Archives: Writing

I’ve had a much better day today than Thursday – both productive, relaxing and joyous in the space of 14 hours, it doesn’t get much  better than that, I don’t think.

Started out with a way-too-early start to give K a lift to work this morning, but when I got home decided it was too late in the morning to consider sliding back into bed (although I have to say it was mighty tempting), so instead I sat myself at my desk in the study and got stuck in to completing the background work for a documentary proposal I’ve been working on since my transplant.

It took me most of the morning, but I got it sent off to the appropriate people to see what they make of it by lunch time, which pleased me greatly – as it always does when I actually complete a task I set out to do.  I suppose that’s a pretty bad reflection on how often I complete the things I set out to do…

Anyway, after busying myself all morning, I decided to take the afternoon off – as is my wont – and relaxed playing Football Manager on the computer for a couple of hours before heading out to pick K up.

From there, we headed to my ‘rents to catch up with my cousin who was visiting with family in tow from Luxembourg, where she took up residence with her Luxembourgish husband several years ago.  I’ve not seen her or her family for two years, we worked out between us, when her eldest was younger, her middle was toddling and her youngest wasn’t even thought about.

It was fantastic to see them – and my other cousin and his new wife who made it up from the old family home in Southend – and catch up with them all.  K was especially happy to be able to enjoy the baby-cuddles she’s been looking forward to all week.  The little one is a wonderful bundle of cuteness, although she’s not as good at hide and seek as her brother and sister are.

In another moment of “oooh I can do that now I’ve got new lungs” I took my cousin and her four-year-old into town whilst we waited for dinner to cook to pick up some new shoes (which are apparently a bargain over here compared to Lux).  We had the best time wandering into town, looking at all the shoes, (“those are cool.  Those are really cool.  Those are REALLY cool.  Those are the coolest!”) although we were all disappointed that they didn’t have the ones with monkeys on in his size.

We all gorged heartily on one of mum’s roast dinners and the “adults” sat around chatting whilst K and I played hide-and-seek after dinner.  My ‘rents house has the best places to hide – it’s clearly been far too long since I’ve played a proper game of hide-and-seek, because I found some great nooks and crannys.  And I’m much better at hiding now I don’t have a tell-tale “ahem” to give me away every 5 seconds.

I’ve got such a wonderfully close-knit family that it’s always wonderful to spend any time with them, but when the gap has been as long as it was since I last saw the Lux Lot it makes it that bit more special.  And when they’d been told after I saw their mum and dad (my aunt and uncle) just before my op that they weren’t sure I was going to make it to Christmas, it adds that final finesse of wonderment to the whole day.

Now I’ve just got to wait until my first year post-Tx is up and I can finally go out and visit them instead of having to wait for them to get enough time off to make it over to us.

Freedom at last – after a week spent couped up inside despite feeling just as well as I had the week previously, it isn’t half a relief to be back at home and within my own four walls.  Even if I don’t leave them for the next 7 days, it’s going to be a heck of a lot nicer than it has been on E ward this week.

That’s nothing against E Ward, you understand, it being the very best of the best places to be if the docs suspect you’ve something dodgy going on in the new blowers they implanted, but let’s be honest: hospital is hospital.

Interestingly, I didn’t find this 5 night/6 day stretch as hard going as my previous one (just a week prior) – I was fairly upbeat and resilient the whole way through.  I think it largely had to do with the fact that when I was admitted the team let me know straight away that I was going to be in until Saturday at the earliest, most likely, whereas the previous week every day had been a will-they-won’t-they let me go connundrum whic, upon the arrival of the nigh-on inevitable “won’t”, always served to deflate and depress me – getting one’s hopes up in a hospital is a bad plan at the best of times, but when you’re feeling physically fragile, too, it’s never good.

Still, three days of being pumped full of more steroids that the US sprint team and the Tour de France combined have served to set me back on the straight and narrow (we hope) and get me sent home for a glorious span of 5 days before my next clinic appointment.  Getting discharged on a Saturday is usually no mean feat, but luckily for me, my team were on duty this weekend, which meant full access to the key decision makers who could kick me out at will (mine or their’s, I’m not sure which yet).

