It’s been a pretty rough time of late and, if I’m honest, I’ve been struggling quite a lot. I’ve not really felt like blogging for quite a while as I’ve been battling with my own daemons and not really wanting to share them with anyone else.

Over the last couple of weeks it’s been slowly emerging why I’m feeling like I am and I’ve come to a few realisations that will hopefully put me on the right path for the next little while. Essentially, I realised, I don’t know how to be well.

I’ve spent so many years ducking and diving in and out of hospital, but since May 2008 I’ve not been admitted, not really been unwell, not had a cough, a cold or so much as a bad case of the hiccups. It’s been all plain sailing and that’s not something I’ve really experienced before – my life has always been broken up into chunks of illness and relative wellness.

What this means is that real life is starting to intrude with a vengeance. I’m actually having to start thinking about “the future”, something that’s always been an alien concept to me as I’ve never really believed I’ve had one. I’ve never planned more than a few months in advance because everything’s always been so unpredictable that I couldn’t. Even last year I had to miss the holiday we’d planned because I was hospitalised with CMV. So it’s strange to be forced to sit down and work out just what the future holds for me, for K and for everyone around us.

I’ve been struggling a lot with making the most of my new life, too – I want to do everything I can to honour my donor but right now I don’t feel that I am. I want to challenge myself both physically and mentally and push myself to find where my new boundaries are, so I’m looking at ways of doing that to make a dedicated, concerted effort to make the most of these lungs and to help my donor to smile down on me and feel proud of the life they’ve given me.

It’s been a tough haul over the last month or so and I’ve had to make some really tough decisions and I know I’ve got some really tough ones to come, but I’m starting – slowly – to feel more confident and energised about what’s on it’s way. I will try from now on to keep this blog more up-to-date with what’s happening and, in particular, my thoughts and feelings about things as I know from before my transplant it can actually be pretty therapeutic.

I can’t promise it’s all going to be sunshine and lollypops on here, or that it’ll even end up being that interesting, but I can promise myself that continuing to write “smile through it” may help to remind me of the long-lost days when everything was a chore and I had more to worry about than not having plans for next February.

Here’s to life: living it, loving it and smiling through it.