I know that I've said a few times about how difficult I found it looking at someone else's face in the mirror during my treatments and I thought it prudent to actually give those people who didn't experience it a taste of how big a difference there was.
For background here's a photo of me just after day 100 post transplant with my niece Maria.
I'm still quite thin but it essentially looks like me.
Now after being on steroids for a month or so I looked like this
I think you can probably agree that it's a bit of a difference. One of the weirdest aspects of it was that people didn't recognise me so people I had known from my schooldays would walk past me in the street. I went up to Aberdeen to meet my old mate Rich Wells from my time in Cardiff about restarting my studies up there with him and he didn't know it was me that walked into his office until I started to talk.
In those times I was so sure that my life was ready to get back on track but I hadn't accounted for all the side effects from the steroid treatment. Just after I started the photopheresis treatment in the December of that year I was unfortunate enough to catch a respiratory virus. I managed to spend Christmas day at home but as this photo shows I wasn't in the best of form.
The very next day I went in to the hospital and they took one look at me and said I'd be staying for a bit. I had to get arterial bloods taken which was unbelievably painful and when they took my oxygen saturation levels it was at 75%. I was in a very bad way indeed. I was in there for a fortnight and it was one of the most harrowing times that I've ever had. It was the reminder that I obviously needed that I was a very long way short of being able to move away again to restart my studies.
It's bleak enough being in hospital but at New Year it was particularly galling for me because my room faced directly down towards the city centre of Glasgow so I could watch the fireworks and lie there thinking about the fun everyone else was having that I was missing.
When I got home again I had to rethink how I was behaving. I had been going out regularly in town with my friends to maintain some sort of normality in my life but it was doing this that was giving me the infections that were flooring me so I decided that just being at home for a while was the best plan. In retrospect I can also see that my confidence had been absolutely shattered because of the steroid face and the constant shaking from the medication. I've never been short of confidence so this was a very strange sensation for me.
So friday nights were spent at home but I almost always had friends round to keep me company. It was almost always Dave and Owen but a few of the other guys came along regularly too. I would sit and munch my way through masses of food while those two drank (and Dave ate all my Haribo sweets) until they fell asleep. I can't begin to explain how much it meant that those two decided to spend their time with me rather than going out for all those nights. Don't get me wrong their patter was shite but it was still nice to have it.
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