Perhaps the title of this piece should be "let the good times roll" - the last 10-14 days have been the best spell I've had since the transplant last July - the anaemia has definitely gone - the erythropoietin injections have worked a treat, I can definitely recommend them! The recurrent septicaemia is in abeyance presumably because of the change of prophylactic antibiotics and my weight has been creeping up.
The new foam treatment is easy to administer and is not causing any problems. Compared to ECP it's a doddle. It is hard to know if it is helping since I was already feeling quite a lot better before starting. It certainly isn't hindering my progress.
Karine and I had a lovely time last week. It was our 35th wedding anniversary and we managed to celebrate it properly with a meal in a bar/brasserie in Gunthorpe just outside Nottingham. This was rather different to last year when we 'celebrated' in a tiny dark isolation room in hospital - dark because of the scaffolding and plastic covering outside the window.
Unfortunately later in the week I had a birthday - just what I needed! - something to remind me that I'm getting older! The Beatles even wrote a song about this particular birthday just to rub the point in! We had a barbecue at home with friends and neighbours and the sun shone on us. During the afternoon we played petanque on the lawn and Karine managed to step backwards and end up sitting in Eden's paddling pool - which was funny at the time but the next day her neck and shoulder started playing up.
We have managed several walks recently most notably a walk around the village of Epperstone east of Nottingham.
At the beginning of this week we were taken by some good friends to Lea gardens in south Derbyshire. The garden is huge and is full of Azaleas and Rhododendrons which have just started to come into full bloom. We then walked down the hillside through some lovely bluebell woods into the Derwent valley and finished off having a pub lunch - perfect.
Today we are off up to Derbyshire to meet my sister (and donor!) and brother-in-law, Mike, to do a walk from a little village called Sheldon back to Great Longstone. This is part of a circular twenty mile walk which starts at Longstone and heads down through Chatsworth to Rowsley and Birchover and then back north again past Robin Hood's Stride and to the west of Bakewell to Sheldon and Longstone. Lucy and Mike are proposing that we do this as a two day walk over a weekend in mid-September which would allow other people to dip in and out as they wished. More details of that anon.
* Led Zeppelin - The opening line of the first track on their first album
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