Take these lies and make them true somehow

I think this task is going to be even harder than I had thought. Day +1 onwards is so very hazy for me that I have to rely on everybody else's version of events as well as trying to put it together with the little bits that I can remember from flitting out of consciousness.

With this in mind I have started putting together a timeline of everything that has happened from Facebook status updates and the likes and I will spend the next wee while reading back over it to get the chronology right in my head before trying to make any vaguely insightful comments about it. Don't worry, in doing so I'm not going to avoid the less insightful ones - if anything has to be worthwhile about this as an undertaking it has to be about the truth of it all and not just some intellectual posing exercise. As such I'll warn you all now that, just as happened at the time, all dignity will be going right out the window. You're going to learn more about me than you maybe thought you wanted to but I just don't see there being a purpose in doing this unless you get the bare (arsed) truth.

Now even looking back on my post about transplant day itself tells us something important. My recall of events is not perfect; far from it. I have been absolutely sure that it was getting towards midnight when I got taken down for the main operation but it turns out it was only about 8 o'clock. I have no idea why I was so far out with that but it was certainly through the night that the main part of the surgery was done. One thing I do remember is being woke up temporarily in the recovery room post-op and having severe stomach cramps. Three full bed pans later the docs all commented that they had never seen anything like it in their whole careers, but it seemed the antibiotics that they used during the operation had obviously been a bit much for me and my body decided to just evacuate everything. Three full pans is, by some distance, a new record apparently. This has always been a side effect of antibiotics for me, just not on this scale. I don't remember much for the next few days after that to be brutally honest so lets rely on other people for that, which I will add to later.

One thing I'll say at this point though is that truth is elusive. What Janine put in her updates is what she felt she could share with everyone on any given day, and sometimes that was more positive than was actually true. Not often, but sometimes it was just too hard to write some of that stuff down. I've done it myself when I took over writing the updates. I'll sometimes put the best foot forward and fairly often will, through particular omissions, make out that I am getting on better than is actually the case at a given point. I get a lot of comments from people that they admire my honesty but they really don't know the half of it just yet. I'm hopeful that looking through the retrospectoscope I'll be able to really say what happened as best as I can. 

I do specifically remember 3 of the nurses who looked after me in that immediate time post-op. One big tall fella who just joked his way through the shift, another who was all business with me but was particularly careful with my mum (curiously always calling her mum I seem to recall) and another who took the time to just talk to me while cleaning me. I remember vividly that while I was being cleaned on one side she would stand at my head and talk to me about her preparations for doing the Great North Run. While she did this she would slowly circle her fingers on my arm so she wasn't just holding me stable but comforting me at the same time too.

There were other nurses looking after me as well but these were obviously in charge at times where I was completely sedated or I simply have no recollection of dealing with them but I could recognise that the family had well established relationships with them, which I found incredibly comforting. These folks aren't just there for the patient at hand after all.

For the first few days I remained mostly sedated and intubated. They did start taking chest drains out at this point though. I think I had four in and they took two out, which wasn't too bad at all. In fairness I was so wired to the moon on pain meds at this point that pain wasn't much of a problem in any regard but the removal of these drains was more about timing your breaths in and out than anything else.

Right, now I've started on this I will start doing it much more often as I have definitely found it rewarding but it has been exhausting today.

Speak soon my lovelies

Paul

And I'll dream of the things I'll do

Sunday August 28th 2016 began just like every other Sunday really. My mum would trot out to Mass while I lay in bed still, enjoying a good quality lie in. I had long since given up going to Mass as I had felt that good came in the acts of people, not divine intervention. It honestly wasn't some hysterical 'Oh I've got cancer, where is God now?' affair. I hate that sort of thing as much as I hate death bed conversions. Hedging your bets like that just offends me, and it should offend those with actual faith too. It was a long and considered decision for me. That said I do still like it when people tell me they pray for me, as much as anything because it helps them make sense of things and I would never wish to deprive them of that.

After Mass was over the mammy would return usually with one or more of my siblings and their kids in tow. My brother Mark's daughter Chloe would usually come up to see me and ask if I wanted a cup of coffee. This Sunday when she came in the phone rang, and I answered it, as you would. 

At the other end of the line was a transplant co-ordinator (not my usual one unfortunately) and she started the conversation with one of the strangest opening gambits you're ever likely to hear. She said "Paul, we have a set of lungs that are a match for you. Would you be interested in coming down?".

Would I be interested? 

It took me right out of the moment as all of a sudden it felt like a cold call for windows or car insurance or something. I had dreamt of this phone call for years and this wasn't really how it was meant to pan out. Then, quite suddenly, I snapped back to reality and said "Of course I would. What do I need to do?". At this point I said to Chloe to go and get her dad as this was very important.

