“I’m beginning to feel my old self”

Nancy is too much in the white water of her voyage with Harry Potter and company (she has started the next-to-last volume) to do a posting today, so let me try to fill her shoes.

When she got out of bed this morning, having stood up, she was astonished to realize that, for the first time since the transplant, she had done so without having to take her healing abdomen into account. “You know,” she said, “I think I’m beginning to feel my old self.”

She even decided to do a little administrative work, putting together some papers that needed sending to our health insurance company, and also working on getting some of the documents we still need to obtain from the US in our quest to arrange for Nancy’s mother, Lorraine, the right to live with us in Holland.

Nancy also wrote a posting to the web site discussion area of the country’s leading newspaper, the NCR Handelsblad, on the topic of what the country could do to increase the rate of live kidney donations. (I will leave it to Nancy to share her ideas, perhaps in her next blog posting.)

We’re still on a somewhat minimalistic kitchen setting. Breakfast and lunch present no great challenge. As for supper, Anne picks up ready-to-heat meals at a nearby supermarket. It’s not quite home cooking but not bad and surely it keeps us going.

Having used up the medicine kit the AMC provided me with on discharge so that I could make it through till Tuesday, I had the small drama this morning of discovering that one of the anti-rejection drugs I am supposed to take every day at 8 a.m. had not been included in the large package the pharmacy put together. As taking the drugs on time is a high priority for anyone living with a transplanted kidney, I hurried over to the nearly pharmacy. They checked their files, found that the drug in question had been left off the list the AMC had provided them with, called the AMC, and within a short time I was home again with the particular drug I needed. (Let me mention that in Holland one rarely has to pay for anything obtained at the pharmacy. No need to bring your wallet. Payment is made by one’s health insurance company.)

In addition to various pills, throughout the month of November I’m taking two injections of blood thinners each day. I didn’t do a very good job with this morning’s injection in my right leg and as a consequence spent a good part of the day finding walking painful. Largely confined to my living room chair, it became a day of concentrated effort to catch up with all the e-mail that piled up these last two weeks or so.

We had the good news today from St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press that my next children’s book is on their publication calendar for 2008. It’s about Saint George and the dragon, a legend that uses spectacular symbols to amplify what actually happened in the life of this martyr of the early third century. The signed contract will be in the mail tomorrow morning.

Best for last: Our beloved Beckett, a cat who looks like a miniature panther and who from time to goes off on great expeditions, returned last after a week in remote parts of darkest Alkmaar. We were overjoyed to see him. Throughout the day, he has been given us an excellent example of what real resting looks like.

(Photo taken last Friday morning at the AMC of my medicine list and schedule and their storage system.)