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The Cold War

I'm ill, but if that seems like a self-evident statement on a blog about living with renal failure, note that I am not alluding to the fact I have no kidneys; kidney failure doesn't count as ill until I want to park in a disabled parking space. What I mean is, I have a cold.

I have not had a cold for ages. Ironically enough, before I started dialysis - when I still had a functioning transplanted kidney and was ostensibly healthy - I used to get colds all the damn time. In order to stop my immune system identifying my new kidney as a foreign body and attacking it, I was taking a handful of immunosuppressant drugs, and whilst they provided a certain level of protection to the kidney, they also meant that I was at the mercy of whatever germs happened to be filtering through the nearest AC vent at any given time. Colds really went to town on me back then: the worst ones were closer to flu, put me out of action for days and took weeks to work their way out of my system. However, since I lost the kidney, I have been, arguably, healthier than ever. Thus it was an odd sensation to wake one morning last week with a sore throat which in my case is always, always a precursor to a cold. Initially, I tried to reason it away: had I smoked to much? Drunk too much? Shouted too much? Stuck anything down there? Alas - none of the above. But who gets colds at the start of June? Me, apparently. Once the sneezing started, I resigned myself to my fate.

By Thursday night, I was feeling grim. I had rallied briefly in the afternoon for lunch with my father at Ottolenghi, but when I turned down the option of a chocolate brownie I knew something was seriously wrong. By the evening, I was on the sofa, drinking mugs of hot ribena and feeling sorry for myself so I went to bed early and had a crappy night's sleep. On Friday morning I called into work sick, the guilt of which was negated by the fact it was a teacher training day, which are a fucking nightmare even when you are feeling fine. I slept most of the morning; I watched some ER; I had some toast. By the time I left for hospital, I was actually feeling pretty jolly.

From past experience, I knew that dialysis when you are feeling ropey tends to compound the problem, but half way through my session on Friday afternoon, I thought I might be dying and if I wasn't, I hoped that maybe the ceiling fan would fall on my head. Maisy rung me half way through my session to say goodbye before she left for the weekend and was treated to a monosyllabic, barely coherent conversation that came to an abrupt end when it occurred to me I might be about to throw up. Knowing that it was Friday and I wouldn't be dialysing again for two days, I struggled on to the end of my four hours. I then made my way - very slowly - out of the unit and out into the fresh, evening air outside London Bridge, and for a moment, flush with relief at having finished dialysis for another week, I felt a bit better. Then I got on the tube.

The problem with having experience with medical matters is that you have experience with medical matters. In short, I know too much and my imagination uses this information to reek havoc. In the duration of my ten minute tube journey up to Kings Cross, I managed to convince myself I was: having a stroke; having a heart attack; going to faint; going to have a fit; going to die; going to be diagnosed with something fatal that had initially presented itself as a cold and then die; going to throw up; never going to get home. I decided at one point that my headache and aching muscles, were, in fact, meningitis, so I stared at the neon strip lights to check my sensitivity to light and wondered whether I should warn everyone in my carriage that they might have been exposed and were probably going to die too (although...more chance of me getting a kidney...ok, keep quiet). I was pale, shaking and now, it seemed, burning up. However, in my addled state, the embarrassment of stripping down to my t-shirt and revealing my heavily bandaged, post-dialysis arm surmounted the benefit of cooling down. Eventually, before magma began to leak from my orifices, I caved and whipped off my top. The relief was instant and I all but crawled home.

On Friday evening, I coughed, sneezed and snuffled in the foetal position on the sofa and indulged in an orgy of self-pity. There is something about a cold that brings even the strongest amongst us to our knees. Though I may look like a twelve year-old, I am in fact a fully grown young woman who has seen off two bouts of renal failure; yet all I wanted last Friday was to be tucked up on the sofa at home with Bear, a West Wing DVD on the TV and my mum on hand to serve up hot milk and honey and a boiled egg. Kidney failure suddenly seemed like a holiday in the Maldives now that I was clearly suffering from The Black Death.

It must have been a miracle, because after an eleven hour slumber, I awoke on Saturday feeling practically cured. During the night, I had somehow managed to stave off any number of terminal illness' that had obviously beset me the previous day. I put it down to my positive mental disposition and my ox-like constitution. By Saturday afternoon, I even felt up for going for a jog and out to a house party with Ellie in the evening because I figured, having just had a near-death experience, I couldn't waste one second and I needed to embrace the joy in life and what better way to do that by getting drunk at a warehouse party in Mansion House? They say that organ failure kills three people a day... I wonder how many of them were finished off by a cold?

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