All my words come back to me in shades of mediocrity

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

If I pass; if I fail; if I drop out does anyone give a damn?

Today is results day for Scottish school kids. I have many thoughts on examinations in school (mostly that they're not the best barometer of knowledge or intelligence) especially how frequently they're used and how much emphasis is put on them.

When you consider the physiological changes that kids are going through at that age, putting them through a tough exam schedule seems backwards, especially when you consider how massive the range in maturity is across the students. Then you add in the difference between girls and boys in that age range and seriously try to tell me it's a good time to tell them their future depends on these results.

It doesn't. There is nothing you can do wrong at school that can't be fixed at a later date. Of course it takes longer and some real determination but if you've got the brain then the results will follow when you're ready. I taught for a while in a further education college and some of the students there were the most impressive I've ever found. A stark reminder that school isn't for everyone. Some blossom that bit later.

I cantered through school and didn't find exams stressful at all but those very facts meant I wasn't prepared for university at all. I was only 17 when I started but I just carried on from school like it was the next logical step. I never thought of doing anything else. Because of the way I coasted at school I didn't know how to plan studying sessions for Uni and worst of all I didn't know how to deal with something I didn't understand first time. So I did something really stupid. I concentrated on really knowing the stuff I did understand and ignored the rest. This obviously only got me so far so I didn't get the class of degree almost everyone thinks I should have (everyone I met when I was a postgrad assumed I got a First class honours - I very much didn't). The reasons for that are too many to list but my attitude was the principal one I fear.

Now when I look back I think if I knew what I did as a postgrad when I was an undergrad I would have done better and subsequently what I knew as a post doc would have served me brilliantly as a post grad student. All that really means though is experience is something gained immediately after needing it.

If I were to start it all again knowing what I know now I would get a better class of degree and I would write up the PhD thesis but those were my mistakes and I have to stand with them.

What I need to remember is that it isn't the academic qualifications you have that define who you are. I am much more than the Scientist my training marks me out as.

I know a place where I can go....

I appear to still be buzzing on the adrenaline kick from the evening I spent at one of my best friend Lynn's wedding to her wonderful husband Craig so I thought I'd write about it while the memories are fresh. Lynn wrote about me way back in the early days of this blog which you can find here. Yes, I have used a line from the same song in this post title but it's my favourite 'Lynn song'.

There were three of us from our group of friends invited for the whole day but, after a discussion with Lynn about how I only managed my own sister's wedding by having a hotel room to go to for a two hour nap halfway through the day, we decided that I would only go in the evening to maximise the fun I could have.

My good friend Martin was driving so came and got me and we took a slow drive up to the beautiful Ross Priory on the shores of Loch Lomond for the night. Apparently it is a site of great significance for the family, as borne out by the photo album Keith (Lynn's dad) passed around showing her and her family going there together ever since they were kids.

I had a nice chat with Keith where I told him one of my regrets of not making the full day was missing his speech. He's a big, gentle fellow who you could quite easily mistake for shy but when he has something to say it's always worth listening to. I reminded him of a speech he gave at a birthday party for Lynn when they first moved away to Warrington and he was amazed I remembered it. When I got a chance to speak to Yvonne (Lynn's mum) I mentioned this too and I nearly set her off crying as she was so touched. I actually did set her crying when I told her the story behind my new ring (from a previous post) as she is a geneticist so understands DNA more than most. I love them dearly as a family. Here's Keith and Yvonne up for a wee dance

And here's one of Lynn and Craig up for a dance too. Their wee girl, Tara, is the wee girl on the left in the foreground

Craig, the groom is a worthy addition to the family too. He took a bit of time to do the usual few minutes thanks that you can get from a groom at their wedding but set aside special time for me to thank me for the present I had got them. Here it is

It comes with the definition of an 'infinity table', which I thought was the perfect sentiment for a wedding gift, but I also just thought it was beautiful, which the whole family agreed on. I totally stumbled across it by accident as well. A nice, serendipitous find.