All I have to show for my week’s stay in the Big House this time is a severe sleep-deprivation hang-over.  One of the side-effects of the Methal Prednisalone (the IV steroid they put me) is sleep disturbance and although I managed through the first night with just a bit of a late nod-off and minor leg-cramps, last night saw me lie awake until 6am before being unceremoniously awoken for my breakfast at 7.45.  Under 2 hour’s sleep does not for a chirpy Oli make.

Still, it’s hard to moan too much when I’m just happy to be out and back home.  Perhaps the total lack of sleep last night – and my managing to stay awake throughout the day so far today – will do me good in getting me off to sleep nice and swiftly tonight.  One can only hope.

Oh, the only other good thing to come from having far too much time on my hands in hosp for the week was a chance to get started on the treatment for my next writing project – a low-low-budget flick about a band on tour which I hope I’ll be able to knock out in quick-time and see about getting shot sooner rather than later.

Of course, like most of the projects that get mentioned on the blog in their formative stages, there is bound to be a mishap which gets in the way of this one at some point soon, but then perhaps this will be the exception that proves the rule.  Watch this space is about the best I can say, I guess.

I’m off to flop in front of the telly to try to stay awake till my last dose of daily immuno-suppressant is due at 10pm.

For those of you who read this in time over the weekend, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Observer, where I *should* be featuring prominently in a health-article to back up the paper’s continued push behind the Opt-Out campaign.  For those who can’t get out to pick one up (and thus see a picture of my lovely mug) I shall endeavour to post a website link up here as soon as it’s up.

I’ve long held an affinity for the way the American’s make their television.  They have a solid work ethic, a prodigious output and some incredibly high-quality programming which is all churned out based on a very rigid formula of writing and producing a season of some 20-25 episodes per year.

Most US shows work on a rolling basis, with a team of writers (the “Writers’ Room”, supervised by the Executive Producer/Head Writer or “Showrunner”) coming together to pitch storylines, plot character arcs and map out the direction of the show for the coming weeks and months pretty regularly, then going away and writing individual episodes alone.  Every show has a slightly different way of doing things, but most hour-long or half-hour shows work to the same essential template – Lost, Desperate Housewives, 24, Bones, E.R., Scrubs, House, Friends, you name it, they’re all run the same way.

A big part of the success of American television, of course, is the sheer size of the budgets that they throw at their dramatic or comedic output.  Compared to the cash we spend on our “series”, the Americans spend a small fortune on each episode, treating each 43-minutes of screen time (for an hour-long show, to make way for the commericals) as a mini-feature film.  We might think we have big-budget blockbuster shows over here, but even our biggest extravagances like Dr Who or Robin Hood pale in comparison – and they only run for 13 eps a season.

This extra money goes not only into “on screen” elements, but also means that they can afford the “writers’ rooms” which create the shows, something which is prohibitvely expensive over here.  If you’re creating a 6-part series (as most shows are over here, ignoring the tent-pole BBC Who and Hood and the “continuing dramas” which we refer to as “Soaps”), it’s much cheaper and easier to use one or two writers to write the whole thing, with a little creative input from the Producer(s) and possibly director(s) as you go than to hire a team of writers to work together on it.

In any case, British writers aren’t schooled in the writers’ room methods, meaning that even if we did try to do it their way, we’d probably end up turning out TV-Camels* rather than the American’s well-practiced Horses. (That said, there are still a huge number of US shows which fail to hit the mark and never see more than a few episodes or a single season.  Just look at Studio 60, or try Googling “Viva Laughlin”, it’s just that we rarely see them over here because our networks don’t pick them up)

All of which is just a long preamble into talking about what’s going on in the States at the moment, namely the Writers’ Guild of America strike which has seen writers from all of the country’s top shows – as well as their rubbish ones, too – down pencils, power-down desktops, shut their notebooks and hit the picket lines after negotiations on their new contract with the studios who produce their work broke down.

