After a while, survival is just another habit.
I haven’t been keeping this blog up for a while, at least for the purpose I originally created it.
I have a rainbow of reasons why: not wanting to bore my few readers with constant whines about my annoyingly dramatic health, a deep dislike of hypochondria, wanting to forget everything about the last seven years on the good days, struggling to stay intact during the bad ones with no energy left over to do anything except to fight and try to figure out what the latest complication meant.
One week and I mark my biological birthday. One month and it will be seven years since the transplant. "It is amazing – way beyond amazing – that you have survived so long!" A dear friend said to me this morning. She is a highly trained and regarded nurse; she knows of what she speaks. I know she didn’t mean the statement to be as bald as it sounded, but there it is: truth, unvarnished.
About a year ago I started a post about the shock of surviving six years. "I don’t know how to write about this," I whined then proceeded to list the complications and conditions and disasters and few triumphs since I first lamented the knife. I hated the whine so I abandoned it.
For the last year, certainly since the beginning of 2013, the problems of these seven extra years of life have started to rear up, first one after the other, now cascading, and are threatening to sideline me from the game of life, perhaps pull me from the game for good. I face this challenge weaker and wearier, and struggling to shore up my will for what is likely to be my penultimate fight for life. At least I hope it will be the second to last; we’ll see.
So I will be writing here more regularly, posting next the distressing list of things I am coping with now, and talking about the last-gasp treatments that are on their way. If you don’t hear from me for a bit, send a note to remind me of this promise.