He's back

Hello everyone,

Just wanted to let you all know that I am still very much alive despite a few setbacks in recent times. I had decided that I would keep this Blog going on a monthly basis but I just looked at the clock and found it's been three months! No wonder I'm getting comments and emails.

I am not going to go on and on about my health issues. In fact I would need Janyne's input because I can't remember times and dates of all the hospital stays and clinic visits. Suffice to say that I have had bronchitis, pneumonia, and, more recently, a lung infection. To top things off, the hard drive on my laptop died just ten days before the expiry of the warranty period. (at least something went right).

The worst of this was that I had lost all of my data, email addresses, documents going back to the early nineties, financial records, photos, everything. Back-up? What's that? And only two weeks earlier I had asked Janyne if she had backed up the files on her computer. Talk about practising what I preach!

The computer repairman said he could send my old hard drive to Melbourne to see if they (HP) could recover some of the files but the minimum cost would be around $1,800 and with no guarantees.

So fortunately I have all the important paperwork on file just not in my laptop. The hard part is reconstructing my email address book. It is going to take a bit of time to fix that. Of course I could just wait for everyone to email me and file the sender's address in my address book!

On a sad note, one of our friends and a fellow transplantee passed away on the 3rd October, just short of five years since his single lung transplant. He had been ill for some time with issues probably more related to his medication than his lungs but eventually his body (and lung) couldn't cope with any more and it gave up. Only two weeks earlier I saw him in hospital whilst I was waiting for a CT scan when he was wheeled in before me with a gaggle of medicos from the ICU, tubes and drips everywhere. He recognised me and said hello and I responded with, "I'll catch you later". I couldn't visit him until he came out of ICU but did so on the Friday of my discharge as he had been transferred to a ward. I knew then that when I shook his hand and held his shoulder as one would when greeting a friend, it would be the last time I would see him.

He was only 52.

We all know that a lung transplant is not a cure, it simply prolongs life, but this incident, so close to us personally, really brought home the fact that we transplantees are here for a good time rather than a long time so make the best of it. Unfortunately most of us still need to concern ourselves with mundane matters such as worries about finances, concerns about our loved ones, family issues and the day to day activities that are simply a part of life. But we also need to work on the priorities and categorise those things about life that are most important to us.

So I'll leave it for now but I will be in touch again soon to provide all the nitty gritty about what's been happening over the past months.

Until then, goodbye.

Ben