The retrospectoscope

It's the time of year where people have a wee look back at what the last year has held for them and begin to wonder what will be in store for them in the next. I'm no different from anyone else but it's especially so because today, the 23rd, is my birthday. I'm 35 today.

I'm not just looking back over the past year but that's where I'll start. It's been a year where I feel I've aged about 5 with the stress of going through all the tests to determine whether I'd ever get put on the active transplant list and then to have the relief of the phone call telling me that was me on the list and it was now just a matter of waiting and staying stable until the day comes and it's my turn. I've had a lot of visitors recently who have said that they are absolutely sure next year will be a good one for me. I'm too pragmatic to let myself get carried away with that but the fact that people are talking in such a way tells you that the overriding emotion in the air at the moment is that of hope and I'm not going to rob anyone of that feeling. I've also been on the receiving end of some fairly barbed comments about just how healthy (fat) I'm looking these days. I'm actually the same weight I was at 20 but back then it really was all muscle and no fat and now the reverse is true because I simply don't have the breath to exercise. The folks that have been in visiting remember only too well how ill I looked when I was so seriously underweight and in a very bad way so their visits are much easier on us all now thankfully.

When I start to think back further than just the last year it actually kind of amazes me the way my life has panned out. When you're a teenager you want to be part of an identifiable group but then when you go to Uni, in my experience at least, you want to stand out from the crowd in your own way. Mostly this leads to lots of people trying too hard to be different and all ending up pretty much the same caricature of the introspective student type. According to my peers at the time I genuinely did stand out. This is something that has been repeated throughout all my education and jobs. For such a wee fellow I leave a bit of an indelible mark on people apparently.

I mention this because as well as telling me I'm looking well people have been telling me that they're still amazed at how I've dealt with everything that's been thrown at me so I've been going back over it all in my head to see if I did in fact do anything special. I've always felt that the Leukaemia diagnosis was shaped not only by my own pragmatism but that of those surrounding me. It was the response of my closest friends that allowed me to deal with it as well as I did. I'm honest enough to admit I did handle it better than most would have, but like I said, it was only because of those I had around me making it easier.

The other thing I've been thinking about is the steady decline in my lungs over the nine years or so between the Bone Marrow Transplant and whether I could have done more with my life in the time before my lungs failed completely in 2009. I look back now and can see all these little pointers that I ignored along the way that signalled that my lungs were still being attacked by Graft vs Host Disease. My years in Aberdeen I can now think of in terms of how difficult I found walking up the hill to the GP. After I left there to go to Belfast I went to meet the respiratory team at the hospital and they kept me in for a night because they couldn't believe I was operating normally with blood oxygen saturation as  low as mine was. So maybe with sheer force of personality I was getting more out of my life than I really had any right to. It's either that or I was pushing myself too hard and a fall was in the post. I got my answer exactly 5 years ago to the day ago. I was meant to meet all my friends for our Christmas meal and I went in to Glasgow to meet with them and very suddenly found myself very ill indeed. I couldn't get any sort of breath and had to phone my brother to come and get me to take me home (More on this story later). You'll notice I said home and not hospital. This is because I am, and always have been, a bit of an idiot and will put off hospital as long as is humanly possible. I had a terrible time over Christmas that year with a chest infection but I did get better but it wasn't long before I got my next reality check. In the following January an old friend from school got in touch and I arranged to go over to England for a weekend for a visit. I collapsed on the plane mid-flight and had to be taken off the plane by an Ambulance crew who only let me go under supervision after an hour or so of checking I was ok. A cold allied to the pressure change in the cabin was apparently a bit too much for my wee body to cope with. A weekend of very light activity then reassured me that I was ok but being honest I was really kidding myself on. 

Over the rest of that year I found tasks harder and harder and looking back I truly have no idea how I thought I could cope with the move to Liverpool and the rigours of doing the teacher training course I wanted to do. Not only did I manage it but on one of my placements they took me on for taking night classes in A-Level Chemistry. I was pushing myself really hard and it is only through blind luck that I got so far into the course before my lungs failed. I had been feeling exhausted almost permanently and blithely put it down to the course rather than my health. I got a bit of a rude awakening with the fungal pneumonia and it's been a waiting game ever since.

I used to think that I had been robbed of a large chunk of my twenties through my various health issues but looking back through it I did a lot more than a lot of people who had no health problems did and have to give myself credit for doing that. I know this whole post has been a bit self promoting but I'm coming to terms with just how amazing the life I have led has been. 12 years post transplant and with laughable levels of respiratory function I'm still confounding doctors and that has to be celebrated. There's an old Chinese curse that goes 'May you live in interesting times' that I love for it's acidic tone. Well my life has certainly been 'interesting' and myself as a student starting out couldn't have asked for more than that.

You'll remember I said earlier that there was more to the story of me missing my 30th birthday meal. Well that meant that my younger sister Janine changed her plans and went out with her own friends instead and met up with an old school friend, Tony. Well they started going out and today, exactly 5 years later, he proposed to her and she said yes so I have a wedding to hopefully be better for next year. They kind of stole my thunder on my birthday but I genuinely couldn't be happier for the pair of them.