The co-ordinator told me the ambulance was on its way and I'd probably have about 15 minutes to get ready. No time for a shower or anything, but that was fine as I'd need to get one down there in preparation for surgery anyway. So I got myself dressed and Mark got the last few things I needed for my travel bag ready. My 'pregnant lady' bag had been prepared for some time already. Then I just sat on the stairs waiting and sent a few emails and text messages to the people I promised I would let know in the event of this actually happening. I was remarkably calm. I think I was the only one. The chaos around the house had unfortunately upset Chloe a bit and so attempts were made to convince her that this was actually all good. She was still a bit teary as I left but she seemed to understand that it was ok. It was a lot for a 6 year old to take in really.

The ambulance arrived and the paramedics got me on board and as comfortable as you can be in those things. Mark went to get some stuff of his own and followed us down. I had the full benefit of the lights and mee maws when traffic got in the way. I had a light snooze for part of the journey and carried on sending messages to (and responding to) people for the rest of the journey. I know I'm repeating the point but still at this stage I was very calm. 

I feel I should explain that, at this point, things had not been going very well. Finally, after years on the transplant list, and the deterioration that came with it, I was getting a bit too close to the point where you can be removed from the transplant list. This happens when you're just too dangerous to operate on. I was very weak indeed. I had actually started thinking about how my life was going to end. Again, this was not hysterical but a sober assessment of how things were going at that time. I was scared I wouldn't survive another winter is basically the crux of it.

So I expected to be quite overwhelmed if and when the call came, but I just wasn't. Even arriving at the Freeman, where my life was going to change quite dramatically in the next day, I was just all business.

When I got there we had to go through nearly all the same tests that I had undergone at the assessment stage, just in case anything had changed, like liver and kidney function for instance. For those I had to get a venflon in my arm, which isn't always easy as my veins can be a little elusive. A few attempts though and it was in. I had an ultrasound on my heart and an ECG, which showed no problems at all. I did the lung function tests too, which were a much less rigorous version than those used at assessment thankfully. Then I did the walk along the corridor. All of these were to see if I was strong enough for the surgery, and everybody was very happy that I was.

All this took a bit of time so we were well into the afternoon and early evening by the time I got the shower I so dearly craved. Prior to that though I had to get my chest shaved, which was an odd experience that I simply hadn't thought of beforehand. Of course I would need it done but it just hadn't occurred to me. So that was done and then I got showered very slowly indeed and with hibiscrub to make sure I was as clean as I could be. I got my brother to take this picture just after I got out as a bit of a 'before' photo. This is pretty much what I feel I look like. It will be a long while before I look like that again, if ever really. Don't get me wrong, I know I was frail and very poorly then but at least I was physically just about well balanced and not hooked up to a million lines, tubes and monitors. 

At this point there was a lot of bureaucracy as several consent forms needed to be filled in. I spent a good time with the anaesthetist going over the procedure and it became obvious quite early on that, even though I had read voraciously on the subject when put on the list, there were things that I had simply forgotten as well as the fact that there had been advances in surgical techniques in the intervening time. One of the things that I had plain forgotten was that post operation there would be a sort of scaffolding structure in my chest post-op to basically hold my rib-cage together. Of course nothing was going to stop me going ahead with it at this point but I had to get my head around it all to give genuine informed consent. Almost everyone assumes that the surgery requires the saw cutting down the sternum to open up the chest cavity but what they do is called a clam shell incision. As the name suggest they literally open you up like you would a clam shell and get access to the chest cavity from underneath instead. There are many reasons for doing this but they don't really add anything to this story.

Now the operation was always going to be done overnight but it was at this stage that the actual surgeon arrived to make his displeasure known that a lot of the peripheral things for the operation hadn't been addressed yet. I actually found it terribly amusing to watch but I could also see why he was getting so annoyed as these things are genuinely time sensitive. I've always had an affable relationships with the cardiothoracic surgeons but it isn't warm by any stretch. I suppose they just don't (pardon the pun) operate that way. Once they've done the surgery and the immediate post care their job is done, and that is absolutely fine.

By this stage Mark had got his accommodation for the night sorted and I gave him the last of my personal stuff to keep and gave him the code for my phone should he have to contact anyone with it. I was wheeled along to the theatre suite just prior to midnight and I got myself from the chair onto the operating table where they went through all the same safety checks again to make sure they weren't going to slice open the wrong person. Then, after a short conversation with the anaesthetist, I started counting backwards and it all went black.

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.