Leaving Cardiff was a real wrench. I had made so many amazing friends in the year or so I was down there and it just felt like I was in the middle of something rather than a conclusion.
On the day before I was coming home I got a phone call from Colin, my PhD supervisor, to tell me to come in as he was going to give me one of his guitars so I could learn to play while I was undergoing the treatments to come. I went in to my department at the arranged time and walked in to my tiny little lab to find pretty much the whole department squeezed in so they could say goodbye. The shock I got increased when Colin handed over a lovely new guitar that they had all chipped in to pay for as well as a complete Beatles songbook which everyone had signed at their favourite (or just appropriate in the case of Rajinda who chose Blackbird because well she's a black bird) song.
Colin had picked Hey Jude and wrote just remember 'the movement you need is on your shoulders' which is a line that has always fascinated me.
Now I've got a lot to say for myself but that day I was rendered completely speechless and just sat on the bench of my lab crying and saying thanks to everyone who had came. I honestly didn't see it coming at all. I'm still in touch with many of those guys now - I hope they know just how much of a difference they made to my life.
When I got back home it transpired that my friends had a night out in Glasgow planned for their football team so I tagged along and had an absolutely fantastic night. We ended up, as was traditional, in the Garage nightclub and I even bumped into a large group of old friends from my undergrad class at Glasgow Uni. Amongst that lot was a new PhD student from America who watched as Shaun and I threw some shapes on the dancefloor and then came over to talk to me after we had worked our way through the whole 9 minute version of American Pie. She got my attention by using the chat up line 'You're beautiful'. Now for someone with as highly tuned an ego as mine that was always going to be a winner. The fact that she was beautiful helped as well.
What followed was a rather short romance that was only called to a halt by the intrusion of a bone marrow transplant. You see I thought we had several months before that was a possibility so Laurie and I had just kind of got on with things as if it was something we would deal with at the time, but a slot opened up only 6 weeks later and when it came down to it Laurie admitted it was too much to deal with. I didn't mind so much because I was happy that she was honest - it was better that than her pretending to be ok when it was too much to deal with. After all we had only met a little while before but it's certainly something that I file in the 'what if?' column.
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