A decent bunch of our old school friends were there, which is always great fun - it is often hard to get all the ones with families together all at the one time - but this had the added bonus of there being a few other people who we had been at university with who, we get to see with even less regularity (it's now 17 years since we graduated after all). One exception who I get to see occasionally is Lynn's best friend Marelle, who I occasionally bump into in the hospitals of Glasgow as she is a nurse practitioner who also, it turns out, happens to be good pals with my dietitian Claire, who lets her know how things are going on the medical front when I haven't seen her in a while.

Of the old school friends that were there, my own best friend Dave unwittingly stole a wee bit of the wedding party's thunder by letting us all know that his girlfriend Kate, who late next year will also become his wife, is pregnant. I'm so thrilled for them both. My own situation dictates that if I get the transplant in time I will be going over to Slovakia under very carefully constructed doctors orders. If I still haven't got the call then we need to have a chat about whether I could hire a portable oxygen concentrator that would allow me to make the journey. It would obviously be a massive undertaking but it's my best friend's wedding. If we concede that it would be folly to, for instance, go in an aeroplane for over four hours with the recycled air of a few hundred people with whatever bugs they are carrying then I suppose I will have to just wait for the much larger ceremony they're having a month later back in Scotland. I'm not going to lie I'd be gutted to not go but I have to be sensible.

Getting back to happy stuff from the wedding it was so nice to see not just the friends from school and university but to see some of the other friends Lynn has picked up along her wander through life as well, some of whom I know well and others I only really know in passing. One of my highlights of the evening though was meeting Lynn's cousin Emma again for the first time in what must be about a dozen years. I've always had a soft spot for Emma ever since we had a couple of snogs at family parties way back in the mid 90's when we were really just kids. She's turned out to be a beautiful young woman with an adoring husband and two kids in tow too. Somehow I managed to live about half a mile away from her in Belfast for two years without either of us knowing about it, which is a shame, but I'm so glad to see her looking so happy and it is to her immense credit that she didn't flinch when faced with me in a wheelchair and my facial furniture. She, like the whole family really, were just wonderful in saying they were keeping me in their thoughts and prayers. You can't ask for much more than that really.

Another wee thing that pleased me was that the DJ played the Bluebells' song Young at Heart, which was just perfect as it was exactly 22 years since my big sister Clare got married and at her own wedding she got up and sang the full song with the band.

I'd rather lead and be mistaken than following and faking

I feel there are many misconceptions amongst those who know me about my situation, both currently and historically speaking. I've already covered people's misunderstanding of the 'transplant list' so I'm not going to bother treading that path again.

To start with, outside of my family but including my closest of friends, there are at most a handful of people who could tell you what form of Leukaemia I had. This is by no means a criticism of them for it, especially after so much time has passed, they're just not details people. They only want the bigger picture and all they heard back then was a word I didn't even use, Cancer.

Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia by the way, just in case you were wondering.

The other prime misunderstanding back then was the Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT). Almost everyone thought that I had to undergo an operation in tandem with my donor to receive the transplanted good stuff. The truth is much more tedious for the recipient as it goes and it's only the donor that has to undergo an operation. The recipient just gets it into their Hickman Line in an oversize blood bag. Nowadays very few donors even have to go through that as fewer and fewer patients are receiving full bone marrow and are getting stem cell transplants instead, which can be collected from blood. So I didn't even have an operation then, and that got me thinking about the distinction between operations and procedures. Is it just a matter of semantics? 

In my head an operation is something for which you receive a general anaesthetic and a procedure can be done under a local. Is that right though because the only operation I have had under that definition was relatively trivial (a circumcision required after my new immune system started attacking my skin) whilst I have had really aggressive procedures done while just under local anaesthetic?

