Archives: Transplant

On Saturday, K and I travelled down to Covent Garden to help out some friends who’ve been working on one of this year’s Battlefront campaigns about organ donation.

Both of the girls concerned have siblings who have been saved by a transplant, so it’s hugely personal to them and one of them, Hope, is looking likely to see her mum go through the same thing soon.

Sarah has covered things in far more detail (and with many more pictures) on her blog, so I won’t rewrite the wheel (no, hold on…), but rather just say that for two young women to achieve what they did this weekend is remarkable in so many ways.

Both of them have been through huge amounts of emotional trauma with their loved ones in recent years and both would be forgiven for packing it all away in a mind-cupboard at the back of their brain to sit in storage, untouched for years to come. But instead, they choose to fight, to promote organ donation to as many people as possible and to set a new world record for the biggest number of sign-ups to the organ donor register in one hour.

I wrote last week about remarkable women I know; you can certainly add these two to the list.

Sometime even the smallest challenges can seem like marathons, the merest bump the greatest mountains.

Other time things seem to fade into the background as something far more significant comes to the fore.

Tor’s transplant on Monday night has thrown many things into sharp focus for me.

Remembering the immense fight she now faces, knowing the risks and rewards at play and reliving what it felt like to be in her position has really driven home the relative significance of everything else in life.

If there’s ever a time when we can take stock, refocus and understand the things that are most important to us, it’s when the life of a loved one hangs in the balance.

Don’t just let these moments pass you by: use them to understand your life and your thoughts and to take definitive action, whatever it may be, towards making your life a little more how you want it and a little less how you’re being lead.

Monday was a day of emotions like no other.

On the one hand, my friend and ally in many things, Tor, finally received the life-saving transplant she’s been waiting over 4 years for.  She can finally stop waiting and start the long journey into her new life.

No sooner had the emotions begun to settle than I heard that my friend and inspiration to many, Rachael, was preparing her final goodbyes, having been told by the doctor that there is nothing more they can do.

Tor always staggered me with her courage, fortitude and stubborn refusal to let CF beat her, reminding me in so many ways of the wonderful Jess, who we lost just days after her long-awaited transplant last year.  Tor has fought and battled and grappled with everything life has chosen to fling at her over the last four years – and throughout her life before that – and faced it with a characteristic smile, passion and commitment to not letting it get in the way.

Rachy has inspired many people, often first to lend support to people going through their own tough times, even as her transplant turned against her and her lungs deteriorated just 3 months after being given her second chance.  Always open, honest and available to all her friends, she humbles us all with her humility and love.

Rachy is all the more remarkable for having posted on her blog on Sunday a simple picture and the words

Rachael Wakefield, a life lived surrounded by love, with my second chance of life time is now precious, I’d like to thank all and everyone for your continued support, love to you all xxx Rachy xxx

Her quiet dignity in saying her goodbyes and inviting those of her friends and followers has seen her Facebook page deluged with outpourings of love and grief filled with the same passionate fervour as Tor’s has been with messages of excitement and prayers of hope.

What’s made this week so hard is that both of these women are at once utterly, beautifully unique, yet sadly not alone.

Every day we lose 3 people waiting for transplants in this country, mostly for the simple reason that not enough organs are available for transplant. If you haven’t already, you need to sign the organ donor register now.

It’s depressingly simple – taking less than 2 minutes and but a few clicks – but far too few people have done it.  No one like Tor should have to wait 4 years to be given a second chance at life.

Although we all know the risks going in to transplant, and although many of us have watched Rachy’s progress with a “There but for the grace of God go I” viewpoint, I know Rachy wouldn’t have traded a second of the post-transplant life had she known what lay in store.

I’ve always said I wanted six months of a better life post-transplant and I’d be happy. That a chance to play football with my Godsons, to run around in the garden, to do something without calculating how much oxygen I’d need to take would be enough for me.

I’ve been blessed with almost 4 years of new life and I thank my donor and their family for it every day. And I’m saddened every day for those who have never had the chance Rachael, or Tor, or I have had.

Don’t let life pass you by. Take it, seize it, make the very most of it. And please, once your done, pass your organs on.

Luck runs out.

In 2007, when I was struggling not just to enjoy but to hold on to life, I inherited what turned out to be a lucky portable oxygen concentrator from my good friend Emily, who had inherited it in turn from another friend.

Shortly after she received her1, Emily got her transplant2 and passed her on to me.

Six months after I adopted Claire, I was blessed with my second chance at life.

In deference to the lives she had touched and the continuing legacy of the lucky little concentrator, I in turn passed her on to my friend Sam.

The thing about luck is, it runs out. As I was celebrating my 26th birthday – a birthday very few, if any, of my family believed I would reach – Sam was slipping away and died shortly afterwards.

We can not – and should not – need to rely on luck to ensure people receive the transplants that will save and transform their lives. Luck should never come into it.

