This is my only escape from it all

I watched Children In Need on friday night. I don't normally do this because the enforced jollity of the 'fun' bits I've always found incredibly cringeworthy and the serious parts I feel are lost on me because I have a firm belief in charity being a very personal thing and I'm very happy with what I give to the charities I choose to donate to. That changed on friday when they played a film about a little 7 year old boy with leukaemia who needed a bone marrow transplant to survive. They found a donor on the overseas list but sadly the donor took ill a few days before the transplant was planned and it had to be cancelled. This brought back memories of my cousin who was in a similar position, with a donor match who fell ill and couldn't donate. In my cousin's case he had really aggressive treatment and recovered but in the case of the poor wee boy all attempts along the same line failed and he died aged nine. I was watching in floods of tears, not just because of the sadness of the story itself but because it made me realise again just how much of a lucky, lucky bastard I had been. From diagnosis to a successful bone marrow transplant for me was the grand total of ten weeks. Ten weeks from diagnosis to cure - that's incredible.

I was so affected by this film about this I had serious thoughts about emptying my bank account and sending it all to Children in Need but more sensible heads prevailed and I made a decent donation without bankrupting myself.

Today I went to the renal clinic hoping to find out whether the urology department had responded to the letter that had been sent requesting an urgent consultation about the small blockage in one of my kidneys and how, or even whether, it needed dealt with. Having had no response to the written word the renal consultant printed out my information and just walked through to the urology consultant and got him to deal with it, explaining that I was a rush case because I am open to opportunistic infection and want to get back down to Newcastle to see the transplant team as soon as possible. An incredibly simple solution that not enough doctors would have bothered going out of their way to do. So the urologist has organised a contrast CT scan of the kidney to see very precisely what needs done.

So, again it's slow, but steady progress. Pretty pleased with it though.