Whilst I have been mildly sedated for some of them, most of them I was absolutely wide awake for. They can be broadly grouped together:

Bone Marrow Aspirates/Trephines - these involve piercing your hip bone with a pretty hefty needle to get a sample of bone marrow and a special tool for taking a chip of bone for diagnosis or analysis. I've had several of the former and thankfully only a couple of the latter. The first one I got I didn't get sedated at all but realised after that first one the sedation is as much for the benefit of the Doctor as you as it's not a nice thing to do to someone that's totally conscious. Similar to the aspirate is the spinal tap, which I had once to confirm viral meningitis.

Hickman Line Insertions - prior to starting the treatment for the BMT I had a line inserted into the superior vena cava (the main vein going into the heart) which allowed blood to be taken and drugs to be given much more easily than constantly attacking veins (chemotherapy would destroy a normal vein). My line had a splitter and each of these had another so you could have four pumps pushing medicines into you at any given time. On a few occasions we even piggybacked another medication onto a line so actually had five things going at once. The insertion of these lines is done under local anaesthetic so the doctor can chat you through it. I've had to have two in - the first got infected, perhaps unsurprisingly as it does involve an open wound in your chest - and the worst part of it was when a junior surgeon speared the vein in the back of my hand and injected 10 ml of saline directly into the tissue. The pain was such a shock. Otherwise they were perfectly uneventful procedures although the surgeon having to kneel on the operating table to thread the line in was a bit odd I suppose. I mentioned the first one coming out through infection. This was incredibly easy but the second one was in for a lot longer and had to be slowly, meticulously cut out as it had grafted on to the blood vessel, and so I have one tiny, perfect bullet hole of a scar on one side of my chest and one brutally ugly stab wound of a scar on the other from the removal of the lines.

Assorted -oscopies - These have almost all been bronchoscopies as the main focus of my treatment post BMT, as I'm sure you all know by now has been my lungs thanks to my immune system's lingering doubts about their provenance. I have had about a dozen bronchoscopies now, starting with the diagnostic ones to ascertain whether the Total Body Irradiation (TBI) I received in preparation for the BMT had scarred my lung tissue. Of course you know the result of those initial investigations. Over the years I had to have several more of them because I was incurring more damage to the lungs due to recurring bouts of pneumonia and the cause of this was found to be a cyst, which was later removed in one of their incursions. Dependent on the preference of the surgeon on the day the bronchoscopies are began either by insertion of the scope into the nose or the mouth. The mouth is easier on the patient but the nose is favoured by most surgeons as it means easier access past the epiglottis at the back of your throat. I've had so many now I can direct the surgeon to my left nostril as a couple of nose breaks from my youth have left the right nostril badly scarred so the scope won't get past it. There's no getting away from it, getting a tube up your nose and then going down the back of your throat stings a little and the local anaesthetic spray, that they laughably make banana flavoured as if that's going to make it better, does little to relieve it.

When I had fungal pneumonia down in Liverpool, the first real big step towards my total lung failure, I had a particular type of bronchoscopy where they flood your lungs one at a time with a solution to clear them out of the bad shit from the infection. It literally amounts to them drowning you a lung at a time and, even though sedated for it, it was one of the most terrifying things I've undergone.

I've had a couple of scopes down into my stomach too for the insertion and removal of the PEG tube used for feeding me when I was unable to tolerate normal food and was so dangerously thin - remember at one point I was a lowly 41kg. These have been relatively incident free apart from the fact that to get a good view of what is going on in your stomach they have to pump air in and you, while sedated, have to try and hold that air in, which is a lot harder than it sounds. Normally you can remove the PEG tube just with a bit of brute force and ignorance but mine wouldn't shift so I had to have it removed the way they put it in. The fact I had a tube in my stomach to feed me has left me with what is essentially a second belly button, which amuses the children in my family greatly.

I've also had a few Naso-Gastric tubes inserted for feeding but they are a piece of piss after the initial shick of the tube going up your nose.

