My Friend Paul (contributed by Bundo)

The following is the work of my mate Bundo. You honestly couldn't hope for more in a friend. I promise these are her own words.

My Friend Paul.

Doubtless, Paul will be most disgruntled to know I can’t actually remember the first time we met. It will have been in the pub watching football, and we fell into the same group together; he lived in Aberdeen and travelled to games and to visit family, so wasn’t always around. I was aware of the day he got the all clear from leukaemia, but not having lived through that time with him, I was rubbishly unaware of just what he’d been through, or how “all clear” can still mean it can dominate your life.

So things fell into a booze fuelled 20’s, which is how I remember my first run in with Paul’s rubbish lungs. He had pneumonia, and was in Glasgows Royal Infirmary. However, Celtic were playing Barcelona and he had a ticket. And that’s how I came to introduce Paul to my Dad for the first time, with a canula in the back of one hand and a glass of coke in the other, he cheerfully explained he had pnuemonia, but he’d discharged himself for the game and it was easier to just keep the canula in as “he didn’t have many veins left and he was going back to the hospital after the game”. My Dad boggled.

It's probably a good time to mention the amount of trouble Paul’s mouth has got us into. Never one to keep an opinion to himself, Paul has shouted at Emos (“Oh cheer up”) at Chavs (“someones been shopping at topman”) and at the New York Yankees (“This is the gayest thing I've ever done, and Ive kissed men”) It’s ok though, because I always comfort myself that with his crap lungs, I can probably outrun the baying mob faster than he can.

Until last year, Paul enjoyed a period of relative good health. He still struggled with his eyes and his joints and there was more than one brush with pneumonia, but day to day it was easy to forget he was ill. Trips to weddings, to cities and memorably to New York were a riot. There is no better company than Paul on form.

And then it all went a bit wrong. Paul moved to Liverpool to study teaching, and as I regularly worked in the area I visited often. We were out to the cinema one night, and the next, he’d checked himself into hospital with pneumonia. But this time it wasn’t so easy. It just wouldn’t shake off. Soon this was to be a crash course in immunology. I’ll leave Paul to explain that bit.

Eventually Paul was well enough to move home, but with his body rejecting his lungs (thankfully it had stopped trying to reject his skin at that point, that was gruesome) he was about to get a season ticket for Glasgow’s hospitals.

Since then, I’ve seen how ill ill can be. And just how scary it is when your best mate falls below 6 stone, or cant get a breath. He scared the shit out of me the day he told me he had been resigned to dying, cause he might have been but I was still that one step behind – Paul always protects us from the worst of it.

Most days though, its about keeping on keeping on (as we say, what’s the alternative?). I truly believe the transplant will come, and, having not had fully functioning lungs for the whole time Ive known him, I might even see a different Paul. The big ask is for a good match that his immune system will take.

I also believe when the time comes Paul's body should be left to science. Not for his immune system, only because maybe then we will understand how he gets women while he’s got an oxygen tank and a feeding tube. I fully expect him to be dating supermodels once the new lungs kick in, I imagine they’ll love him telling them how much prettier he is than them, it seems to work a treat.

Cx