Essentially, the Writers’ Guild of America is like any other labour union (or, since they’re American, labor union) in that they negotiate the basic rates of pay that their members can expect and, indeed, demand, if they are working on studio movies and/or TV shows.  As part of the minimum deal, writers are entitled to “residuals”, which means every time the show is aired on TV, they get a small payment (based on what money the Studio makes) and every time someone buys a copy of the DVD they get a small payment.  As it stands, they receive a whopping $0.04 per $18.99 DVD sold.

The main bone of contention, however, is not with the DVD residuals (although they would like to double it to $0.08 per DVD, it’s not a deal-breaker, by most accounts), it is with digital “airplay” – the streaming of episodes via the Studio’s websites or the downloading of the shows through new-media outlets like iTunes and their ilk.  Right now, the writers who create the shows and are valued enough to earn good money and acceptable residuals on TV-play and DVD-sales get nothing for internet use of their work.  Nothing at all.

Now, the in’s and out’s of all this are clearly numerous and well-covered in many places across the ‘net – if you want to know more and more specifics, click the logo above right to go to the striker’s website, or see the explanations on YouTube – but suffice it to say from me that it seems completely, bafflingly down-right criminal that the Studios should be claiming that they don’t make money from paid-for downloads of shows and from the advertising they sell to tack on to the streamed versions.

The writers, honestly and fairly I believe, think that they are entitled to a similar cut of the profits of their shows from the internet as they get from all other forms of their distribution.   And since it’s very likely that more and more TV is likely to be seen via the ‘net in the years to come – indeed, many people are predicting that the ‘net will become the primary source for our television consumption in the next decade or so – it stands to reason that the writers want in on it.

There are always going to be the people who disagree with the principle of writers receiving residuals for work they’ve already done and I’m not really interested in trying to turn those people around, but beyond there I don’t see how anyone can say that writers don’t deserve a cut of the digital profits.  It’s not greed, it’s just fair and decent.  If you accept the principal that they should be paid a cut of the profits from screenings and sales of their work, then online sales has to come into the equation.

Anyway, all of that is a very, very long-winded and roundabout way of saying that I’m wholeheartedly supporting the American writers in their strike action and that if I were being paid to write now, I’d be putting my pencil down and if I could walk more than 10m without needing a long sit-down, I’d be with them on the picket lines.  If I was in the States.  As it is, I’ve just signed this petition.  Which is about all I can do, as well as urging you to do it too.

For now, the strike is having little impact on our TV schedules, but if it goes on more than a few more weeks, we’re going to see pretty big holes open up in our Spring schedules, including things like Season 2 of Heroes, Season 4 of Lost and many others besides.

It’s nice to write about something other than feeling rubbish.

* the old famous saying, “A camel is a horse designed by a committee.”

Up to Oxford today for my mid-IV once-over, during which all signs were pointing to “pretty good”.  “Good” is obviously a relative term, but compared to last week, where I was perched on the verge of a bit of a down-turn, things are doing pretty well.

Lung function is up to 0.75/1.5 from 0.7/1.2, which is a goodly leap (18%/30% from 17%/24%) in the space of a week, my sats are holding steady around the 90% mark on 2l O2 per minute and my exercise tolerance is improving.

Yesterday we took delivery of a brand new exercise bike from the lovely Fitness for Hire, a company who loan out exercise equipment so you can see whether or not you’re likely to get into the habit of using it without throwing away a whole heap of dough on something that’s just going to sit and gather dust.  We’ve loaned it for 4 weeks for starters and if it doesn’t get used, it’ll just go back, no hassle.

The theory is, according to the Physios-Who-Know, that working on a bike is easier on the chest/lungs than step-ups with Goliath as the tendency is not to desaturate so quickly.  I don’t know why that is, or exactly how the process works, but what it basically means is that by using the bike I will be able to do more exercise without getting so out of breath.  This, in turn, should mean that I can make my muscles do more work, rather than my lungs stopping me before my muscles really get a work out, and the muscular improvment will serve to improve the flow and use of oxygen around the body, meaning that I require less oxygen to do everyday tasks, which means I get less breathless while doing them.

