So I have not long returned from my monthly visit to the Beatson where I had a nice wee chat with my consultant about how happy they are with how I'm getting on in staying relatively infection free and with a stable weight meaning they only need to see me every two months at the clinic (where all the people with bugs are in fact) and in the intervening month just to go straight to the treatment room for my immune system boost of immunoglobulins. This suits me just fine as, to be honest, there's not much going on that I need to report to the doctors for at this point in time. From their point of view the less they see of me the better as it means I'm not ill. It's very much a state of limbo waiting for the call to come for the transplant and you can almost feel it from the haematology team that they're desperate for things to get moving on that front too as I am ploughing a bit of a new furrow here. They've never had a patient like me before so not only do they want it for my sake, there's a lot of clinical information they can glean from me whenever it happens.
I'm in a kind of self imposed exile at the moment where my friends are concerned as I fear that they may well be unwittingly carrying bugs and with my baby sister's wedding coming at the end of next week I want to limit the chances of me catching anything to as low as possible. Whilst I have my own kilt and full highland regalia I chose to go with what the team of participants are wearing so I went to the shop to get measured for the whole kilt and caboodle last week, which was a remarkably straightforward procedure. I haven't worn my own kilt in a few years and I couldn't quite remember how high it sits on the waist so was concerned that it might sit right on the site of the PEG tube into my stomach. No such worries though as there's a few inches of clearance. As it's a hire kilt though I'll make extra sure that the site of the tube doesn't leak at all, which it can sometimes (albeit occasionally) do.
Apart from that there isn't really a whole lot to report except for the fact that my two closest friends came to see me in August. Owen was only here for a long weekend so I only saw him for a day but Dave was back for pretty much the whole of August so I saw him at least twice a week. It was great catching up with them both. When Owen was here we had a chat about his dissertation for his studies in the field of film and television editing, which was a genuinely interesting read. I've counted them up now and 12 different people have given me dissertations to proof read for them on subjects as diverse as model fire development to philosophy. I'm incredibly pedantic about grammar so I'm a pretty decent set of eyes to go over things and to make sure what they're saying actually makes sense even if, like in most cases, I'm a total stranger to the subject. As well as the dissertations I've done I was often the go to guy in my research group to do the same thing for our end of year reports although that was more due to the fact that most of those were written in the respective author's second language. There's something about your own work that blinds you to the faults in it because it makes sense in your own head, so proof reading is very important indeed. It fills me with quite a bit of pride that, even with a slightly fuzzy brain, people still trust that I can still go through a document and pick out the slight flaws in it and help them out.
I need to get onto some more people and remind them that I'm here and looking desperately for fresh company as, like I've said on here many times before, real life just gets in the way of people coming to visit. While I've not been short of company, I would like some fresh faces and new chat. When I talked to Dave about how long it had been since assorted people had been to visit he was positively apoplectic. I don't have the energy for that level of anger about it but he is right - some people really do just need to try a bit harder to come and visit. The thing is, they know it too because whenever they do come they always part by saying it won't be so long until the next time. I tell them never to say that if their actions can't follow the words.
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