Archives: Day-to-day

I have discovered a new feature on my blog which allows me to change the datestamp on the posts, so I can post an entry for Thursday after typing it up on a Saturday (exactly what I’m doing now). This excites me because a) it means I can technically never miss a day’s blogging without feeling like I have to write something hilarious at midnight when I’m straining to keep my eyes awake, b) I can better keep track of all the things I do from day-to-day without having to write a single, enormously long post at the end of the week or such.

Really, the excitement stems from having got lost in re-reading Kevin Smith’s diaries, which I used to follow avidly on his website but have now been published in paperback form. What occurred to me as I waded back in to them (alongside memories of their first reading as long ago as 2005) is that part of the reason for creating this blog was not only to try to give myself a kick up the butt when I needed one, but also to have something on which I could look back in a few years time (God willing) and help me to remember what life was like “way back when” in my old life with rubbish lungs.

So I’m hoping to keep a slightly more day-to-day diary of events from here on out, although I’m sure they will still be peppered with the usual random tangents and streams-of-consciousness as all my posts have ever been.

So anyway, Thursday (today… wait, that’s weird…) saw me waking, annoyingly, 10 minutes before my alarm went off. I say annoyingly, but actually, thinking about it, it’s quite nice to wake up naturally, even if the first impulse on waking to roll over and drift back off to sleep has to be fought off to get up and set the a.m. dose of drugs flowing. Which I manage to do.

I park myself, still slightly dazed, in the chair by the telly and watch something or other while the drugs kick in. By the time they’re done, I’m actually nearly awake, which is quite rare for drug-mornings. I stick on the extras disk from Lost Season 3 (which we finished last night) and immerse myself in behind-the-scenes stuff which always gets my creative-juices flowing.

At 10 I wake K up as we have a visit from our littlest niece and nephew and she just about manages to roll out of bed in time to greet them at the door. They are so excited to get here it’s almost magical, and no sooner are they in the living room than they’re up on the sofa bouncing their heads off or pulling the contents of the coffee table off onto the floor.

We sit and drink tea with their Mum while they tear the place apart (in a nice way) and we play with anything we can find to play with. Most excitingly, because of the delivery of drugs I had yesterday, we have a big, empty cardboard box to play with, which ends up getting decorated with colouring pencils.

I grab my camera and get some super-cute shots of them as they run around, including some wonderful full-paparazzi-style shots of the little on, hand extended at the camera in “get out of my face” mode.

They leave around lunch time and I immediately crash out back in bed. I’m pretty impressed that they didn’t actually totally exhaust me, but I know for sure that if I don’t take the chance to recharge my batteries now, I’m not going to make it through the rest of the day unscathed, and with the hint of a cold still around, I don’t want to use all my energy up.

I wake up a couple of hours later and feel strong enough to run K to college, which cheers me up as I’d assumed I would be house-bound most of this week. I drop her off and head home, spending the next hour or so on the ‘net checking emails and getting a little lost in Facebook, as is my unfortunate tendency.

K calls in a seriously foul mood (justifiably, after a completely wasted and pointless night at a poor excuse for an educational establishment – shame on you Milton Keynes College) and I run out to pick her up.

We get back to find an old friend of mine from the Theatre in the car park, where she’d been waiting for me to get back (I thought K was going to be out longer, so I’d be around to let her in before I had to shoot off to pick her up, but ended up leaving her parked outside for 20 mins while I did the school run). We go upstairs and grab a cuppa while catching up on anything and everything from the last 6-months or so. She has a lot more to share than I do…

In fact, I hadn’t seen her since before she went off on a jungle-trek to Thailand in the summer, through which she raised over £7,000 for the CF Trust and nearly died in the process after an unfortunate incident with a bamboo raft and a set of rain-forest rapids. She fills us in on all the details of everything and it sounds like an amazing trip.

What was intended to be a quick cuppa turns into a lengthy evening’s nattering, which eventually ends with her taking her leave about 10pm. K and I settle on the sofa while I do my drugs and watch tonight’s episode of Studio 60, then hit the sack just before midnight.

It’s been a nervous 24 hours here since the cold reared its head and it was made all the worse last night after I spotted a problem with the line into my port through which I give my IV’s.

I noticed while I was doing my afternoon dose that the line had gone a little cloudy, but didn’t think much of it.  By the evening dose, it hadn’t cleared up (as sometimes happens) and had a couple of distinct breaks in the cloudiness which started to concern me slightly.

Anyone with a port-a-cath will tell you how protective they are of them, not least people in my position as the loss of use of a post through breakage or – God forbid – infection is a serious problem: replacing ports is not the kind of thing that can be done on a whim and while it isn’t what you’d term “major” surgery, it’s certainly more than most doctors would like to be performing on someone with end-stage lung disease.

