Skip to main content

Saturday night

It's Saturday night and me, my laptop and several chocolate coin wrappers are on the sofa in front of The X Factor. This may will be a pleasurable way to spend an evening, but I shouldn't be here; I should be at Siobhan and Kat's house, with Fiona, getting ready to go out dancing in Fulham because Saturday night is party night. Unfortunately, Saturday afternoon is a dialysis afternoon and it was all I could do to get home let alone don my wet look leggings and get on the dance floor.

I have spent a good proportion of this evening trying to let go of the sadness, envy and self-pity that I have experienced as a result of missing out on tonight's festivities. It's pathetic - I'm pathetic. It's just a night out, there will be plenty more I am sure, but seeing a photo of my three friends looking giggly and gorgeous about to head out reduced me to tears. Getting dressed up, getting drunk and getting my groove on alongside my girlfriends used to be my favourite thing to do. The last time I went out and truly let my hair down was before I got ill...so that will be four years ago. I mourn constantly for the life I once had; 2012 will mark the start of my fifth year in kidney failure but I still haven't quite managed to acclimatise or accept it. Instead of focusing on the numerous positives in my life I get hung up on the negatives: missing one night out is a small price to pay for being healthy and happy in so many other respects. And instead of chalking tonight up to a loss and using the time productively - cracking on with my book, reading for my Masters, even cleaning the kitchen - I have wasted it, beached on the sofa, a fat lump huddled under a blanket. I've already lost half of my twenties to this condition; I want to spend the next five years dancing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
2 comments
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more