I have been getting asked for a while now when I am going to start writing this blog again, specifically in regard to my experiences since I got the call for my lung transplant. This short post is to tell people that I plan to really get my teeth into it as soon as I finally get home, which I now believe to only be a few weeks away.The first post will deal entirely with the events of Sunday August 28th 2016. It was a bit of a day.
The reasons I never wrote it all up while it was happening are fairly simple. I genuinely wasn't capable. The first month or so post operation I was so frazzled by the assorted medications that I was on that I couldn't adequately communicate with people in the same room as me on even the simplest of levels never mind put my thoughts down in anything approaching a coherent form. I was, as they say, oot the game. I promise I will go into some of the details of this at a later date. Some of it is funny; other parts significantly less so, but I will try to address it all from the relative safety of the future. The very fact that I was so disconnected from reality for that initial period means that, for the chronology of events at least, I am pretty much entirely reliant on the Facebook updates that my younger sister Janine was writing about my progress. She is an absolute hero for doing that for me. What I'll be trying to do is put some meat on the bones of them and tell you lovely people exactly what and how I felt at the various stages along the way. I was also not helped by the fact that the Internet access in the ward I was in down in Newcastle was pretty much non existent and I could also barely get any phone signal when there either. All things considered I went into radio silence for pretty much the whole 6 months I spent down there. Even my closest friends were getting all their information about my progress second hand at best. It was far from ideal.
Now, since I've been feeling much better I have kind of taken over the reigns in regards to those status updates, and while I have had a lot of fun with them, they are also incredibly difficult to compose still. My brain is getting closer to a decent operating speed with every day that passes but trying to compose my thoughts on any single aspect of the last year of my life is still a bit of a struggle. Even just the few paragraphs that make up those occasional updates are written and re-written because I fret constantly about getting the tone of them right and that's what I want to make sure I have a handle on when I start writing these blog posts in earnest. I want to continue in the vein I hope I had managed before the transplant where what I wrote was informative and interesting but not too heavy on detail; light hearted but not flippant. I want people to know and understand just how serious this whole affair has been but also to show that it hasn't all been miserable. Even at some of the bleakest looking points in the course of it all there was a bit of light relief. I am warning you now that it will be brutally honest, simply because I don't know any other way to tell this story and retain its value.
I am hopeful that the very act of facing it all back in my head and then putting it down here will give me as much an understanding of it all as I'm hoping to impart on you folks. At the moment a lot of it is a jumble of incredibly mixed emotions and this really is the best catharsis I can imagine for that.
Right, that will do for now. I will speak to you all soon, I promise.
Pico P xx