Theory is all well and good, but we know how my body likes to throw googlies (or curveballs, if you’re more comfortable with the American vernacular), so having the option to bail out on the purchase of a hefty piece of equipment is a good option for right now.

I have to say, having had a wee spin on a bike at Oxford today, it certainly looks promising as a less intense form of exercise.  Obviously, there are different levels of resistance and speed settings and a whole host of other options, but the great thing about it is that the very basic starting point is easily managable, giving a lot more leeway in terms of turning things up or down as my chest may dictate from day-to-day.  The trouble with step-ups is that they are very set-in-stone – it’s a set distance, with a set weight (my body-weight), over a set time.  The bike, on the other hand, has myriad ways of making things easier or harder as my body goes through it’s yo-yo routine.

Once again – and as usual – we’ll wait and see what comes of it.  I don’t want to get too over-excited at something that’s just going to fall by the wayside again, but the promise is there for something with potential.

Sadly no progress on the script today, because the trip to Oxford has pretty much sucked the energy out of me, so it’s probably a night in front of the TV tonight, maybe catching a flick or something.  But it’s been a positive day, so I’m not going to moan about a little bit of tiredness at the end of it.

It’s taken me a bit by surprise (the whole thing seems to have wrapped up rather quicker than I expected it to) but I have this afternoon completed the official first draft of my screenplay! Am incredibly chuffed.

There’s still a way to go with it – I know for a fact that there are at least 3 scenes I want to revisit already, plus some minor points to fiddle with, but technically, I reached the point at which you write END on the page, which makes it a completed draft.

I’m hoping to have the 2nd draft done in a week or so with my minor tweaks and then to be able to print it out and comb through it in detail to come up with a 3rd draft that I’ll be happy to start showing people.

I’m happy.

Today I am tired. Today made no sense. I think it’s because I’m tired. But really, it made no sense.

I woke up this morning at 6.30am – that’s really early. Luckily, it’s not dark, because the clocks have gone back. So I woke up in the light. But it was still really early. I didn’t get much sleep last night. It was past midnight when the light went out and I then spent the next hour or so getting to sleep, where I then spent the next four or five hours dozing and waking every hour or so to readjust my position because either a) Neve was coming off my face, b) my shoulder was hurting because of the port needle or c) I was lying too much over on my chest and giving myself breathing trouble.

I woke up grouchy. I don’t think many people wake up at 6.30am happy, but when you’ve slept badly two nights in a row, coupled with not sleeping long enough two nights in a row, coupled with being on really high doses of the most drowsy-making drugs in the world (with the notable exception, perhaps of sleeping pills, which I suppose really ought to win the most drowsy-making award and if they don’t then they should really have a different name, or get their makers sued under trading standards) then it’s pretty hard to wake up at 6.30 in the morning without being grouchy.

I did my drugs. This involves (at the moment) doing about 10-15 minutes worth of injecting solutions from a syringe down the tube then connecting up a big bubble-thing which works like a drip, but in a different way. (That doesn’t make sense, does it? If it works like a drip, then it must be a drip; if it works a different way then it’s not like a drip, is it? Told you today didn’t make sense.) That takes an hour to go through, then it’s a couple of quick syringe squirts and hey presto, all done.

So the whole shebang took me up to about 8am. Every Monday morning, I have a delivery of portable oxygen cylinders to give me enough to move around for the week when I want to go out. Invariably, the delivery driver arrives at 9am. Looking at the clock, tired and grouchy, I decided I didn’t want to go back to bed for an hour just to get woken up as I settle into a nice sleep to have to get up and answer the door. So I try to occupy myself to keep myself awake until 9.

Dutifully, the lovely Brummy gent turns up and drops of my new cylinders and whisks away my old ones. Following which I retire to bed for a catch-up nap, aware that I have to be up no later than 11.30 to get ready to go to the hospital for a physio appointment and drug-level check.

I clamber into bed and strap on my Neve-mask, only to discover that the condensation in the mask has done something – I don’t know what and boy, do I wish I did – which makes something on the mask make a really loud, annoying clunking sound every. Single. Time. I. Breathe. In.

