This Sunday past was the anniversary of my Leukaemia diagnosis, a full 13 years ago now. At that time the prognosis was such that, while the disease was in it's chronic phase, I would have less than 5 years (probably notably less if my white blood cell counts were to be believed) before it went into the acute phase and then the terminal blast phase. That being the case only if none of the treatments they had for Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia were successful. Regular readers will know that I got a bone marrow transplant and even taking into account my current health issues 13 years is actually an impressive stat on it's own.
So, as happens when this time of year rolls round, I get a bit analytical about what has gone on in those intervening years. I've said before on here that I feel I was deprived of a decent chunk of my twenties and while that's perhaps a smidgeon over dramatic in the case of that decade, it is undoubtedly true for my thirties. I did a lot in my twenties, something that I seem to need other people to remind me of before I'll believe it. My thirties started off under a bit of a shadow with the recent death of my father and my career - shot to smithereens by my lack of desire to put the effort of completing my PhD thesis leading to my contract at Queen's University in Belfast coming to an end. That shadow was soon cast aside when I started working as a lab tech in a school to see if I fancied life as a teacher, something I had always fancied for myself but had put off, not just because of my career as a researcher, but because I felt I was too young and wouldn't exude the necessary authority to do it till I was at least in my thirties.
I can justify not putting the effort in to write the thesis in a thousand ways but the overall truth of it is I just didn't want to put the effort in. My supervisor once told me that if I put in half the work he did I would be his boss. The old adage that hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard springs to mind. I would beat myself up about being lazy up until the point where I actually started teaching, whereupon I found something that I really wanted to work towards. I would get by on four hours sleep each night after spending the wee small hours preparing lessons and the early hours of the morning traipsing all over Liverpool to get to the school or college I was placed in. I even took up a position of lecturer for the night time A-Level course at the local college one night a week on top of the work I was doing for the PGCE. I had found something that I really wanted to work towards and wasn't afraid of failing at it. A further bout of honest soul searching has me thinking I was scared that my work in the PhD wasn't up to the required standard and I'd have failed at it. There's no empirical basis for that in fact I don't think but it doesn't stop it creeping up in my thoughts every once in a while - that I'm not actually as clever as I sometimes think I am.
Another thing that crops up in my musings over these times are the people who I spent them with. I found out yesterday for instance that one of the guys I spent a few years at Aberdeen (and a further period in Belfast) with got married two years ago to one of the girls I worked alongside in Belfast. I had no idea this had happened because I hadn't spoken to either of them in just about 5 years. For some reason I thought I had them on my Facebook friends list but hadn't so I hadn't kept in touch with what each of them were doing. I had kind of been out of the loop firstly because I was so very busy in Liverpool but furthermore because I was subsequently so very sick in Liverpool. The next year saw me perilously close to the blade of the Grim Reaper's scythe so I was kind of preoccupied and I lost touch with a lot of people, these two included obviously. Recently, I decided to throw off the shackles of restraint that hold me back from quite simply begging for visitors as I've found that it's the squeaky door that gets oiled. I've had more visitors in the last month than any single one in the preceding four years. That's nobody's fault - as I've said often on here real life just tends to get in the way. I make a point of telling people on their way out at the end of their visits not to promise to visit more often as we both know that such promises aren't kept as often as they should be. I've got back in touch with so many people through Facebook - if I haven't got to you yet for an update don't fret, I've got nearly 300 people to get through. I'm not particularly methodical about it. I just see someone post something and I think "Oh, I must message them". I really do have to make more effort with people.
In transplant news I had another in my long line of lovely chats with Kirstie, my transplant co-ordinator who was perfectly adept at allaying my fears about something. You see, every four weeks I get a transfusion of a blood product called immmunoglobulins, or the goblins as my friend Claire calls them, and they are essentially the antibodies harvested from donor blood. My worry is that if antibodies can keep you from being a match with a donor set of lungs then surely getting lots of them every month or so just decreases your chances of finding a match. The kicker is that these are the basis of much of my immune system and are, as far as I'm concerned at least, the reason I haven't been hospitalised in four years now so to do without them would put me at risk. So to put my mind at ease Kirstie went through all my previous blood antibody samples and found that I haven't gained any in between samples being taken so it looks like it's safe for me to continue receiving this treatment without affecting my chances of finding a matching set of lungs. Kirstie went so far as to tell me that I actually only have 8 antibodies that they specifically test for in terms of potential rejection risk, which is miniscule apparently. So the fact that I matched 5 out of 8 with that set that became available a month ago is what we, in the scientific community, would call a curious statistical anomaly.
