July 2010

7 months post transplant

After my college friends left my sister and I had planned to have a few days camping. We set up the tent and went to see my brother who has a caravan nearby. We had a very sociable evening with him and his wife and their neighbours. My brother’s neighbour mentioned that hurricane winds were expected but we didn’t take much notice as the evening was so calm. When we returned to the tent around midnight we tightened guy lines just in case then went off to bed. However, sometime in the small hours the hurricane did arrive, complete with horizontal rain. Now there is something cosy about rain when you are wrapped up nice and warm in a tent but this was a bit different with the tent fabric blowing right on top of me. This was not a good sign. By 7 am I couldn’t bear it anymore and got up to discover that two, if not more, poles were broken. After vainly trying to rectify the situation we packed all our kit into the car and gathered up the tent as best we could in the howling wind. By this time we were soaked through so carried on to help some other people struggling with their tents. One couple in particular attracted our sympathy as they had two toddlers and a massive tent. We managed a cup of tea in the cooking shed which also contained another twenty people all in dripping waterproofs. That phase of weather passed through quite quickly but July continued to be unsettled.

Life continued with a lot of work put into the garden and leisure time spent on short (4miles) cycle trips. I also ventured into the sea accompanied by son number 2 who was back home to finish writing up his PhD. He was training for his first triathlon so we were hardly a matched pair – me swimming breaststroke sedately and slowly and him zooming up and down doing front crawl. I expected to be tired very quickly but found that I could swim continually for some time without a problem. We also went out climbing and although I was mainly top roping i.e. following my son, I was beginning to feel a bit more confident and thinking it would not be too long before I would attempt some more leading.

By mid month my cyclosporin was stopped completely with a view to having my first lymphocyte infusion in mid September.

I had another trip up to Scotland with a friend, staying in my brother’s caravan. We did a bit of cycling and walking and even managed a little bit of hill climbing though only to around 1000ft. but an achievement nonetheless . The going was very rough with no path and tussocky heather underfoot but the wonderful views made it worthwhile. We also managed a bit of running and speedy dry- stone- dyke- climbing when chased by a herd of bullocks! That wasn’t on the agenda but did keep us on our toes!

Towards the end of the month I went out with a friend to do some trad climbing at Swanage. This was a little more cerebral than the climbing I’d done since the transplant in that it involved choosing where to place gear and which gear to use rather than clipping into the insitu bolts. I started off top roping middling grade routes but by the end of the day we had upped the grades and I managed to lead a fairly respectable route so was very pleased with myself.