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Showing posts from July, 2012

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After Monday's slightly alarming post I am pleased to report I no longer feel like jacking it all in and expiring quietly. The sun is shining and the Olympics are coming, don't you know; plus Fiona is back for a visit from her tax haven and I have bought new cushions for our sofa. Life goes on, even if it is extraordinarily banal (I didn't want to boast, but I also purchased a small coffee table). In recent weeks, the thought of an imminent transplant has sustained me; now it is just a question of finding something else that will do the job. It might just have to be the little things from now on.

I pray that they are damn lies, these statistics

I found out something today. My Dad had asked me whether I could seek out some more information about the transplantation process - the hospital has told us next to nothing, which is not unusual, but certainly frustrating. My Consultant duly arrived this afternoon before I was attached to the machine, and told me this: for a couple of reasons, the antibodies present in my blood mean that I am an incompatible match for 90% of the kidneys that become available through the national donor list. "So that means I only have a 10% chance of getting a kidney?" I asked, waiting for him to reply that of course that was NOT what he meant, I had misheard, my C in GCSE maths was a lucky get. But he said, "Yes, 10%." "That's a pretty small chance," I said. He had come to me with no other information whatsoever, and he left after I told him there was not really much more to say. My first thought was that I was done. I have had enough. I have tried with every fib...

Guilty Pleasures

I don’t know if you know, but it is actually summertime. Yesterday, one of the children at school questioned me for a solid three minutes about the validity of this claim, and grew confused when I confirmed that it is, in fact, summer. “It isn’t sunny,” he said, “so how can it be?” I assured him, but he was having none of it. Children have literally stopped believing in summer; it is now a seasonal fairytale. So what with the rain, and the double dip recession, and the imminent arrival in London of 70,000 tourists wearing bum bags and befuddled expressions, there doesn’t seem a whole lot about which to be cheerful. The French are trying their best to alleviate our gloom by offering free trips – albeit to France – for every gold medal the British Olympic team win, but something about this feels very smug, very….well, French. I firmly believe that relief can be found closer to home: now is the time to let our guilty pleasures run amok. The joy I take in my own G.Ps is immense, all th...

Sexual healing

There is a nurse at the hospital who is quite fit. This is highly anomalous and yet not that difficult seeing as his only competition comes from small, middle aged Phillipino women. He is quite swarthy, and possibly French; not my usual type, but, again, in comparison... In other circumstances, I might even fancy him a bit - and by other circumstances, I don't mean if I had met him in a club rather than on my dialysis unit, although the latter isn't exactly conducive to romance. By other circumstances, I mean if I had any libido left to speak of. I think I might have broken. Read any pamphlet, browse any website, and all information proffered confirms that Mojo Erosion (yes, that's the medical term) is a common fall out from kidney failure, though it is most frequently experienced in tandem with depression, and I may be stressed and tired and borderline anorexic but I would not describe myself as 'depressed". 90% of the time, anyway. But what with one thing and a...

Ice, ice, save me

Maisy and I decided to defrost the freezer. We should have done it during the electricity holiday we took last week in which we went back to Victorian times. A cable had exploded below the pavement outside our front door, maybe because it was old but probably because it was installed during the tenancy of a Labour government, and by day two we were compelled to go to the pub to watch the football because the lack of hot water and Facebook meant one of us was about to eat the other. We felt guilty for moaning, because lots of African children seem to get by quite fine without electricity, but with it gone we realised we had become quite attached to power. We needed it to keep our processed meats and diet yoghurts cold, for instance, but the temperature of our fridge matched the arbitrarily hot weather outside and we were forced to rely on a picnic from M&S. However, it gifted us an opportunity to defrost the freezer - a job on the house to-do list (also on there: save up for a hoove...

Food for thought

Social media is responsible for a lot of good in the world: it has facilitated political change, bulldozed ludicrous celebrity injunctions and gifted us Caitlin Moran. But reliable it is not, for that which isn't posted, blogged or uploaded is often an awful lot more insightful than what is. When opinions are limited to 140 characters and images are notable by what has been photoshopped out, one is inclined to wonder about the truth. Self-editing is a modern pastime, and lately I have been guilty as anyone. I never intended this blog to be a definitive account of life on dialysis - the experience is so subjective that such a thing could never exist. But I did mean it to be honest and open, or at the very least, cogent and spelt write (little bit of literacy humour for you there). Of course, there are reams of my thoughts and experiences that have not made it to the page: too boring, too repetitive, too painful or too self-pitying. But whatever is going on with my eating at the ...