The only other procedures I've had done really have been on my eyes. Again because of long term effects of radiotherapy my left eye doesn't make enough tears for a good coating of the eye. Assorted efforts have been made to fix this which all centre round the idea that most of your tears actually go down your nose and we were trying to divert that stream to my eye instead. The first few attempts to remedy this involved pushing silica plugs along my tear ducts to block the nasal canal. Unfortunately for me these plugs wouldn't stay in place and would eventually come back out the tear duct in my left eye. A final attempt to fix this issue was made by pushing a cauterising needle along the tear duct and burning the flesh so as to permanently block the duct down the nose. This is every bit as grim as it sounds as you have to lie completely still while staring upwards into a bright light while someone sticks needles in your eyes. As well as that because of the nature of what they're doing you can smell the flesh at the top of your nose burning. It's not quite the lovely smell of a barbecue let me put it that way. Anyway, apparently I healed too well and the duct didn't close adequately and I didn't want a repeat so I have resigned myself to using artificial tears for my remaining days.

As for the one, true operation I have had. I suppose an explanation is required. Post BMT i developed Graft vs Host Disease, which is where, instead of me rejecting the bone marrow it was rejecting me, starting with my skin. It started off just getting red but that graduated to becoming inflamed and then getting paper thin and tightening. The one area where this was a pressing issue was the foreskin so I had to go and see a urologist about it. Upon his first inspection of my jiggly bits he said "Oh that'll have to come off" to which I terrifyingly replied "What, all of it?". After he stopped laughing he said that he just meant the foreskin. I didn't understand then why I needed a general anaesthetic for this but as I was wheeled into the prep. room prior to the surgery I could see into the theatre where the aforementioned doctor was admiring all his scalpels and all of a sudden it made perfect sense.

So there you go. I hope that's cleared a few things up for you all.

Christ, you know it ain't easy

So I have had a wee bit of a chest infection for the last week or so. No big deal really and just the same course of meds to kick it to fuck and then a wee period where I slowly get back to normal. The few weeks before that though there was definitely something wrong that wasn't infection related as I was exhausted all the time without there being any obvious reason to be.

I got to thinking that maybe this is my new reality and that the progressive nature of my Bronchiolitis  was to blame, which was a bit depressing really. At those times I usually try my best to hide that I'm feeling down by somewhat overcompensating but this time I just retreated into my shell a bit.

During that time though it was time for a review with my lipoproteins consultant to look at my cholesterol amongst other things. Mine had gone mental during the period where I was pumping liquid fat into my stomach through a PEG tube and so required a statin drug to bring it back down. My ongoing battle between what is a good weight to be and how much I want to eat (not helped by my drug regime) meant my cholesterol level had gone up a little so it's just a matter of altering my dose for little while. Again, no big deal.

The other thing he noticed from my previous bloods taken was my thyroxin level was low so he wanted to check it again to see if it was an abnormal result or if it was something we need to address. This was something I had been warned about pre-radiotherapy, that my thyroid would eventually stop working as well, but after fifteen years I thought I had kind of gotten away with it.

So after the results came back he sent me and my GP a letter saying that I was to start on a small dose of levothyroxin as I was definitely showing signs of hypothyroidism. You folks know me well enough to know by now that I was already looking into symptoms and all of a sudden everything made sense.

Click on the word here for the list of symptoms

Going through them all suddenly everything made sense. Almost every one of those I had exhibited, except the periods obviously - they've been just fine, thanks. Even ones like the tingling in my hands had been bothering me but not enough to bring it up with a doctor admittedly. It might sound peculiar but I was thrilled with the diagnosis. Now we can do something about it.

Now, in other news I've been toying with the idea of a DNA double helix ring for ages (seeing as my Leukaemia was caused by a mutation of it) so after a lot of fannying about and changing my mind about what I wanted I ordered a polished silver version of this

Lovely isn't it? I had to get it specially made though and I totally underestimated how fat my fingers are so when it arrived I realised it only fit on my pinky and I don't really want to be that guy.

So, because it was a bespoke piece I couldn't send it back and I thought I've got oodles of family so one of them can have it. Perhaps it was fate that the sister with whom I actually share DNA was the only one present whom it fit. So she is receiving a rather special birthday present this year.

