Great, just what London needs...

....another unemployed, freelance writer with a pipe dream and no kidneys. I am 23, an ex-teacher, living in London, (currently) watching Never Mind the Buzzcocks and yes, yes...ok...I'm writing a blog because I want to write professionally. By which I mean, I want to sit on my sofa eating Party Rings and get paid for it.

The reason I'm lucky enough to be able to pursue writing as a career is because I am currently on heamodialysis, awaiting a kidney. Apparently having four hour sessions of dialysis three times a week isn't particularly conducive to a career in...well, anything, as it turns out. If, by reading this blog, you are inspired to sign up to the national donor list, all the better; but this blog is not intended to be dogmatic. 8055 people are currently awaiting an organ transplant in the UK, but organ failure (kidney, in my own case) is a tough sell: we 8055 losers (couldn't even make their own body parts work...dicks) rely on you other 51,991,945 (is that millions? I did it on the calculator on my phone...) to help us out. And it's not sexy. But it can provide some cheap, macabre laughs I shall try and relate - articulately - here.

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Postscript

You wouldn't believe where I am. You could guess, if you've seen the gratuitous images of my self-satisfied gurning face in front of an infinity pool on Facebook...otherwise you might find it hard to imagine the paradise in which I currently find myself. I am in Dubai. Bar Abby Clancey and the cast of TOWIE, is is not everyone's idea of paradise - it actually wasn't mine. It is exciting, exotic and fucking hot, but the skyscrapers and traffic, the desert and cultural deficiency (not to mention the chavs that clutter up the Ritz Carlton these days, I mean honestly...) suggest you'd be hard-pushed to call it paradise. It is vaulted to utopian heights simply because, four-months after the transplant, I am here. My nearest and dearest suffered for seven years as I dreamily aired my wanderlust. Yet the reward of a post-transplant holiday seemed too extravagant a prize for which to yearn - wasn't a life free from dialysis enough? Wasn't having a drink when t...

The phone rings: Part II

Anaesthetic can do weird things to you. It makes you sleepy (clearly) but in the past I have arrived back from surgery giddy as a chipmunk in spring. When I was wheeled back onto the ward after the transplant, I was not so much giddy as...suffering from delusions of psychosis. This was how I announced myself to Mum and Sam anyway, scaring the shit out of them in the process. I spent a wide-eyed half-hour protesting against the poison in my body before declaring, "I don't feel a shred of hope and I shall never be happy again". I remember only: 1) being told the kidney was not producing urine, and consequently thinking the transplant had failed 2) that I had to stop myself asking the doctors to take the kidney out and 3) despising myself for my ingratitude. It was the first in a range of unexpected emotions I would feel over the coming week. After half an hour of drug-induced ranting I finally - mercifully - passed out. Tuesday When I w...

The phone rings: Part I

When I open my eyes, I'm not sure where I am and I can't move. The last thing I remember is having an oxygen mask clamped over my mouth and being told to inhale; it was quick and traumatic and now I feel as if I have awoken in that very scene. I am freaking out. "Where am I? What's happened? What have you done to me?" "You've had a kidney a transplant," says a genial Irish voice, as though this sort of thing happens every day. Sunday, 6:10pm It is 6pm and I am on my sofa, writing on my laptop with one eye on Dinner Date . I feel peckish, so I decide to make myself some bulgar wheat and peas (don't ask) and watch the Strictly results - it's about time Dave goes, the joke has worn thin. The phone rings. A man with heavily accented English asks to speak to "Rosa....Rosymend....Edwards?" and I am about to tell him I am not interested in whatever he is hawking, the words are about to roll off my tongue, when he introduces himself...

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