Please sign the organ donor register.

1. the concentrator had been named Claire [↩]
2. double lungs, same as me [↩]

This is Jo. She was a very close friend of mine.

She was waiting for a double-lung transplant, just like me.

She died in November 2009.

She is missed.

Sign the Organ Donor Register.

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

— Rudyard Kipling

Nothing sums up the way I’m feeling this morning better than this amazing poem. It’s probably my all-time favourite poem and I try every day to live my life by it.

Around 8am this morning, I anticipated being in the middle of deepest Wales, holed up in a little hotel not far from the foot of Snowdon, enjoying a celebratory breakfast with the 3 Peaks team and our nearest and dearest who were all coming out to join us.

Instead I woke at home, in my own bed, many hundreds of miles from where I wanted to be and feeling pretty rubbish about it, if I’m honest.

But, straight from my Life According To Kipling playbook, I’m off out for a celebratory breakfast with one of the team and their wife, both great friends who’ve been hugely supportive through the whole crazy rollercoaster of the last few weeks.

I am facing disaster and treating is just the same as I would have the triumph of completing the 3 Peaks. By celebrating I’m telling whatever higher power has deemed it necessary to prevent me completing it for the 2nd year in a row that I will not be bowed, I will not be cowed and I will never stop appreciating, loving and making the most of the gift I’ve been given. Wales or Wellingborough, it makes no difference to me.

If this post means anything to you, please share the sign-up link for the organ donor register for the trek – http://www.bit.ly/oli3peaks – by copying and pasting or sharing the link to this post. Help us make sure everyone who needs it gets the second chance I’ve had.

The plan was that by this time today1, I should have been arriving at a hotel in Scotland with the rest of the 3 Peaks team to prepare ourselves to tackle the immense 3 Peaks Challenge this weekend.

As we all know, other things happened to get in the way of that.

I’m absolutely gutted that I’m not going to be with Ben, Dave, Gary and my bro this weekend and that I’m not going to feel the immense sense of achievement (and exhaustion) on Sunday morning that I anticipated feeling. What makes it worse is the fact that this is now 2 years in a row when my health has got in the way of the very same challenge, with the very same team of people.

I’ve dealt for many years with the ups and downs of my health, but I’ve always managed to come out of things with a positive spin and so it is with this. Despite thinking that after transplant I wasn’t going to face these kinds of disappointment, I’m finally starting to hear the sense in my own words, spoken at almost every event I speak at: transplant is not a magic bullet, it’s simply exchanging one set of problems for another.

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing – NOTHING – that I would change about my life right now. Transplant has saved and transformed my life and allowed me to be the person I always wanted (and believed) I could be. It’s allowed me to do all the things I’ve always wanted (and believed I could) do.

Events like the things that have been happening recently serve only to remind me that although I have downsides, so does everyone else. And thanks to my transplants, my troughs are a hell of a lot shallower than before – and than many other people deal with every day – and my peaks are a hell of a lot higher.

So it leaves me simply to suck it up and move right along – knowing in my heart of hearts that not going this weekend is the right decision and knowing that something else will soon come along to excite, entice and energise me as I move forward.

As a result of recent events, my life is going through a lot of changes, but they are all enormously exciting and I know that the best times of my life lay ahead. It’s time to knuckle down, get on with it and start taking my first steps forward to the brave new world to which I’m being introduced.

1. around 4.30pm as I write this [↩]

By now you’ll have read the other two posts and, possibly, seen my Tweets on the subject, too, but I’m home safe and sound after the craziness of the preceding weeks. Here’s what happened on the final day of investigations at the John Radcliffe in Oxford.

At 8.30am I was informed I’d be going to the angio theatre at around 11am to get everything sorted. 10 minutes later I was told it would be 9am instead. A rapid shower and gowning later, and I was riding my bed down the corridors to the radiology department, where I was met by an assortment of nurses, doctors and, I think, and anaesthetist (although she could have been just about anything).

The nurse checked out my groin and deemed that I’d not shaved well enough, so gave me a rapid going over with a dry razor, following which I was immediately sterilised with surgical alcohol. Yes, yes it did hurt. A lot.

Next came the ironically-painful local anaesthetic injections around the artery in my groin, followed by a frankly disconcertingly painful and uncomfortable pull, pushing, pressing and scratching as the doc inserted a fairly large tube into my artery and begin sliding the angio tube all the way in and up to the base of my neck.

Angiograms are very weird things, where you’re lying flat on your back with an X-Ray machine immediately above your face and one immediately to the side. As they inject the contract dye into you head to highlight the blood flow – and thus show any clots or aneurysms – you feel a hot rush that’s unlike anything you can describe beyond the feeling you get when you tense really hard to make yourself go red in the face.

What’s even weirder with a full angio, as opposed to the CT Angio I spoke about last time, is that they pinpoint very specific areas of your head, meaning you get the flushing sensation in extremely localised areas in your head. It’s incredibly bizarre and although not unpleasant, it’s not something I’d like to repeat to often. Or at all.

