A Long December…

… and there’s reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last…

Every December I make it my mission to quote the Counting Crows’ Long December at least once. Sometimes I quote it twice, and last year? At least three times – and not just because I was particularly bad at titling my blog posts last year, either (although that was also the case). Last December was a particularly long one, filled, as it was with “the smell of hospitals in winter/ and the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters with no pearls”. Last year, though, was also the first time that the hope expressed in that song (which I can now hardly listen to, by the way), actually came true. This year actually was better than the last, and it’s all because of the events of December 15th, 2005: T-Day.

Today is the one year anniversary of Terry’s transplant. It’s the three year anniversary of our engagement. It’s Terry’s Name Day, in Greece. (It’s also the day Dylan and Skye got engaged in Neighbours, but honestly? I don’t think that’s going to last, personally.). A big, important day, then. A T-Day, if you will. This time last year, Terry was still in theatre (that’s the operating theatre, by the way – he wasn’t treading the boards), and I was still sitting in the reception of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, staring at that scuffed bit on the toe of my boot and hoping I wouldn’t throw up. (Note to self: get boots fixed, because, seriously, Amber, that’s been a YEAR now already…)

But now here we are, 12 months later, and the thing that amazes me most is how quickly I stopped thinking about it. For maybe three or four weeks I’d wake up on dialysis mornings and remember with a jolt that dialysis was no longer part of our lives. Only three or four weeks to wipe out two years of habit, and after that the “new life” we’d been looking forward to became simply “life”, and things were back to normal. Just like that.

It took much longer to shake that feeling of being somehow “other” that we’d carried around with us for two years. To be able to go out for dinner with friends, or bump into acquaintances, and not see that look of pity cross their faces as they asked how we were, and was there any news about the transplant? It took a while to feel that we were truly back to “normal”. Even now I’ll be out walking the dog, or filling up the car, or mowing the lawn, and I’ll be suddenly filled with this feeling of inexplicable joy. It always takes me a few seconds to identify just what it is, and why I’m feeling it, and then it will hit me: this is what “normal” feels like. This is how people feel when there’s nothing in particular to worry about. Wow, again.

I never want that feeling to go away. Twelve months ago today, I sat on that chair in the hospital reception area, and while I made all of those deals with a God I don’t believe in, the main thought going through my mind was that if you just let this work out OK I will never take normality for granted ever again. Because this “normality”? It terrifies me. It’s a pretty fragile normality. It feels like it could fall and shatter at any second, and I’ve always said, there’s nothing more terrifying than hope.

I hope that this first year is just the start of many more months of normality. I hope I get to feel that burst of “hey! There’s nothing wrong right now!” happiness at least a few more times before we’re done. I hope I never forget what December 15th, 2005 felt like – and how much better things are one year on.

Happy T-Day, Terry. Don’t order the steak when I take you to dinner tonight to celebrate…