With all these thoughts running through my head, I took the executive decision to not give my next dose of IV’s until I’d been to Oxford to get it looked at and replace the needle and line for a new one.

After a late-night phone call with Mum, we hastily arranged a lunch-time pick up when she finished work (trampling all over any other plans for the day she may have had) and I settled down for the night after pumping another mini-monsoon of First Defence up my nose and downing a handful of Vitamin C caps to try to ward the cold off, too.

For once I slept absolutely beautifully.  Without my morning dose of dugs to do, I slept clean through till 10am, when K’s alarm woke me.  Lucky it did, really, because it didn’t wake her, so she’d have been in a spot if it weren’t for my eagle-eyed sense of hearing. (Yeah, I know, that confused me, too.)  That said, I’m sure she’ll jump to defend herself having already been out of bed once to answer the door to a nice delivery man.

A quick call to my team in Oxford and the ever-brilliant Cass opened up a slot for me early in the afternoon.  I checked with Mum and we were all good to shoot on over once she’d got her morning at work out of the way.

I got up slowly and rumbled around the house, hesitantly waiting for the cold to hit with full force, but nothing really materialised.  My sinuses were much less clogged and though I struggled a little with my physio first thing, I managed to clear a good bit and get my nebs done before Mum arrived.  I grabbed some Lucozade for the journey and hopped in the car, leaving K at home for a study session with a college-mate.

Cass looked me over and gave my port a quick once-over and agreed that it didn’t seem to be anything too untoward, although she’d never seen anything like it either.  She swapped my needle out and reaccessed me, giving it a good flush to check it out and all seemed well.  We agreed that although the cold doesn’t seem to have taken hold, an extra week on the IVs wasn’t going to do any harm.  I can’t have been there more than 20 minutes before Mum whisked me off again, but it was worth the 3 hour round trip for the piece of mind it gave me.

We got home just before half-three and I connected up my afternoon dose of IVs and hit the sack to recharge my batteries.  I woke an hour later feeling really quite energised, hit my nebs and did some physio before dinner.

I think – touch wood – I’ve managed to ward the cold off, so am hoping that another good night’s rest and another day not doing too much should keep me back on the well-wagon and I can look forward to another weekend with family and friends.

Off to catch tonight’s episode of Heroes now – we’re all addicted and we’re only a few weeks from the end of the season!  Hooray!

Not much more to say, really.  Am feeling utterly deflated that at the end of 2 weeks’ IVs which have boosted me rather wonderfully and got me feeling very good and positive, I wake up this morning with puffy, stuffy sinuses and a whisper of a headache, which has spent the day hovering between going away and worsening into full-blown cold.

There’s not a lot I can do to keep it from setting in full-blown, I don’t think, certainly no more than I’m trying, which is lots of rest with lots of calories and spraying First Defence up my nose like teenage boys spray cologne on a night out.  The plus side, I suppose, is that at least I don’t smell as bad as they do.

Thinking about it, I suppose I have to take the blame for the onset of the cold, since I did make the mistake of saying yesterday that I wanted to be productive today and get things done.  If this blog has proven one thing over the last 12 months, it’s that whenever I talk about getting things done, something crops up to get in the way of it.  I really should learn just to keep my mouth shut.

Realistically, it’s more likely than not that the cold is simply my body’s reaction to a frantically busy weekend – it’s a long time since I’ve had 3 night’s of “entertainment” in a row and although I rested a lot in the day times, it must still have worn me down.

It’s frustrating and – as always – a little scary to be coming down with something, but at least I have the security of knowing that I’m getting it at my very best point physically.  I’m just a day from finishing IV’s (which will now be extended by another week to cover any knock-on effects from the cold) and still on steroids, which means my appetite is good, my chest is as good as it ever gets and I’m firing on as many cylinders as I’ve got.  If there is ever a “good” time to get a cold when you’re aware of the possible consequences to a pair of dodgy blowers, this is it.

So I’m off to get some more physio done, shovel down some more food, suck down some more Lucozade and pray to the Big Guy to keep this one mild.  All help appreciated, if you’re so inclined.

So Saturday night was a bit of a bump, but Sunday and Monday have been a much more even keel – I’ve stayed resolutely on the positivity band-wagon, although I may have slid sideways a couple of times.

Yesterday morning vanished into nothing – a brief wake-up call at 7am to do my morning drugs dose, but the rest disappearing under the covers after another late night.

Shortly after the turn of noon, having stumbled out of bed, K’s Dad swung by with the visiting boyfriend of her Hungarian cousin.  Actually, technically, I don’t think they’re cousins, but once you get into the Hungarian side of the family I’m afraid I rather lose track of her clan.  I can only just keep track of the English side, but that’s because they’re inconsiderate enough to have 2 Uncle Peter’s, which is just foolish if you ask me.  I don’t see why they couldn’t have drawn straws for a name change to help me out just a little.

