Let the heathens spill theirs on the dusty ground

carrying on with the theme of the last post today it's exactly ten years since I put my best swimmers under storage. This has actually been on my mind for a bit now as at the time they told me that they recommend using sperm within ten years of the deposit. Now since that has happened I have been told that it's not really a concern as there have now been plenty of occasions where sperm older than that have been used successfully but it's just a funny feeling knowing that your sperm has a best before date and that it has now passed.

Of course for it to be any use I'll have to find someone not only willing to use it but to go through the process of creating a child through the use of a turkey baster. It's not a great thing to have to bring up at the start of any relationship. Having said that any time I have done so the person involved has been nothing but supportive and there's been plenty of laughs about the plain absurdity of the whole idea. Still, as I say it's an issue for some time in the future and even then it might come to pass that it never becomes an issue. I have to admit I've wondered about whether I actually want to pass on my rather dubious genetic material onto another generation but the wealth of children my family and friends have been producing over the past few years has left me monumentally jealous. I'm definitely missing out on something and when I'm fit enough to cope with it I can't wait to get in on the act.

I wish I was a fisherman, tumbling on the seas

The observant among you may well have noticed that today is the 10th anniversary of my diagnosis day. Woo and indeed hoo.

The fact that I am still around ten years later is nothing short of incredible and is testament to just how lucky a person I am. To be born in a time when (and where) such medical miracles are possible leaves me feeling incredibly blessed. Of course I wish I hadn't had to endure all that has gone on in the last decade but the fact that I am still around to muse on those events is something to be celebrated without thinking too much about the bad things.

Cancer patients are often told to look to the 5 year point of their Cancer being undetectable as being the point where they are cured. When I got to that point I was living in Aberdeen and getting on brilliantly both in terms of the research I was doing and in my personal life. It was, by some distance, the happiest I had been since my diagnosis. When the 5th anniversary of my bone marrow transplant came around I sent an email round all my friends to thank them for every bit of help they had given me (and that I hoped I would never get to return the privilege). I also said that I hoped from that point onwards I could start putting the Cancer years behind me and start looking forward to a life without that shadow being cast over it.

Another 5 years later and I can look back on that time very fondly but also knowing that I was deluding myself. I was finding that hills around town were becoming more difficult as time went on and looking back now I can see a regular, steady decline in my lung function. I suppose I didn't want to acknowledge that it would come to a point where something needed to be done about it. I was already annoyed about the limits my scarred and battered lungs had placed on my life and didn't want to think about more limits arising so I just ignored it.

Even though there was this fairly steady decline in my lungs it was something I could still cope with. That was until fungal pneumonia came along and triggered my immune system into damaging them beyond repair.

I don't know what else to say but I think you get it

I've been terribly remiss at keeping this going. I've had a chest infection over the last few weeks and it and the antibiotics I was taking for it have left me feeling totally drained so I've not really felt like talking about it.

As well as physically not feeling great, it does terrible things to my mind as well. I can't concentrate on even the simplest of things and it becomes hugely frustrating for me because I can actually feel that I'm struggling. I can't concentrate on books at all and even watching films I'm finding that my mind wanders.

I was at the hospital yesterday for my monthly dose of immunoglobulins and the docs gave me a different type of antibiotic to ensure that my chest clears completely because even by my own low standards it was particularly wheezy. That said I still forced myself to walk into the clinic and walk all the way back out to the car afterwards. It was very tough going if I'm honest but I really feel that I should push myself like that occasionally.

I need to organise myself and get a flu jag but I'll need to be absolutely clear in the chest before getting that.

I wanna live, breathe, I wanna be part of the human race

I have news of a sort. The transplant secretary phoned me to tell me their plans for seeing me. They will see me at one of their satellite clinics at Gartnavel Hospital in Glasgow which is great news as I wasn't keen on the prospect of having to go down to Newcastle for their assessments. The problem is that their next one in November is already completely full so I won't see them until February.

There's no getting away from the fact that this is a bit of a downer for me as that seems very, very far in the future. By the time it comes round in fact it will be a year after I had hoped to see them. The incessant weight issue is what has been responsible for such a long period of waiting so I understand why it has taken so long but it is incredibly frustrating now that issue has been resolved that there is another such gaping hole in my life before any progress can be made.

One of my main concerns is that the winter is such a traumatic time for me as I struggle fighting off persistent infections through those months so I worry that I might actually not be well enough to even see them. Of course worrying about things that are so far ahead and ultimately outwith my control is idiotic but I'm allowed to be idiotic once in a while.

So by the time I actually get to meet the transplant team for the first time almost two years of my life have lapsed without doing anything I'd wanted to be getting on with and it's beginning to wear me down because I know that it will probably be years before I can even get a transplant as well so I'll be well into my mid thirties by the time I get ot kick start my life again.

I think about my twenties in a bit of a schizophrenic way because while I feel that I missed out on large swathes of the sort of things that most people do in their twenties, I am also very aware of the incredible number of things that I have done that are quite remarkable for someone in my position. I can only hope that by the time I'm forty I can have the same sort of feeling about my thirties.