I don’t have much to ramble on about this morning, I’m tired and I don’t think my brain is working properly.
I got another call from Harefield last night, around 6pm (the Tx-coordinator actually interrupted the end of Neighbours, the cheek!). It took me a while to grasp what she was calling about as I’d phoned her earlier and thought she was returning my call, so I was merrily chattering away to her about this that and the other before she manage to slip into the conversation that she wanted me to go down.
It was a very different experience this time, although I can’t quite put my finger on why. Feeling completely serene (at least for my part), we drove the back roads so as to avoid the rush-hour motorway traffic and got the the ward just before 8pm, where I slowly went through the battery of tests they perform to check your suitability.
For the first time on any of my calls, I saw one of the surgical team, a really nice German/Austrian doc who talked through everything with us in immense amounts of detail which managed to be both petrifying and completely reassuring. Not quite sure how that works.
The combination of it being early evening rather than late night and the collection of tests and assessments being strung out over a longer period of time all seemed to help the time pass much quicker than on previous calls.
By 11pm I was showered, shaved and scrubbed in my gown, lying in the bed ready to go, waiting on word from the team. Almost to the second around 11.15pm I started to feel the nerves kick in and then they somewhat ran away with me. It’s a strange kind of fear that I felt, centred largely on not knowing what I was going to wake up to.
Strangely, I don’t have any fear of dying on the table, or post-op, nor do I particularly fear any of the rest of the process, but what bothers me is not knowing how it’s going to feel and what I’m going to see when I come round the other side. Everyone reacts totally differently to the op, so it’s impossible to judge by anyone else’s experience how it’s going to be, which in turn means there’s nothing I can do to prepare.
As nervous as I was, though, I was confident in myself and my decision to go ahead with things, and still excited at the prospect of my new lease of life.
Unfortunately, the coordinator came in just after midnight and let us know it was a no-go. They had apparently all had very long discussions about the suitability of the lungs, but in the end they’d had to err on the side of caution and decided it was just to dangerous to transplant them in their current state. It was odd, though, as the coordinator seemed almost as gutted as we were – I think everyone there was convinced that this was our time.
I felt completely gutted, in a very literal, physical sense – it felt like I’d been hollowed out in my stomach and left gaping. The three previous false alarms had been disappointing, but have never caused such a swelling of negative emotion in me. The journey home was a long, tough one last night.
Of course much of an adverse reaction to things like last night comes through pure tiredness – lack of sleep does all sorts of odd things to your emotions and thought processes. I know that things have to be 100% right for me to stand a decent chance of coming through things, so I know the docs are doing their best by me. I know also that they are thinking of me and will get me up whenever they can.
I still feel tired and flat this morning, but I think it just needs 24 hours of bed rest and I’ll be back on all-cylinders again. Apologies for typos in this, spell-checking is lower on my priority list than sitting doing nothing at the moment.