My brother took the day off to accompany me for the appointment, as I had decided to drive to the hospital once again. When we got there to outpatients we almost turned around. There was hardly a spare seat anywhere to be found. I turned out that there were four clinics on at the same time, which meant four of the doctors were running the clinics. The bottleneck however was in getting your bloods taken. My file was put on top of a large set of other files, and I thaught I'd be waiting a while, until I realised that there were two other piles just as high. We did consider leaving and rearranging the visit, but instead we went to wait outside in the park at the back of the hospital. That was after popping down to the radiology department to say hi, but only Steff was there, and she had a cold.

Anyway, after about an hour-and-a-half we called outpatients to find out how much longer we'd have to wait and found out that my bloods were due to be taken, so we returned to a much less packed waiting room. Unusually, soon after the bloods were taken we were seen by the doctor. Pretty routine except I noticed that my bloods had slipped a little when compared to the previous week. Although I was reassurred that variations do occur, I wasn't entirely convinced with the reasoning, particularly as in my experience the bloods usually dropped when there was a problem. Nonetheless, I thaught I'd wait until Tuesday when I'd find out my cyclosporine levels as they may point to the problem. As It turned out, my cyclosporine levels were 140, so right in the middle of the range in which case we'd just wait till the next appointment to see what the trend shows.

My haemaglobin was a little low, so a blood transfusion was set for the Thursday after which the hickman line would be removed. The low red cell count would explain the way I had felt for the last few days, which had been mostly quite lethargic. I have only recently started to feel about as active as I had done prior to my readmission back to hospital, so it has taken about three weeks to get myself back on track. I now know that alot of this is due to the daily walks I've had with my Mum. Exercising this way builds up your stamina and starts working the body gently but effectively.