I digress.  T’s English was immaculate (handy, considering the state of my Hungarian) and it was really nice to meet him and chat.  K was revelling in getting first-hand details of all the goings on with her Hungarian cousins, one of whom is due to have her first child any day now.  K was keen for T to let his other half know that being an Aunty is “the best thing in the world”.  I ventured to point out that I daresay being a Mum might be considered to top it, but I always get shouted down.

They didn’t stay long, since K’s Dad was taking T off for a round-the-houses meet-and-greet of the rest of Team H over lunch.  I should think he got back to his apartment in London absolutely shattered after getting through the whole gang.

In the evening, we headed over to my ‘rents to catch up with them and have a gorgeous roast.  I know everyone always says it, but my Mum does the BEST roast dinners in the whole wide world and last night she even managed to out-do her usual high standards.  It was but a whisker short of perfection. (The whisker being Tio’s, their lovely little cat, who brought us a wee mouse as a pre-dinner snack).

After dinner we played chilled out and played games for a while before K and I headed home as everyone but me had to be up for work in the morning.  Not that it means I get a lie in as I had to be up for my drugs anyway.  Sometimes you just can’t win.

Today has been a generally un-taxing day.  I’ve not felt 100%, but it’s most just tiredness, largely caused by a busy weekend and the usual end-of-IV-run lack of decent sleep.  Having to be up every 8 hours to do drugs doesn’t sound like a bind, but when you figure it means you only ever get around 6 hours of sleep at a given time, it starts to wear you down a fair bit.

I did manage to catch a movie I’ve been trying to peep for a while now, which actually ended up disappointing me greatly, so I’ll not even go into detail here.  Suffice it to say I’ll not be awaiting the next QT flick as eagerly as I did this one.

Tonight, once K got in from work, apart from nebs and physio, plus another 20 minute bike sesh, we’ve basically just been in front of the telly finishing off the third season of Lost, which just totally blew us away – it’s amazing.  If you’ve never seen it, you absolutely have to go out and get all three seasons in their box sets now and check them out – they’re completely compulsive viewing.

Now there’s just time for another dose of drugs and a catch-up on some of last night’s telly while they go through and it’ll be off to bed and start again in the morning.  I’m determined to be productive tomorrow.  Watch this space.

That’s the sound made by me hitting yet another low after a nice 48 hours of high.

I’ve been um-ing and ah-ing over whether or not to drag down the recent positivity of my posts by indulging in my slight rearward step, but on reflection of the last two days I realised that what this blog started out as was a way for me to keep track of the course of my progress up to and hopefully beyond the point I receive my new lungs.  It seems entirely counter-productive to gloss-over the bad bits in order to spare what few regular readers I do “entertain” on here from being exposed to more difficulties.

Yesterday was actually a really good day – spent largely in bed/on the sofa doing very little indeed recovering from Friday’s grand night in, then sharing a lovely meal with K’s ‘rents which saw us pass over her Dad’s 60th birthday pressie (which is only 6 (and a bit…) months late).  Was worth the wait, though – we got a photograph he had taken in Central Park blown up and printed on to canvas for him and it looks amazing.

It wasn’t until after they had left that the day slid away from me.  Every night I sit at my computer in the study and do my nebs and casually surf around the ‘net for the 15-20 minutes it takes, most often taking in other people’s blogs and catching up on friends’ news.

On Saturday night, I made the mistake (it would appear) of clicking through into Facebook while I was browsing.  It was there that I found a new batch of photos a friend had put up of the festivities at another friend’s wedding.  The happy couple (God bless them, in the most sincere way possible) are friends I used to work with at MK Theatre and have enjoyed many a night out with over the years, both at work and outside.

Clicking through the newly-created photo album (put up by someone who clearly left the party too early if they were awake and/or sober enough to be able to connect their camera to a computer and upload the pics), I was met by face after face of happy, smiling people with whom I’ve enjoyed countless brilliant nights out over the years I worked at the Theatre and, indeed, since I left.

It struck me suddenly – in that sort of round-house punch/kick in the crotch kind of way these things tend to occur to you – that it’s been a very, very long time since I was out with all of them.  In fact, it’s been a very, very long time since any of them would even have thought to bother to ask me to go out with them.  Not through any fault or malice on their part, but simply because they know I wouldn’t be able to join them.

Sitting looking at happy face after happy face, smiling friend after smiling friend, it slowly dawned on me just how long it’s been since I’ve done anything remotely “normal” for a 25 year-old who claims to work in the Theatre industry.  I’ve not been to the Theatre, I’ve not been to the cinema, I’ve not been out for a drink, I’ve not even been out for a latte or “done lunch” – it’s not just “normal” that I’ve missed, I’ve even managed to lose “pretentious” too.

