Life on the list

Having spent much of the last three years being either introspective or retrospective and sometimes a hybrid of the two ("What was I doing wrong last week?") I feel it is high time to start looking forward. I have developed a (not unjustified) phobia of making plans because the ones I do make never quite pan out as expected: my plan to graduate, get a job and live happily ever after, for instance, has been disrupted by the abrupt terminus of my kidney function. Once that had happened, my rigid dialysis regime meant that any plans that didn't revolve around an afternoon at the hospital were a dead end. I resented it for a while - I felt it cruelly unfair that I couldn't arrange a holiday, but then I realised what an obnoxious dick I was and that not being able to get burnt and drunk over a week in Turkey is not exactly a violation of my human rights. In fact, the only significant impact my medical inertia has had on anything is my career. I tried working full time: ...

I calculate it has been roughly six weeks since I wrote last, which I realise translates as an eternity in the blogosphere. The gap correlates with my having gone back to work after the summer holidays and consequently being too tired and short of time to contemplate the goings on in my life, then attempt to articulate them in amusing vignettes. In addition, all my spare time (when I have not been asleep or hungover) has been dedicated to The Book. It has paid off in part because I now have an opus of approximately 55,000 words, most of them trite, but there on the virtual page of my pre-historic lap-top never the less. Perhaps if I had a brand new lap-top I would get more written: I had to give up writing in Starbucks, what with the shame of my old clunking Mac and all; I would ask for a Christmas cash injection towards an update if only I wasn't so desperate for Laura Mericer products. Still, if the worst dilemma in my life is currently that my expensive computer embarrasses me i...

Most people measure their successes through conventional social barometers: a pay rise, say, or aesthetically pleasing children. Not me - no no. To define myself in such staid, traditional terms would expose me as severely lacking anyway. This is not to say I have not achieved: this week, for instance, I finished watching the entire series of "ER". It has taken me months, it has been boring at times, but on Friday, I did it. All fifteen series of it. I would never have managed such an impressive feat had it not been for dialysis. How else would I have found twelve hours per week to devote to DVD watching? Work or socialising or other such superfluous nuisances would have gotten in the way if I didn't have to be at the hospital. The element of sadism involved in watching a hospital drama whilst in hospital has not escaped me, but there is schadenfreude in watching someone have an arm ripped off in a horrific tractor accident whilst sitting snugly in a south London NHS...

The winds have certainly changed, from a mild breeze that made the hot, sticky days of July bearable, to blustery, damp gales that seem to have heralded the arrival of autumn when it really still ought to be summer. Perhaps this explains what has happened to me this week. Perhaps it is the shift in the winds, or maybe Jupiter has moved into my thirty-ninth maisonette, but over the last seven days I have miraculously - inexplicably - developed some sort of...irresistible sexual allure. Over the years, I have had an average amount of luck with the opposite sex. A few long term relationships; a handful of undulating flings and plenty of casual encounters to keep my morale and the numbers up. I am nothing spectacular to look at; indeed, until I turned sixteen, I was quite repulsive to look at, having as I did the baffling belief that rocking a combination of short ginger hair, bad skin and puppy fat swaddled in ill-fitting flamable fabric was an acceptable way of presenting myself to t...

Yesterday, I began to feel better. I had survived Friday's dialysis session, or at least a close approximation of it; still, it was a great relief to find the fistula works well, though I am not looking forward to Monday now that I have run out of skin-numbing Emla cream. Having surgery is an un-nerving experience. Upon coming round, you are forced to turn detective to try and explain the array of bizarre sensations you are now experiencing. It is exactly the same as waking up after a particularly heavy night of drinking to find yourself in an unfamiliar bed, inexplicably wearing a West Ham strip and cuddled up to a traffic cone; it obviously happened, you were definitely there and yet you have no conscious knowledge of what went on and now have a myriad of questions that need answers. For a mere forty five minutes, I exited the conscious world and was at the mercy of the surgeons who, fortunately, I trusted to competently repair my fistula and not shave off my eyebrows. Yet with...

I have now been officially plicated. Things got off to a shaky start on Monday when I arrived at dialysis only to be told my appointment at the pre-assessment clinic, the one I had been told to ignore, was now. Fortunately it was only across the hall; unfortunately, it was in the Transplant Clinic, so my joy at my upcoming operation was tempered by sitting down amongst all the glowing post-transplant patients with their stupid working kidneys - smug bastards. I had a mercifully short wait before a boy of all of about twelve popped his head round the door and asked me to follow him down the corridor to a consultation room. He was not, in fact, on work experience; he was (or so he claimed) on the surgical team. He was barely older than me; he could have been one of my mates. When he asked me if I had any questions, I resisted the urge to query how old he was and instead voiced my inherent fear about the possibility of waking-up mid-operation...now who was the immature one. I was pres...

It's probably not normal to be so excited at the prospect of a day in hospital and a spot of light surgery - I am obviously becoming a sycophant to the disease; the operation to have my ghastly fistula plicated has been set for this coming Wednesday. My lovely surgeon JT will cut out roughly a third of the hideous thing and sew it back together - the hope being that it is greatly reduced and still functioning when he has finished. There is a risk that the fistula will be damaged beyond repair during the surgery, in which case JT will have to create another one somewhere else and in the meantime I shall be forced to have another neckline - a Autumn/Winter '10 necessity for any sartorially forward renal patient. But any risk is far out weighed by being able to wear t-shirts again. The surgery has been scheduled for 11 am which means hopefully it will be some time that day; even if I am wheeled down before the day is out, I shall still need a precise confluence of circumstances ...