Life on the list

Dear Future Rosy Please remember not to blog when you are tired and struggling and sad. It will only result in draft after draft of profoundly self-pitying and ultimately humiliating text. Things are not as bad as they seem, or they are, and you're fucked. Either way, there is not a lot you can do about it. Also this: Rage, rage against the dying of the light. R

Today is the 20th, and you know what that means: yep, my transplant will happen this week! At some point! Maybe! I should start making plans. I need to pack a bag, as though I were an expectant mother, with some pyjamas, a toothbrush, my hair straightners, a change of outfit for Bear and the Tramadol I still have kicking around...all the essentials for my stay in hospital. I'll need some cash, too, for the taxi over there and all the M&S sandwiches. Next, I shall need to tell all the important people in my life what is happening. In my family we favour a complex, La Resistance-type system of information sharing, so as long as I mention it in passing in a cryptic text to my cousin everyone is bound to find out sooner or later. I shall also need to inform my tutor on my Masters course, the mother of the baby I observe, my therapist, my line manager at work and the features desk at the Metro who will inevitably want to write an article chronicling my epic journey from beautif...

I would not consider myself religious, or particularly spiritual; I don't believe in fate, or ouja boards, or those charmless mediums for whom somebody at Living keeps commissioning shows. I am, however, a feckless sucker for believing good news. A favourite joke of mine from The Simpsons is teed up by Marge telling Homer that he only hears what he wants to hear... "Thanks, I'd love an omelette right about now," he replies. Hence, when I read in the Evening Standard horoscopes last week that Mercury's movements (or something) would bring about a life-changing event after the 20th (or sometime thereabouts), I took it as empirical evidence that I am about to get a transplant, and started planning how I will fill the cool box - the one that will live beside my hospital bed and house all the various soft drinks I plan to consume in the wake of the operation (currently topping the list is mandarin lemonade from Selfridges, should you be interested). Armed with t...

Just spent the last 20 minutes writing a post which I subsequently lost; karma, I suspect, for being filled to the brim with self-pity. Things aren't crazy super wonderful right now, there's been some crying, and Bear has been notably quiet on the issue. Trying to get a grip, really trying...hard though (insert suitably sad-face emoticon).

Death and taxes, proclaimed Benjamin Franklin - the two certainties in life. Almost hard to believe that Franklin didn't also give a nod to the peculiarities of dialysis, but since he made his declaration in a letter to his father dated 1738, when the advent of dialysis was still over 200 years away, you can see his reasoning. I should like to amend Franklin's famous quote to include: monthly bloods. Since my very first dialysis session over four years ago, the hospital have checked my blood work religiously once a month, every month, whether I have wanted them to or not - and most months, I do not want them to. I understand the necessity of monitoring my potassium levels to make sure I'm not about to have a heart attack, or checking my phosphate to confirm that my bones aren't crumbling to chalk, but because I am frightfully busy ( Homeland won't watch itself) I never, ever remember when monthly bloods are due, I don't modify my diet accordingly, and conseq...

There are, I am sure, countless proverbs that reference beginnings and endings. I don't know any, hence the prosaic start to this entry, but the ideas of life and death, of old and new, are inseparable, and were very apt at hospital today. It was Elsa's last day. Elsa is a very kind, very competent Indian nurse who has been working the dialysis wards at Guy's for the last twelve years. If anyone is going to plunge two gino-needles into the most valuable part of your anatomy, you want it to be someone with twelve years worth of experience to their name. It was Elsa who held my hand and comforted me last year when I had a minor meltdown during a session, tipped over the edge by the ranting, coughing old men and the general icky-ness of the whole dialysis set-up. She looked past my tears and snot and hysterical rambling, and if she didn't she was very discreet about it. She greets me with a warm smile, is attentive during the session and unlike some of the other nurses d...