Day +17, today is exactly four weeks since I was admitted into hospital, and here I am writing my blog post from home. Who would have thought that I will be home before the New Year? My blood counts continue to rise; wcc now at 3.4 (range: 3.5-11), neuts 2.5 (range: 2-8), plts 175 (range: 150-400) & hb 10.7 (range: 13-17). We are close to hitting the normal range on all fronts and this is an amazing result. However, because I am on cyclosporin, an immune suppression drug, I will still be prone to infection. Cyclosporin is there to prevent the Graft-versus-host disease.
Spent last night in a ward with two other female patients. One patient was very confused (I only found this out later) and kept calling people on her mobile phone at all hours of the night. Moving from a lovely isolated room with its own shower and toilet into an open ward was a shock to the system. The good news is that I get to sleep at home tonight and hopefully they will discharge me tomorrow. The only spanner in the works is that my creatinine levels are high. This is a side effect of the drugs and I am probably not drinking enough water to flush this out of the system.
I called my post, glass half empty. This is because I may be a ‘glass half empty’ man. In spite of talking about ‘celebrate success’ I was not happy about leaving my cozy secure environment into an open ward. Yesterday was a day to celebrate. I was at home for dinner after over 3 weeks in an isolated room and Sri Lanka won a test match in South Africa for the first time. We had some family time together playing a board game. However, moving out of the room managed to dampen the spirits. Talk is cheap they say and how true this was in my case. Instead of celebrating success, I was focusing on one minor setback. Instead of the glass being three quarters full, it was half empty for me! In hindsight, moving out of my secure room was good. It would have been difficult to come home directly from my secure environment. Lesson learnt, ‘don’t let a small set back stop celebrating success’.
We are playing scrabble this evening and it looks like I will beat our local scrabble champion Amal today! But just like a good test match, the tables can change at any time.
That’s all for now folks!
1 reply on “Update Day +17: A Glass Half Empty”
Counting your chickens before they hatched here – maybe it would have been best to have maintained a “glass half full” approach to Scrabble Mr Third Place Perera!