The live register and dialysis

Recession has hit my treatment.

Baxter – they who are in the business of Brendans - is to cut loose almost 200 of its workers from one of its Irish factories.

This particular Baxter factory is local to my house. It was one of those brand names that popped up in my vocabulary when I was a child, and stuck there by virtue of its omnipresence in the life of the village, the town, the county.

Half the kids in school had a parent who worked there; everyone had an older sibling who got a summer job there at one point or another.

With sickness, and my starting on dialysis, I took some vague comfort from the economic symmetry I could see in my plight.

The factory that had provided employment in abundance for the community into which I was born was now supplying me with a lifeline to prevent me from dying.

Supporting local industry.

Now the factory is in trouble, itself on a life support of sorts, a good wallop of its workers preparing for unemployment.

As I have driven past Baxter over the last two years, I have often seen them coming and going from their shifts and I have wondered how much they ever consider the work they do, how aware they are of the difference their product has on the lives of people like me.

Now, after years and possibly decades of that work, they are facing their own problem in the shape of a different type of uncertainty to the uncertainty that lies before dialysis patients.

They may have children and health problems of their own and little hope of alternative employment on this side of the country that does economic depression better than others.

I wish them all well. My future lies in the hands of some soon-to-be bereaved family and surgeons; theirs lie in the hands of economic forces and the government.

One would have to say that optimism lies more realistically and comfortably with the former.

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Some thoughts on Beaumont

It feels, in some ways, as though I’ve been adopted by a family, but they forgot to come and collect me at the orphanage.

Or as though I have been injured somewhere along the journey to the summit of Mount Everest. I have put the call for help in and I know it has been received, but I don’t know if anyone is actually coming to get me.

It has been 14 months since I was granted an audience at the transplant unit at Beaumont Hospital. This was a formality. All my tests were complete, and the surgeon signed off with his esteemed opinion that I was fit and healthy (well, relatively). I was then officially pronounced “active” on the transplant list.

Since that day, nothing. Not a phone call, not a Christmas card, no general mail-shot from the hospital, no text to assure me my name is still in their files somewhere.

This irritates me greatly. I know they communicate with my medical people every month and I know that my bloods are sent to Beaumont every three months for regular testing for antibodies.

But the communication I crave is something more direct. A line between patient and transplant coordinator. I know they have bigger things to worry about in the immediate activity of a busy hospital ward, but still, a little initiative for the hundreds of people on the transplant list would not be difficult to arrange.

An emailed newsletter every quarter, perhaps; an update on how many transplants they have carried out recently; any indication to the patient that there is a whole hive of life-saving activity ongoing in that unit and that you will eventually have your turn to benefit from it.

I know some of you will be thinking ‘why doesn’t she tell this to someone who can do something about it’. I have. I mentioned it to one of my consultants some time ago and he agreed to bring it to the attention of his colleagues in Beaumont.

This is the Irish health service however. Therefore, the best I can hope for is that some action might be taken in the next decade.

I will most likely require a second transplant in my lifetime. Maybe by then, Beaumont will have an app for the futuristic version of the iPhone, sending an alert every time an organ is donated.

Then, that phrase I used to rhyme off when I was young would make a new kind of sense.

"Every time a bell rings, another angel gets its wings".

For trivia kicks, name the film in which that line appears...

That's right. It's a Wonderful Life.