I can be so prescient sometimes. Not only did I predict that my writing-and-posting-daily habit would come to an end, I predicted it literally the day before it happened.

But it highlights one key point in this battle for routine and regular updates: the fact that a transplant doesn’t remove some of the many challenges of living with cystic fibrosis, the key one being energy management. After a busy and stressful few days at work,1 I had a bad night of almost no sleep that arrived with aches and pains across a lot of my body and a general level of fatigue. Although the fatigue is probably explained by the lack of sleep come to think of it.

I tried to get up in my normal routine, but my body and my brain weren’t having it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the many years of living with CF and my new body post-transplant, it’s that I have to listen when my body is telling me things. So I gave up on posting here and took myself back to bed.

There’s a lesson for everyone in this, because too often I see people struggling on, fighting through the beginnings of a cough or a cold because they think they have to, but totally ignoring the fact that they’re actually making things worse. The best thing you can do for your body when you start feeling unwell is to rest it and let it repair itself. Try to carry on too long and you end up making yourself even sicker, taking more time off work and increasing the stress levels you thought you were avoiding by continuing to work when you were unwell.

We can’t avoid some of the fear of ‘not working’ when we know we have a lot on our plates, but believe me when I say I speak from experience: giving yourself time to rest, recover and re-energise when you need it will make you stronger and more productive in the long run.

  1. Nothing too stressful: I love my job, but it’s the same as any other job when it comes to it’s everyday stresses and swings-and-roundabouts of challenges and successes. [↩]