I get up and drag myself out of bed and into the shower when the alarm rouses me at 6.45am. I gather my bits and pieces, kiss K goodbye and head out. The roads are very slow, so I opt to avoid the M1 and take the slightly slower, but moving faster, back roads to the hospital.
I arrive and it’s chaos, as should be expected on the first clinic back after the Christmas/New Year break. I sit and chit-chat with JL, another transplantee who’s doing amazing thing with her gift. We talk fundraising, sponsorship, goals and targets for 2011 and how we can help each other out before she’s called in for her tests and I sit and wait a while longer.
Eventually I’m called in to get my bloods done, then sent off for RFTs and X-Ray before heading back to get my obs done (the clinic is in utter disarray with too many people and not enough staff, so the whole blood-and-obs procedure take much longer than normal). I’m free to go by 11am and told to be back for 3ish, so I take myself over to Watford to settle into Starbucks and rock their WiFi with a bucket of caffeine.
I sit in Starbucks from 11.30 until just after 2pm and get through loads of email and other work bits & pieces, which I’m really chuffed with as Starbucks work days can sometimes be disappointingly unproductive. At 2.00 I get up and take a wander around the centre, grabbing a magazine to read during the afternoon wait and then jumping in the car, fuelling up on the way back and eventually landing back in clinic just after 3pm.
I wait a little under an hour before seeing the No.2 doctor dude, with whom I run through a few issues I’m aware of at the moment. None of them seems to overly bother him, so I’m sent away with the promise of a scan appointment to come through and a follow-up at Harefield in March.
The drive home is hellish as the anti-clockwise side of the M25 is completely closed due to an accident and everyone on the clockwise side (my side) wants to stop and see what’s happening. I take a detour off the motorway by take a wrong turn and end up clogged up in rush-hour traffic. By the time I get home a journey that should take 1-1.5hrs has taken me closer to 2 and I’m shattered after my early start and close to 5 hours in a car today.
K is waiting for me and I’m a little short with her for not emptying the dishwasher while I’ve been out, but we soon kiss and make up and settle onto the sofa for a cuddle. We opt to head out to get some takeaway as neither of us has the energy or compunction to cook tonight, so we ride the sofa and watch some Sky+ while we eat, then stay where we are for the rest of the night going through the programmes that have stacked up on our planner and chatting.
We eventually call it a night around 11ish, conscious that we have to be up for the London trip in the morning. I pass out almost immediately we get to bed.