Well I've officially returned to full time work, and can now draw a line under the long recovery period that began last year. It's been a long time coming, but I've been fortunate to have had a lot of support from work, and therefore no pressure at all to get back to working full time, so I've made the most of my time. You do realise how precious time is, and in a way that makes it a bit more difficult to accept going back to the normal routine of working life. However, despite the idyllic lifestyle that I've been lucky to experience for the last several months, there's no escaping the fact that you've got to face your responsibilities and earn your crust. There are ways of adopting your 'new' found philosophies in to your routine, but you still have to just get back to what you did before.

The transplant seems like such a far cry now, that I can now understand how other patients' recollections of the event become patchy in due course. I'm not sure if this is a subconscious process, but I realise how much I've already forgotten each time I read through my diary entries.

With the return to work, I can now get on and make plans with my life, which was something I felt I wasn't able to do whilst still working on a part-time basis. At work, I keep forgetting that I've been away for over twelve months, because when I think back to last year, I don't think of the transplant and recovery period, I keep thinking about what I was working on the year before that!

I found the return to work a little daunting at first, partly due to the high expectations that I was imposing on myself, but also due to the great time I'd spent in the UAE over Christmas and Jan/Feb. The period when I was working part-time was the worst, as I felt stuck in the middle between having no proper direction at work, and less time to myself at home. I'm sure this was in large part as a result of the dependence and support of others that I've had for such a long time. I felt the need to get my teeth into a new challenge, as I've been feeling a sense of loss in direction following my return to work.

During the last year, my goals were to make it through the transplant and recover. Now that on the large part that has been achieved, I have been sensing the lack of a new goal. It may sound strange, but having made it this far, I'm now thinking "What next?". I know that I'm still not clinically cured due to the on going treatment with the DLI, (although mentally I feel cured) but apart from that, life is back 100% to normal. In the meantime, I've still got to focus on ensuring the last remnants of the disease are eradicated by the DLI treatment.