It's been ten days since I last wrote one of these. Ten days is a long gap by my standards over the last few months, and I think that gap actually tells its own story. When there's less to write about, less drama to process, that's usually a sign things are going alright. Someone said something similar to me recently — that they hadn't heard much from me, which probably meant things were good. There's some real truth in that.
So — what have the last ten days actually looked like? A mix, honestly. Mostly positive. A bit of normality, which I've been craving more than almost anything else. And one small step backwards that turned out to be a step forwards in disguise.
Getting back to something normal
The biggest thing, and the thing I want to lead with, is that I've managed to get back to work. From home, in manageable chunks, but properly back in the swing of things — productive, useful, contributing. It's been genuinely lovely. I think normality gets undersold. When you're stripped of it for weeks at a time, you realise how much you actually want the boring, ordinary stuff back — a working day, a sense of purpose, the small satisfaction of getting things done. That's exactly where I want to be right now, and these last ten days have given me a real taste of it.
I've been back out at Dale Park Rangers training too. Normal life, reassembling itself piece by piece.
Then Tuesday's bloods threw up a curveball
Right in the middle of all that steady progress, a routine blood test on Tuesday showed high calcium again — the same issue that tangled itself up with the colitis a few weeks back. This time it came from absolutely nowhere. I'd been feeling well. No symptoms at all. And yet there I was, told to get myself into the acute assessment unit and toxicity clinic first thing the next morning.
I'll admit that felt like a step backwards in the moment. You build up a run of good days and then a number on a printout pulls you straight back into hospital corridors.
Except — when I actually got there, it turned out to be far less dramatic than it sounded. A drip. A slight tweak to medication. And a new referral to the eye clinic, which is actually something I'm genuinely glad about, because my eyesight has been quietly frustrating me for a while now and I hadn't had anyone properly look into why. So instead of being purely a setback, Tuesday turned into a bit of progress dressed up as a problem — new appointments, a clearer plan, and someone finally going to look properly at the blurriness rather than everyone (me included) just shrugging and blaming the steroids.
Where that leaves things
Calcium being watched, steroids continuing to come down, an eye clinic appointment to look forward to, and — best of all — ten days where there genuinely wasn't very much to report. I'll happily take more chapters like this one.