Annoying? Slightly. Grumpy-making? Exceedingly.

After, oh I don’t know…. 5 minutes of trying, I give up and clamber out of bed, thoroughly bad-mooded for the day. I wash the mask up, in an effort to have cleared whatever the problem is for tonight, and sit myself quietly on the sofa to start reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which I’ve finally wrestled from K and am keen to get through before having the whole story spoiled for me by people who’ve seen the movie.

Bizarrely, all the time I’m sitting reading, I’m perfectly awake and alert, despite having had not enough sleep and being beside-myself with tiredness when I’d gone back to bed. As soon as I got up from my perch, however – to make tea, to fetch things, to do anything at all, really – I was exhausted. My chest was heaving, my legs felt like lead and my eyes couldn’t have been heavier if they’d entered a Weight Watchers programme and won the prize for world’s worst dieter by gaining their own body-weight three times over.

I was not a happy bunny.

By the time K got up I was happily reading away, but ready for some morning physio, which is never fun at the best of times but when you’re tired it becomes a peculiar kind of torture – long, drawn out, unpleasant, occasionally painful, sometimes exhausting, often breathless and very, very hot (this morning, anyway). Needless to say I ended in a mildly worse mood than I start – impressive, huh?

I did manage to lever myself into a bath and chill out for a fraction of an hour before throwing some clothes on and getting ready to head off to Oxford, only to be phoned and told that the physio I was supposed to be seeing had broken her tooth and wouldn’t be able to see me today, so could I come Wednesday instead? Of course, I said. Why not?

But here’s the weird thing: having not gone to Oxford, which I took to be a blessing on account of my overwhelming tiredness anyhow, my body then decided that actually, it was feeling pretty happy and perky. After 5 hours semi-sleep, a 6.30am start, a morning of trial after mood-blackening trial, I found myself suddenly feeling an urge to sit at my keyboard and write – to carry on with my screenplay with which I have been having so many recent tussles. (For “tussles”, read: “hit a structural bump which sapped all creativity and forward-momentum and left a big black mark against my 5-page-per-day copy book for the last month or so”)

So all afternoon I’ve been beavering away on my screenplay without so much as a care in the world, pausing only for the occasional break for food, water or the odd episode of Lost (just keeps getting better).

I have no idea what my brain is doing with itself, nor what my body is up to at the moment. My chest feels like it’s improving, but my sleep certainly isn’t. My mind is lost in a mire of lethargy which saps any mental strength and positivity right out of it, whilst still apparently providing me with enough drip-fed muse to be able to carry on doing the kind of creative writing which is usually the first thing to desert me when I’m feeling rubbish.

Literally nothing about this day is making any sense to me right now. But I guess that’s just because I’m tired. Can you tell?

I’m not really sure at the moment, if I’m honest.

My body and my mind are all over the place and I can’t decide what to do with myself from hour-to-hour, let alone day-to-day.

Frustration is playing a key role in whatever I am doing at the moment, though, driving me to distraction.

For the last week or so I’ve been sleeping incredibly badly – not being able to get off to sleep and then waking every hour or so until the early hours when it tends to increase to to a whopping 20mins of sleep at a time.  It’s been driving me bonkers.  Also, of course, it’s left me with very little energy to do anything with myself all day.

Once I’m tired, I’m also absolutely horrible to be around.  I’m sure most of us aren’t at our best when we’re lacking a bit of shut-eye, but I know that when I’m sleepless I’m at my very, very worst.  For all the days K’s spent laughing at me and with me when we both get the giggles when we’re tired, I’m sure she’s now found out that when I’m really tired giggles are nowhere to be found.

Lack of sleep also causes more and more worries as well.  I’m well aware of the fact that it’s when our bodies are at rest that they repair themselves and set themselves up for another day.  As you’ll know from the more recent blogs, I’m also increasingly aware of the frailty of my body and the desperate need it has to keep itself ticking over.  Missing out on crucial rest time bothers me big-time because I know how precious a resource it is.