That didn't really help me though so I went back to searching for one for me; one that wasn't identical but ran with the theme. I eventually found this.

Again, it's a bespoke piece but this time I used my dad's wedding ring and an American ring size conversion chart to get the correct size made. I deliberated for ages over whether to get it as all silver but I think the gold is far more impressive. It should arrive in the next few days despite the fact it was made in Arizona and I was told to expect a 6 week waiting time but it's made and on its way right now only two weeks later.

Oh goodness, my gracious, I hope it's not contagious

My best friend and one of my great friends from Belfast have, quite independently (they've never even met), come to the same conclusion about me. 

Dave regularly says that "He can't be killed by normal means" whereas Marty phrases it that "Come  the nuclear holocaust it'll just be wee Paolo and the cock-a-roaches"

These testimonies have always amused me because they always remind me in a curious way of Terry Pratchett's definition of flying as the simple matter of 'throwing yourself at the ground and missing'. In evading death thus far this is entirely how I feel I've done it.

I've come close to proving them wrong a few times but so far their proclamations seem to have held true.

Mostly it has been medically where I've come closest, with several doses of pneumonia and other respiratory afflictions getting me perilously close but that isn't what I really want to talk about.

A couple of weeks back now a young woman got separated from her friends in Glasgow while under the influence of a good bevvy. She was last seen walking along the Clyde side and, eventually her body was recovered from the river. This has really got to me, even though I recognise it was probably an unfortunate accident.

About a dozen or so years ago I was on a stag do for a pair of brothers who were getting married within weeks of each other. A good squad of us went to Amsterdam and everything was going pretty well. A bit too well in fact as I seriously over indulged.

In one place we were in I went to the bathroom and decided to jump out and get more money from an ATM. I told nobody where I was going. This is a perfect definition of bad decision making when drunk. Details from this point on are pretty vague but the upshot is that I was mugged. I got hit on the back of the head and down I went. My wallet (empty as I was actually on my way to get money) and phone were taken. I tried to stand up but was clearly concussed and lurched sideways, over a barrier, and into a canal.

Thankfully someone who saw this unfold jumped in after me and got me safe. I was later told in the hospital that the unknown heroic person had told the ambulance crew who arrived that my foot had got caught in a bicycle frame at the bottom of the canal and they had to get me free of it.

I amazingly got away with just a small cut to the head that got glued back together, but if it hadn't been in such a busy area I could easily have died.

My friends all assumed, quite fairly really, that I had just gone home to the hotel to sleep it off. It was only when I arrived back at eight the following morning (dressed only in a paper boiler suit) and had to wake Dave up to pay the taxi driver that any of them found out what happened. Men are really bad for this. Every one of my friends has just disappeared on nights out and we all just assume that they've just had a moment of clarity and called it a night. It's an atrocious assumption.

I have problems equating that to the story of the young woman though. She was deaf and was separated from her friends not by her own volition, but by a couple of bouncers. I wonder if they mistook her attempts to communicate as her being too drunk to get back in to their club. Who knows really? I am just so sad that she had the apparent misfortune to end up in a dangerous stretch of water where nobody was likely to see her and save her.

Oh would some pow'r the gift to gie us....

....tae see irselves as ithers see us.

I have become increasingly aware of something that makes me quite unhappy. More and more I'm feeling defined by my illnesses. This might well be considered perfectly normal for someone that has been really quite ill for 9 out of the last 15 years but I had always hoped to avoid becoming so tunnel visioned about it. I am so much more than just a cancer or transplant patient so why has it become so pervasive?

Partly it is because almost every visitor I have firstly wants to talk about where things are so I spend a good chunk of my time thinking about exactly that and how I am coping. Deep down I know it's not just that though.