Back on the ward, I felt the familiar headache forming, but this time it was accompanied by a significant nausea as well and before long I was beside myself with pain and the urgent desire to throw up, coupled with being forced to lie flat on my back for 6 hours after the procedure to prevent the artery opening up again once it had clotted.

It turns out, although I was unaware of it at the time, mostly through sedative doses of Codeine and Tramadol for the pain, that I’d reacted to the dye they had used. Whereas the CTA had only cuased a headache, the far more significant doses of dye used in the full angio had resulted in a not-insignificant reaction on my part. The only good thing to come from it is that I don’t really remember a lot of it too clearly.

In the end, I improved quite rapidly once I was put on IV fluids and began to eat and drink again and I was discharged the following day with two conflicted reports on what had happened.

The registrar was of the belief that the whole thing had been caused by acute sinusitis and that the LP result had been a false-positive. This is a diagnosis I struggle with having seen my mum suffer through horrendous sinusitis in the past and not recognising a single symptom she described in myself. However, because it was the only thing that showed up on the CT1, I think the Reg decided to put it down to the visible.

The consultant, on the other hand, strongly believes that it had, indeed, been a sub-arachnoid haemorrhage, caused not by a ruptured aneurysm as is most common, but by a burst blood vessel that was so small it obliterated itself in the process, leaving no evidence whatsoever for the scans to pick up – something that happens in around 15% of SAH cases, she told me.  Her main evidence for this was based on the Xanthochromia found in the LP – a type of cell formed when red blood cells expire – which she doesn’t believe would have formed in the CSF through a badly-performed LP as it takes too long for the RBCs to break down to that stage.

So, essentially, I left the hospital with a clean bill of health, but feeling worse than when I did when I was transferred.  I’m now on an anti-convulsant drug to stop the blood vessels in my head spasming and causing more problems. I’m assured this is purely a precaution and the course only lasts 3 weeks, so I should be back to normal soon.

More on the changes that have been forced on my by this latest hospitalisation later in the week.

1. ie, that my sinuses were full of muck [↩]

Following my post from last Thursday about my admission to hospital, at the end of which, you will remember, I was waiting for a transfer to a neuro unit somewhere in the UK, the epic story of a simple headache continued for the next 6 days before finally reaching an inconclusive conclusion on my 29th birthday this last Wednesday.

I was (eventually) moved to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, where their neuro unit is considered to be one of the best in the country. On top of which, it was significantly easier for my family to come across and visit than a stay in central London would have been.

The Saturday after I arrived I was prepped and sent for a CT Angiogram, which is a regular CT scan1 plus a big bolus push of iodine-based contrast-dye to highlight all of the blood vessels. The idea was to look for aneurysms or weakenings in the walls of the blood vessels that usually show as small bubbles of blood. The concern with any aneurysm is that it could rupture and cause major bleeding on the brain, which in turn can cause strokes or even death.

The didn’t find anything.

It was at this point that the suspected diagnosis was made clearer to me through the far more knowledgeable nursing and medical staff at the JR; they suspected what’s called a sub-arachnoid haemorrhage. Here’s a couple of quick definitions to save me boring you to death if you couldn’t care less about the rest of the medical jargon and info.

I then spent the rest of the weekend locked up on the ward on 4-hourly obs and not allowed to stray for more than 30 minutes and then only if accompanied by a family member. Strict isn’t the word, but then I suppose the kind of issues they deal with are much more serious than most of the hospital wards I have frequented in the past, where a minor hiccup is unlikely to lead to instant chronic brain failure or death.

On Sunday afternoon, I was told by the weekend doctor that he suspected the LP from Harefield had been a false positive from the two failed attempts before the successful one2 and that further tests were unlikely to be ordered.

To my surprise, then, I was consented for a cerebral angiogram first thing on Monday morning, with no real explanation of the reasons beyond the fact that it’s the best test to check or aneurysms. Clearly, the weekend doc wasn’t the one in charge of my case and made a slightly sweeping statement in leading me to believe all was well and I’d be on my way home as soon as the docs on my case could process the discharge paperwork.

Waiting around, nil-by-mouth, all day for a procedure you don’t know a huge amount about is slightly frustrating, but not nearly so much as being told ten minutes after lunch has been round that they won’t be performing it that day.

I would go on to have the full angio the following morning, but that’s a whole story in itself.

The epic adventure continues tomorrow….

1. of the kind I’d had to Harefield the day I was first admitted [↩]
2. meaning the sample was contaminated by blood from outside the CSF [↩]

Thanks to an unscheduled 10-day stay at the pleasure of various hospitals and doctors1, it’s been far too quiet on here.

Rest assured, normal service will resume after the weekend. Thanks for sticking with  me.

1. more on my journal site [↩]