More than all of that, though, the more tired I am the more frustrated I get with myself and with the things around me.  My energy levels are so low that doing anything other than sitting and surfing the ‘net causes me to feel like I’ve been running around a football pitch for hours.  Without the rest it needs, my chest will start to moan and complain if I do much more than make a cup of tea and I can really feel my auxiliary muscles working overtime just to keep the oxygen flow going through what’s left of my lungs.

I’ve been struggling for the last couple of months with pain in my back and neck where the over-worked auxiliary respiratory muscles are tensing up and causing all kinds of different, unpleasant aches and pains, which in turn makes it harder to sit properly or carry myself as I should, which only then serves to exacerbate the problem with my back and neck muscles.  It’s the very worst of vicious circles that no one seems to have identified a way out of yet.

There are so many things I’d like to be doing with myself at the moment, projects I’d like to be working on, writing I’d like to be doing, but it’s the most I can do to get through a day without going mad at the moment.  My brain certainly doesn’t feel switched-on enough to achieve much beyond the occasional email.  I don’t think I’ve had a creative thought-thread for a couple of weeks now, which really gets me down.

Still, it can’t all be doom and gloom – there’s good things in the world. (Best not get on to last weekend’s sport if I’m looking for sunshine, eh?).

My bro was back for a couple of days over the weekend, which was really nice – he’s away so much doing this, that and the other that it’s been really good to see him and catch up a bit.  He seems really happy in what he’s doing, which is so good to see.  I get a real kick out of seeing my family and my friends doing things they really enjoy – I suppose it’s a kind of vicarious pleasure that I’ve lived with for a while now and I have always felt it most strongly for the things my bro gets up to.  If he’s happy, I’m happy for him.  And he’s always happy, because he’s that kind of bloke.

I know I could be doing a lot worse, too.  My chest isn’t 100% – an understatement, I suppose, of rather dramatic proportions, but then everything is relative – but it’s holding on there for the most part.  It could be much worse and I could be properly laid-up, which I’m not, so I should really not be complaining too hard.

I suppose that when frustration bubbles up it’s often hard to see the good for the bad – the wood for the proverbial trees, as it were – and it’s all too easy when tiredness attacks to let it drag everything down with it.  Positivity is a precious resource in and of itself, so I suppose what I really need is just the energy to go and mine some more of it.

Nothing really changes in my life these days – it’s getting harder and harder to find something new to write about that’s not just droning on and on about how hard things can be, or what minute fluctuations my chest is taking at the moment. So I figured that if I’m not up to making sweeping changes in everyday life, the least I could do was to give the blog a bit of TLC.

So here we have it – the all-new SmileThroughIt, courtesy of the lovely people at WordPress (forr all your blogging needs!). Hopefully, it makes the whole thing a bit easier to read – I was surfing the other day and saw the page for the first time in ages and noticed just how SMALL the font size looked on the front (I only see the “back end” of the page, which is all fresh, clean and white, totally different to the published version). It also, I hope, makes it easier to navigate the old posts, or the most recent posts, as well as seeing when I’ve published.

Anyway, as far as the “me” update goes… well, nothing’s changed really.

I say that, of course, but there have been things going on. It amused me last week actually, when I was catching up via text with a friend of mine who’s got himself couped up in the Big House (read: hospital) and he was asking what I’m up to at the moment. I said I’m not doing anything these days, not really up to much. Apart from still doing CF Talk. And the work I’ve got going with Live Life Then Give Life. And talking to the campaigners behind My Friend Oli. And the odd bit of writing.

I suddenly found myself looking back over my text wondering what, indeed, the Roman’s had ever done for us. (Apologies to Monty Python). In fact, said friend said as much in his reply. Told me I clearly didn’t have time to work, even if I was up to it physically.

So yes, I think to myself, nothing ever changes around here, but I’m still finding myself pretty busy. Saturday was a blessed day of nothingness, somewhat of an oasis after a busy week, which had been draining not just physcially, but not helped my the mood swings and negativity flying about.

