My conscience is making me do this...

So I have been waiting for my transplant call for 46 days now, 45 night of going to bed with the phone. I’m seriously not expecting the phone to ring any time soon. My pulse doesn’t quicken with it lights up in the late hours of the night. My boyfriend lives across the ocean and sometimes forgets that a four hours time difference plus beer plus phone means awaking the dragon. I’m supposed to have a bag packed with some very specific things that I haven’t bothered to assemble. My friend sent me a suggested packing list and I’ve gone so far as to deleted the things on there that don’t apply to me. So that is progress but I’m more concerned with figuring out who is going to take care of my Gameboy when I’m incapacitated. IF YOU DON’T WATER THE FLOWERS EVERYDAY THEY DIE and then my neighbours will move out and cockroaches will infest my house. (Seriously, don’t start playing Animal Crossing, it will take over your life). THAT, I have taken care of, Lauren will do it. Phew. Who says that I’m not preparing for transplant?

I have a friend or two who are teeming with excitement at getting the call, who can’t wait and just want it to happen already. Personally, I’m cool with it taking a while. I have come a long way since I started this journey 21 months ago. I can now talk about transplants without bursting in to tears, I no longer think that it’s likely I won’t live through the surgery. That took about eight months. Hurray for personal growth. Now, I busy myself with worrying about the minutia – how I’m going to be able to deal with not being able to shower and wash my hair everyday while I’m all stapley and tubey and bedridden after surgery. Seriously, if I don’t get to shave things and shampoo and slap on a little mascara, I don’t feel like a human being. I worry about not being able to dress myself and wear a bra because of stitches and sternal precautions. I worry that I’ll get the one surgeon who does the incision that goes directly down the middle of my cleavage. My vanity is apparently an obstacle in my road to health. I make no apologies.

My goal is to get through this surgery and come out of it some super version of myself. A better version of me. Carly 2.0. I don’t want become afraid of the world because of being immunocompromised, I don’t want to become some inspirational poster-girl who climbs Mt. Kilimanjaro, I don’t want to find Jesus. I want to come out the other side as bitchy, sarcastic Carly, who can breathe like a normal person but takes a few more pills and just move forward.

Natalie is making me do this...

Apparently having a blog means that you’re expected to update the content more than once. This is really going to be a lot of work. I don’t know if I can handle the pressure. I’ve received more than a few harassing emails, telling me that they aren’t mad, just disappointed that I haven’t written more in my snarky pseudo-memoir of a life on hold.


Perhaps I should explain my blog title. “My regularly scheduled life...”

At one point, my big excuse for not starting a blog was that I didn’t have a snappy title. Great excuse. Then one day it came to me in a flash of inspiration and I thought that I was so unique and brilliant and it was going to be the launching pad for my intellectual musings that kept me busy during this whole transplant-thingy that I have going on. And then I googled it. Damn.

The internet can be such a self-esteem killer sometimes. I guess it’s a phrase that has been whispered into other’s ears by some shitty muse. Probably the same guy every time, recycling the same sentence because that’s as good as it gets for him. Damn, even my muse is lazy. It’s kind of like that time I thought I was extraordinarily brilliant when I came up with the idea for a Breathe tattoo, until I found out, four years after permanently scrawling it on my body that every damn CF kind with a hint of rebellion in their blood had the same killer idea. But regardless, I decided that I was cute and smart in my choice of title and I would go forward.

My regularly scheduled life is, I hope a fairly obvious play on “and now back to our regularly scheduled program.” It’s something anyone with a television has heard any time their favourite show gets interrupted by some obnoxious breaking news story or weather bulletin. It means that something that you were previously enjoying has been hijacked for some seemingly important but generally annoying reason that will soon pass and the show will go on. For the past year and three-quarters, my life has been commandeered by my need for second-hand lungs and the regular life of a 20-something year-old girl has been rudely put on hold. I was enjoying that life too, dammit.

Someday soon this adventure will be behind me and I can go back to my life, get a house, go to work, get a pet, go to movies, run errands without having to lug around extra equipment and just generally be free to re-enter society as a normal girl once again. By the time I’m ready, I will be in to my 30s. I guess we will return to my regularly scheduled life, already in progress.

Terilyn is making me do this...

Do you hear the trumpets sounding? 

Here it is, ladies and gentlemen, my long promised return to the world of writing. It's been a while, I've been busy, so very busy.  Doing nothing at all...

The reason why this has been such a long time coming, despite the oceans of time I've been wasting playing Gameboy and filling my valuable brain space with things I am ashamed to admit publicly that I have a vast knowledge of, is that just getting started on something is a dirty bitch.

See, right there, I used the term dirty bitch and I hesitiate, knowing that my eager audience is full of people who maybe are better of not knowing that such filth flies out of my mouth, although if I am completely honest with myself, people who have met me, know that my lack of filter doesn't lend well to having a distinct division between my 'outside thoughts' and 'inside thoughts.'

So there is big excuse #1, I'm unsure as to what tone my blog needs to express. To what degree do I dare unleash my inner thoughts. 

I have everyone from my very best friends to my extended family members to my health care professionals telling me that they're excited for me to start a blog, that it would be a positive use of my time, that I'm wasting my supposed 'talent' by  watching reruns of the Dog Whisperer instead of squishing my mind grapes into a juicy pulp of sarcastic prose to satisfy the secret voyeuristic needs of those bored at work. 

Big excuse #2 - I have no idea what theme I want my blog to adopt.

Let's be honest here, my life these days is so horribly dull. I'm a borderline recluse with no real hobbies of note. What makes me interesting these days is this whole transplant-thingy I have going on. Like any good recluse facing a challenge, I've scoured the interweb for information and other people on similar journeys to relate to and the one thing that is the most apparent to me is that the world needs another transplant blog like I need a carton of Marlborough Reds. 

An inspirational chronology of a life lived with chronic disease is not really my style.  

Big excuse #3 - too much damn pressure.

Thanks Kristin and Natalie and Terilyn and Julie and Harvey for making me feel like a teacher is expecting homework from me again. I had long forgotten the nauseating tension that comes from a looming deadline. 

Alright, so who is my audience? What is my message? What do I have to say?

Maybe I'll put off figuring that out until tomorrow.

Big excuse #4 - I'm horribly lazy...

Kristin is making me do this

KY: Would you like to dictate to me?
CS: I don't know what to say.
KY:Let's write it down like a script.
CS:Hee hee
See this is why I haven't started blogging. I have nothing to say. It's even weirder when I have a pocket stenographer on my bed
KY: I can't spell
CS: Spelling is important by the way. I'm a journalist, there's a lot of pressure for content and form and grammar.
KY: It's going well so far
CS: I hope you're writing that too. For the introductory blog you should introduce your theme to the world. And what are we trying to say? That Carly is bored. What do you expect to see when you log on to my blog when you're slacking at work.  What do you hope to see?
KY:An acidic tongue. Acerbic wit.
CS: I hope the blog has a spell check feature.
KY: We'll fix it before it's published