The last post & a familiar chorus

I am two years on dialysis today. I wish it was winter, because it is the kind of anniversary that I would like to cloak in darkness. I would rather not have opened the curtains today.

The most relevant statistics now stand as follows:

There have been 728 nights of dialysis (two nights off, with permission from my consultant).

That amounts to 5,824 hours of being attached by a line that runs from my tummy to my machine.

Or 242 full days.

I have carried 1,092 litres of dialysis fluid around in my tummy throughout the daytime hours, and by night a total of 8,736 litres have flowed in and out of my abdomen.

I have gone through (and duly recycled) roughly 3,504 cardboard boxes.

I have taken about 8,000 tablets and 30 energy injections.

I have disposed of about 200 bags of hazardous medical waste.

I have spent 0 nights in hospital

I have now been on the transplant list for 22 months.

The average wait for a new kidney is now something like four years.

Now for the really bad news (not really, really). I have decided to stop writing this blog. I didn’t envisage two years of this when I started, and now there is the fear that I will start to repeat myself, because when you re-live the same routine day in, day out, you inevitably return to the same gripes. There is nothing worse than a writer who recycles old metaphors.

I realise I may be doing a disservice to the few people who read Limbo on a regular basis, and who have hung on in there, waiting for the glad tidings of a new kidney.

To those followers, I offer my sincere apologies, but I also advise that in a few months’ time, if I ever cross your mind, that you imagine me, post-transplant, on a beach somewhere - albeit covered from head to toe in Factor 50 - but sipping some exotic cocktail, and enjoying my freedom, released from the infernal groundhog day that is peritoneal dialysis.

Regina xxoxx