Sunday we popped over to K’s ‘rents to say hi and for K to raid their loft to try to find some old books of hers to help with her college course. K being K she’s decided not to do the simple, middle-of-the-road, easy-as-the-proverbial-pie kind of project that they expect their students to do, but rather to launch into a semi-professional study which, all things being well, she is hoping to then go on and get published if we can find the right journal for it. The only thing is, it means she needs to wrap her brain back around the statistics info she learned way back when. I am, naturally, completely useless for this as I can’t really count much higher than 10 and ask me to do division and I’m stuck beyond halving something.

While we were there we were, I think it’s fair to say, attacked by our tiniest niece and nephew. I think it’s also fair to say that they’re not going to be the tiniest for long. The little one is nearly as big as his sister now, despite being 13 months younger. In a reversed nod to Animal Farm, he’s just discovered Two Legs Good, Four Legs Bad – it’s so much easier to cause havoc when you have your hands free to grab, hold and throw things while you move. His sister, meanwhile, is mostly contented jumping on me and her Auntie K.

Today I even managed to venture across town to pick up my own prescription, something which I’ve been relying on Mum and Dad for for a while now, although when I told Mum I’d done it tonight she told me off for not asking her to do it (you can’t win sometimes).

Just writing all this down, I’m starting to realise not only that my life is still pretty full and varied, albeit in a different manner to that which I was used to, but also why I started this blog in the first place. More than just a place to air my frustrations, or my minor triumphs, I began writing these posts nearly a year ago in the hope that putting it down in words might help remind me that life’s not as bad as all that and if I only take the time to look around, I’ll see all the wonderful things I have in my life: my family, K and her family (my second family, really), my friends: a network of people who never let me forget myself. More than anything, maybe I’ve reminded myself to Smile Through It.

I feel like I should be doing a great, big week-long catch up on here, but I don’t seem to have the impetus to go back over the whole of last week and work out what happened or didn’t.  I seem to remember largely feeling pretty knackered, thanks, no doubt, to the IV’s.

The good news is that they really did the trick and we got on top of the infection before it could develop properly.  My CRP at the start of the course was at 89, which had reduced to just 33 after 7 days, which is good going.  The extreme fighting going on is probably the major cause of the tiredness, too, alongside the drug doses.

I also feel like I should be entertaining you all with a blow-by-blow account of my troubles with Sky, but I think I’m so tired of all this malfunctioning technology and maladjusted people on the end of helplines that I can’t even bring myself to muster up a random thread of expletives to describe the situation.

The IV’s finished on Tuesday and I was up at Oxford yesterday for a quick post-IV once-over.  The best news of the 2 weeks (and recent past) is that my weight is now up to a rather impressive 54.4kg – the heaviest I’ve ever been.  I’m hoping that I can keep it on and keep adding to it even as I slowly start to reduce my steroids.   My lung function had improved greatly, too, back up to 0.8/1.3 after dipping down to 0.6/1.1.  It may not sound like much, but when you consider that’s a  25% drop in lung-function,  it goes to show why I may not have been feeling my best.

I have continued, on-and-off, to look at and sporadically work on new projects and a couple of old ones, although clearly a lack of internet access is a bit of a hindrance to most productivity.  Of course, being offline and having nothing else to use my computer for, you’d have expected, I guess, that I would make some significant progress on the screenplay.  Rather impressively, however, that’s not the case at all, and it’s sitting just as untouched today as it was when I lost the internet connection 10 days ago.

Only I could manage to ignore a chance to turn a technological disadvantage into an advantage – looking the mis-guided gift horse in the mouth, as it were.

There’s not much else to add, really – I suppose it’s been a bit of a boring week or so, or certainly that anything interesting that has happened seems far too long-winded for me to dredge back up right now.  I’m still tired.

Ho hum, let’s keep rolling along and see what tomorrow brings.  Sorry for being boring today.

This isn’t actually a proper post, but I do have my internet back (more on that tomorrow) and thought I’d point you here to a letter I had published in the Guardian Media Section today.  It’s not often I big myself up, but I’m really rather proud of this chappie.