Another Letter to Ali (Hepatitis C / Liver Transplant & Biopsy (Hep C) HCV Blog)

I thought I would share this letter that I sent to Ali and readers of this blog will know this is not the first time I have posted our letters here.
Ali's a good friend of mine whom I've known since way back when, through good times and bad. I sometimes wish I was as good a friend to her as she has always been for me and even though we are now many miles and countries apart, she continues to support me in so many ways.

Dear Ali, How are you and how is beautiful Chamonix?
Well, I finally managed to track down my HepC nurse at our local hospital and after badgering her a bit (It has been nearly a month and a half since St Jimmy's handed me over to them to start my treatment) I finally got a date from her for the start of my treatment... I think.
Friday 6th May is when I'll be going to see them to start treatment. Apparently she's been having to study the protocol for dealing with transplant patients as she's never dealt with one before.... Yikes!!
I'm sure it will be OK and she will be in regular touch with my doctors at Jimmy's and I'll be very closely monitored. You know my old saying "It'll be all-right!!!"

Thank-you to you and Mo for doing the healing meditations, I can't believe how well they've worked. I know you think Benny would frown on spiritual meditation as "a load of bollocks and all that" (and at one time I would've been right there with him) but if he ever needed proof that it works then he needn't look any further.

It really has lifted me in my mind and I feel physically better than I have done for a long time and don't just take my word for it, even Mandy's amazed. And Mandy is not a spiritual believer in the way we are but she can't believe the change in me.

I've also had Jenny saying Buddhist 'chants' or prayers for me as apparently shes quite into that, It was great to see her again and she hasn't changed a bit, the rotten cow!
Anyway, it was quite interesting hearing her talking about her religion but I don't think I could ever embrace it in it's entirety but as with the spiritual meditations, I think there must be something to it. 
I've been looking into meditation quite a bit anyway after our success with it. I certainly haven't 'found God'  or 'seen the light' yet but Jenn probably put it right when she said "I think they're all paths to the same thing" and essentially I think shes probably right.

I'm not sure if, since we started the meditation, everything is going exactly to plan (far from it sometimes) but I certainly feel like I'm coping with it a lot better.
I'm better at dealing with the fear of the unknown so much better now and that's got to be a good thing. I've certainly had plenty of that in the last couple of years. 
But although the fear never quite goes away entirely, it just feels like I've got a kind of scary, hairy creature thumping around inside me all the time at the back of my mind.
It's all the things that have haunted me and now I no longer see 'it' staring me in the face. But sometimes I can hear it moving around and I can hear it's breathing and grunting somewhere way back in the darkness of my mind where I have put it and I just have to tell myself that it cant hurt me anymore because it's locked up in it's cage back there.
And then I try and think back to the meditations and I can feel it getting further and further away, like I'm walking out from a dark passage where it lives and out into the light where you and Mo are and all the other people who are fighting this thing with me. I can hear their voices and see their smiles and feel the warmth and the safety and then I'm back, and that's it - life can go on again without all that weight on me.

I'm so glad we spoke on the phone when we did, I was pretty low at that point, as anyone who's had or has this virus knows, you get good days and some very bad. It's difficult to explain to people, now that I've recovered from the transplant op and you look okay on the outside and some days you feel okay too, and then others when you can't get out of bed because you feel so fatigued or you just can't face the world and are in a place that I though I would never go. I suppose people will have to live and learn as I have had to.

OK chicken, I'll get off, write me back soon and I guess we'll both keep looking out for each other.

Take care.... Rio xx