It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life

The strangest thing about transplant day was just how underwhelming it actually was. Well for me anyway.

It's only the donor that has the surgery to remove a litre of their bone marrow through four holes in their hip bones. The patient receiving it simply gets it in a drip bag for hanging and letting it slowly work its way into their body. It doesn't even require a pump, gravity does it.

I was acutely aware that this was the most important event in my life yet it felt remarkably prosaic. I don't know what I expected to be honest but something as life changing as that should really come with more of a fanfare than a nurse saying 'Aye your new bone marrow is just coming now so we can put it up in a wee while' like it was the most normal thing in the world. Of course for them it is something that happens regularly so I don't know what on earth I was expecting.

As soon as I knew that though I went along to Clare's room where she was recovering and got her to come along so she could see it. Obviously for her it was a bigger deal as she had just gone through surgery and she was a little surprised to see this litre bag full of stuff that had come from her. We amused ourselves greatly at the fact that there was too much fat in the bone marrow and it kept blocking the plumbing to give me it - there's not an ounce of fat on our Clare you see so finding out it was all hidden on the inside was quite a revelation.

I've been avoiding saying too much about the donor side of things as I don't like speaking on Clare's behalf about it. I might ask her to write down her memories of it if she's up for it. I do know that she found it quite difficult being away from her daughter, who was too young to be allowed into the ward.

So even though there was a distinct lack of fanfare for the big event itself this was still the single most important day of my life and lying trying to sleep after it was difficult, even accounting for my final dose of radiotherapy which had knocked the shit out of me. I couldn't even face getting up in the night to go to the bathroom so just had bottles at the side of my bed. I was on a fluid chart so would have been peeing into bottles anyway so I didn't see the point in making the mighty trek across the room to the toilet.

It was in the next few days that the side effects of all my treatments started to make themselves known. I mentioned before about how it is the fast reproducing cells in the body that are victim to chemo and radiotherapy and it is these that started to die off. I first noticed it with the mucous membranes in my mouth and nose so I started using mouthwashes to stave off infection and to numb my mouth from the pain. Soon after that I realised how far those mucous membranes go when the lining from my oesophagus died off, which meant that the acid from my stomach could, if I were lying down, run all the way up to the back of my throat and burn the flesh in the process. It is an incredible pain - nothing in my life has ever come close to it and there is nothing to do to stop it except pain medication and learning to sleep upright.

That led to my first fight with a doctor though. I first felt the pain in the middle of the night and the on call doctor came to see what was going on. He, and I do understand this, wanted to know what was causing it so he could deal with prevention rather than just treat to mask the symptoms, but the more experienced doctors know that you can't stop it and just have to treat it. All the nurses told him so too but he wasted a couple of hours while I was writhing in agony before finally prescribing Diamorphine to just block the pain out. If ever anything goes wrong when you're in hospital you want it to happen in daylight hours so you don't get saddled with the on call doctor.

I also started to lose my hair then and no sooner had I found the first of it on my pillow than I asked Collette, one of the nurses, if she would just shave it all off. She hadn't been in that ward long and hadn't done that for anyone before so wasn't terribly keen but I persuaded her and had it all taken off. Of course there were still the roots of the hair in place and over the next week or so they fell out but it wasn't as horrific as running my fingers through my hair and taking clumps of it out. Having no body hair at all was a weird sensation. Little things like having no eyebrows is quite hard to get used to.

People were very keen to tell me afterwards that being bald suited me, but in all honesty I think they were lying to make me feel better. They needn't have worried. I was aware I looked in pretty bad shape but was fine about it as I knew it was a short term thing. I sometimes wonder if people told me I looked good because they expected me to look worse so how I did look was comparatively good. I know I always imagine worst case scenarios when I visit people in hospital so can only imagine people were doing that with me too.