Comparing photos

With the posting I made yesterday, there is a photo of me taken by one of the nurses on the dialysis staff at the Alkmaar hospital. It was taken either at my first or second session of dialysis in January last year. Now here’s the second photo taken under similar circumstances, made today by Nancy when she dropped in for a visit. I’m using a newer dialysis machine but the main thing, Anne observes, is that I look like dialysis isn’t so strange an event in my life. After approximately 270 sessions of dialysis, indeed it has become, if never exactly normal, at least something I have adjusted to.

What neither photo shows is how I have used the time on dialysis. In those early months I mainly watched films, using a small DVD player that had been my Christmas present. But then I discovered that, with care, I could do more with my left arm -- the arm in which the two needles are inserted -- and so began to use the hours for reading, and since then have done as much reading in a month as I might have done in three or four months in the past. It’s an aspect of dialysis I will miss (assuming the transplant goes well). Today’s reading was chiefly a Dorothy Sayers’s classic mystery novel, Murder Must Advertise, a book that is as much a spoof of the advertising industry as it is about a crime to be solved. The DVD player has been passed on to Anne...