I'm forever pointing people to newspaper articles or tv shows that relate to cancer, especially blood cancers, or transplant related stuff. It's with an almost evangelical zeal that I do this. Of course I fully expect the response to be that it's only natural to be like that but it's recently come to my attention that a lot of folks avoid it all because it's a bit too close to home. Even talking to other patients they've said to me that they don't watch anything related to their condition, and even feel a bit off if there's some tangential reference to it in a work of fiction.

It's almost embarrassing to admit but I hadn't even considered that this was possible. I devour everything I can relating to my own condition and hope that others do too in the hope that they might understand things a bit more, or in my own case to feel something positive about shared experience. To learn that there are people who just want to put that period of their life in a box and forget about it hadn't even occurred to me.

Of course, there is the difference that I am still living it and you could argue that it's perfectly understandable that I would immerse myself in things that resonate with my own experience. That I choose to share all this stuff with others comes mostly from the noble place that if I can get more awareness of transplants of all types then I have done some good. Again though, I have to admit that's not the whole story, I don't think.

I've been out and about with friends a lot more recently because I've been well and I've caught myself basically listening to them only waiting for an opportunity to pivot the conversation back to me. I hate myself for it but I can't seem to stop it. I've always maintained that I want to hear about my visitors' lives more than talk about my own because 'real' life is far more interesting and up until recently that's genuinely been true. I even used to have a little speech about where we were at a given point regarding the lung transplant that I could rattle off in about ten minutes so that we could then talk about other stuff. Something's changed though and I'm not quite sure yet what it is.

Before I go trying to work that out though I have an admission to make. I think that my Leukaemia and subsequent lung failure make me a much more interesting person. Now that's not to say that I don't have any other strings to my bow, as I'm sure any number of people who knew me before those diseases (or even in between them) could ratify, but they have certainly made my life the road less travelled and there is a part of me that thinks that surviving it all is incredibly impressive. This is the sort of thing my closest friends and I would joke about, like how I can't actually be killed by conventional means. This has though had the side effect of me lauding it to others like it's the thing I'm most proud of. It worries me that that's kind of true though. Whilst I don't seek admiration for how I've coped I certainly love getting it.

Another thing that I've been poring over is that it's genuinely embarrassing to think how little time it takes before I'm introduced to someone before they know my whole life story.

That, of course, is triggered by curiosity because of my oxygen tubes in my nose and the wheelchair. People are just intrigued to know what has led me to this position. It's something I can explain relatively quickly, like when I needed to explain to the tattooists how none of my back story would be a reason for them not to tattoo me (like if I was immunosuppressed for example) but just because I can do it doesn't mean I always do. I can be guilty of really holding court when it comes to talking about myself and it's definitely not an admirable trait.

What I was saying about loving admiration for the way I've reacted to my condition, while true, is partly because people are so quick to offer it. I do always tell people though that if they were in a similar condition they'd cope better than they think they would, which always seems to be their starting point. Few seem to believe that they'd cope well with being ill. I was always more worried about those closest to me to worry about myself but something has definitely changed there, and this is perhaps the crux of why I'm beating myself up.

The passage of time I feel is getting to me. 7 years without a decent breath and 4 years staring at a phone will eventually break even the strongest of wills. Now, I'm not falling apart. On most days I am still just the smug arsehole that I've always been but I guess the point of this whole ramble is that I'm asking people to consider that there might be days now where I'm not coping as well as I have done previously.

To say it's asking permission to feel sorry for myself isn't quite right but neither is it that far off the mark either.

Having written that I suddenly realise that everyone will understand that because I am surrounded by an absolutely incredible support network. I don't know either way whether my response to my initial diagnosis set the tone for how my team are around me reacted or whether it was their almost total irreverence that allowed me to only take it as seriously as I needed to. I'm personally a lot more reverent when it comes to my situation now because it is, as I've mentioned in previous posts, a progressive condition. That scares me and it's not something I'm very familiar with as a feeling.

So, if you have been in my company recently and ever thought that, even by Paul's standards, he's talking about himself a lot I think it's because I'm scared that the call won't come; that this will be my legacy.