heal the injury,
their body stops them from being able to move
or go to the toilet.
Apparently it wasn't even that weird.
And he said "the best thing for it, is probably to do some
gentle exercise."
And that my friends,
is what we're doing today,
that's why we're baking a cake on the floor.
Okay we're also baking a cake on the floor
because I don't have a kitchen or any space
or any like counters or whatnot,
but mainly it's for all the good reasons I just said.
(calming music)
Okay, so we have our basic cake batter,
and you've heard this week's kind of tragic tale,
but then it has a happy ending.
So now we've come to the experimentation part,
because I do not know how much of this
is going to take to turn the cake batter.
Also I have no idea how long it's
gonna need in the microwave,
but that's the fun, right?
We're gonna need six things,
but I only have five of these.
I'm aware the rainbow is seven but really,
who needs two purples.
So I only have five of these
so one of them is going to have to share.
(calming music)
Well hello and welcome to the
microwaving section of the video.
Yes, this massive bit of plastic behind me
is just covering a hole that we don't like to talk about.
I have no idea how long this has to go
into the microwave for,
so we're all just learning new things together today.
Experimentation.
Let's try, it's pretty thin,
so let's try one minute.
(bright music)
( microwave beeps)
All right, how's our mini cake?
A little bit longer.
There you go mini cake, come on.
Another 30 seconds.
Okay well, it's as baked as it's gonna get.
The thing is with microwave cakes that
I've sort of forgotten
is that you really need to smooth them,
because unlike cakes in a regular oven,
it's not like the batter just has time to.
Yeah, it's gorgeous.
Look at it, stunning!
Most beautiful cake you've ever seen, oh my gosh!
Okay, I think one and a half minutes
was the winning combination,
so let's go again with our orange.
I shouldn't lie, my back does
really really really really really hurt,
but I have taken some medication.
You good stuff, everything's fine.
Also supposedly gentle exercise is great.
You know baking in a microwave, gentle.
Blue.
Hey purple!
Okay I may take a break.
So we have our beautiful microwave cakes
and now we're going to stack them one to another.
I think using some kind of cream cheese icing.
I am trapped on my sofa.
Jewish tops is completed.
Yeah, I'm just going to literally throw this in now,
because it has reached 4:00 p.m.
Okay, let's decorate this cake,
and by decorate I mean stack and pray that they stay.
(bright music)
Well hello!
So the lighting changed,
because the time changed,
because we had to discuss some things with our builder
about cornicing.
Cornicing is very important.
I learned recently, Americans call it crown molding.
Observe my cake!
Are you impressed with me?
Because I'm impressed with me.
I think we should all be impressed.
(bright music)
(Jessica laughs)
That's actually nice. Hey!
Hey! Before you hop onto your next video,
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(bright music)