The 14th & 15th; I somehow got lots of laughs.
The 14th of June.
My eyes have been fucking awful today. I can barely see what I'm writing. It's incredibly annoying.
When I got up, Daddy had gone on his driving fun morning, then Mommy decided to do the food shop, so I ended up on my own for the most part. I'd gone downstairs in my pyjamas, so after breakfast I went back up to get dressed, then do my core exercises. I had to move my yoga mat from Christine's room into mine because hers was full of washing that was drying and my lungs can't cope with the overpowering smell of washing powder.
This afternoon, Daddy returned, having had much fun on all the terrains. He had videos to show us but he had to get them off the memory card before we could watch them.
Becky came round with Harry, who was very chatty and showed off his talent for blowing raspberries and pretending he can stand up. After a little while, he got tired and shouty so had to be taken home, but while they were here, Becky and I were able to have a nice chat.
We have now watched Daddy's videos which confirm that Mommy and I were right not to go with him because we would have hated it. Driving on a sideways slope? No thank you.
The 15th of June.
Oh it's been such a lovely day. This morning we went to Aston Villa where the QE and BCH liver teams were celebrating their 5000th liver transplant! Getting in was a slight palaver because they hadn't got a great queueing or registration system, but once we got in we were fine. I was supposed to speak briefly during the last talk of the morning, but I noticed that they didn't have a ramp and if I had to climb the stairs, walk across the stage and then talk, I wouldn't be able to breathe. I found an organising woman, and we sorted it so I had a chair on the stage and I would go up at the same time as Lindsay (whose talk I was contributing to) and sit there trying to be inconspicuous with my blue hair and gold boots while she talked and I got my breath back.
The room filled up, and we sat through several talks: First, Mr. John Isaacs spoke about The Evolution of the Transplant Services and Its Milestones (which mentioned some of the people I've recently read about), Mr. Thamara Parera (who had performed three transplants in the past 24 hours) talked about The Future of Liver Transplantation at QEHB, which was mainly about the liver perfusion machine, then Dr. Matt Armstrong talked about trying to get patients as fit as possible before transplant. I remembered seeing him in CDU when he was just a reg and I had undiagnosed pneumonia. He's very memorable because he's incredibly attractive, like offensively so. After him, Prof. Deirdre Kelly (the Queen who took me on when there was no protocol to treat me) talked about Paediatric Liver Transplantation Through The Ages, then Dr. Indra van Mourik (who I remember clearing loads of dead tissue out of my stomach during my many endoscopies) spoke about Immunosuppression Through Time. Finally, it was time for Lindsay to talk about transitioning from child to adult services, which included me! I was last, after two girls who'd grown up with chronic liver disease so had a longer transition than mine, which was kind of forced because I had turned nineteen and they legally couldn't treat me at BCH any more. My talk was just about how easy my transition was, and I somehow got lots of laughs (I did make a good joke about how the team still consider me "young" at 28 which I like because according to Love Island I'm ancient) so I'm pretty confident it went well. Actually, I know it did because they then asked me to stay and do it again this afternoon!
Which is what we did. Thankfully we were only third in the order this time so we didn't have to stay until the very end. I saw Deirdre afterwards, and she hugged me and told me to stay well, and that she is always here for me, which I love. Philippa came out with us, and she said Deirdre found my talk really funny, which is amazing because Philippa's never heard her laugh before! We had a nice catch up, then it was time to go home.
Back in my armchair, I had some coffee and birthday cake, then spent my final afternoon with Fabio watching episodes 5 and 6 of Good Omens. He occasionally got a bit skittish but he was generally a lovely good boy and we had a lot of cuddles.
We had dinner, then Fabio's adopters came and we did that very quickly and easily. An empty nest once more!