I suppose it’s a positive reflection on my state of body/state of mind at the moment that I can sit here after the fact and see inject some humour into it, but it really did hit me quite hard as I flicked through the album.  Some kind of intense sense-memory came washing over me and I could hear the voices, the laughter, the banter, the music; I could see the suits, the dresses, the dancing, the staggering, the pretty, the happiness and everything else.  I wanted so badly to be back there, to be laughing, singing, drinking, dancing – just being.

When I first started this weblog almost exactly 12 months ago, I truly never would have believed that without my transplant I would still be writing it today, so it is with no little understatement that I suggest it’s not a bad thing to be here – sitting comfortably in my desk chair, living with my wonderful girlfriend, having spent an amazing weekend enjoying the company of my friends and both sides of my family – complaining about not “getting out” enough.   If there was ever a “meaning” to this blog – a reason, plan or intent behind it – it was to remind myself of the good things in the face of the bad things.

So it is with a deep breath in and a sigh of appreciation that I thank Last Year’s Me once again for providing me with a place to come to remind myself that no matter what’s going on in my life, my body or my head, things are never as bad as they seem, that there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel and that the most important thing in life is to keep on keeping on – Smile Through It.

It’s been a while since I had such a straight-up, unabashed, pure-and-simple really good night in with friends.  Last night I had one and it was one of the most simplistically wonderful things that I’ve experienced for a while.

Having decided rather last minute that the best way to combat our household’s fear and loathing of fireworks, K and I set about recruiting the usual gang of easily-entertained appendages to join in our frivolities.  We also took the opportunity to finally go out and splash a bit of cash on the Scene It board game I’ve wanted for a while.

The whole evening was really terribly refined, in a loud and rambunctious kind of way – no alcohol, no TV, just a group of friends laughing, chatting and playing games, sometimes all at once, sometimes in a strange mish-mash of the three.

Whatever we were doing, though, it was just lovely to have the guys round and to be enjoying myself without feeling totally exhausted.  I’d had quite a quiet day, keeping myself in check and not getting too over-excited about things so that I had the strength to make the most of the evening and it really paid off.  The all eventually left around 1am and I was still feeling really good – a bit of a rarity for me.

We got through games of Scene It, Scattegories and Simpson’s Monopoly, the last of which having the bizarre novelty of now being a cash-less game.  Each player gets a credit-card, which is inserted into a little electronic calculator to add or remove money from the account.  It’s a great idea, but sadly doesn’t really work in practice.  The novelty wears off after about 5 minutes, by which point you’ve realised that every transaction takes 5 times as long as it did with cash and that it’s now impossible to a) know how much you’ve got in the bank without having to ask for the machine to check and b) know how much everyone else is stock-piling to help make those cash-rich deals to the hard-up players.

It was just such a great night and we all had a great time.  I honestly don’t think any of us noticed the lack of alcohol, which goes a long way to proving my long-held belief about having more fun without it than with it.  I won’t lose myself in an anti-alcohol diatribe here (because you don’t want to hear it anyway), but suffice it to say that it wasn’t until K pointed out the party’s dryness the next day that it even crossed my mind.

I haven’t been this excited about random developments for ages. I don’t think I’ve actually EVER been this excited about developments relating to fitness-type stuff. But I’ve just climbed off the shiny new exercise bike sat not 3 feet from this screen and I feel fantastic – this biking lark seems like it might just be the key to breaking the back of this fitness-malarky.

It’s such a bizarre feeling to sit on the bike and be doing real, proper exercise but not to feel completely breathless and deflated by the whole thing – to find a type of fitness which is enjoyable and beneficial without being a real battle of will power to push through the pain/breathlessness barrier.

It appears that the slower slope of desaturisation that I was talking about yesterday is much more significant than I’d first thought and that I can actually go a lot longer on the bike than I’d hoped without gasping for air or feeling like I’m going to keel off it. Rather, I can actually get to a stage where I can really feel the muscles in my legs being worked hard and doing some stretching and improving of their own.

It’s indescribable to feel that I’ve found something which can make the “working” parts of my body feel included in the day-to-day running of life – like their being paid at least a cursory bit of attention rather than being glossed over in the fight to keep the lungs ticking over.

I keep having all sorts of qualifiers about the relation of current treatment/steroids etc to the improvement in my chest and exercise tolerance and everything else swirling around my head at the moment, but right now I feel so good, so happy, that I don’t want to sit here and qualify things.

It’s not often these days that I get a chance to just sit and be excited about something going well. And I know that “not-so-good” may be just around the corner – as it is for all of us – so I’m blowed if I’m going to sit here and not let myself enjoy this feeling for tonight.

I’ve found something I can do physically that doesn’t make me 2nd best to a 3-year-old child and much as you may laugh, that’s a really, really big thing for me. Tonight, even if it’s “for one night only”, I’m enjoying it.

Big smiles and hugs to all!

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?