Organ donation

Has it made you look at life differently?

Yes. Yes, definitely. I think partly because I’ve never had more than a week off at a time. I’ve had two weeks sometimes, but this’ll be nearly two months. And it’s made me realise how there’s more to my life than just work. I felt I was my work to an extent, and I realise now I’m not. There is life outside work. I’m much more self-sufficient that I thought I was. People need me more than I thought they did, which is lovely.

Yes, but it’s, I just sit, things that were important, aren’t so important now. I popped back into work. I had to. I didn’t want to go, and immediately got my ears bent with the usual moaning about all the problems at work. I thought there’s more important things in life than whinging on about your hours have been changed or something. I’ve really made a difference to someone’s life and that’s fantastic. And that’s much more important than day to day niggles. Yes, so that has made a difference to my life. Yes. Which I didn’t expect at all. I just expected to carry on.

It’s a new beginning really. This is the Clare post-transplant. So my life has been the depressed alcoholic, anorexic mess. To changing that which has been a long process, coping with that, still having self-doubt issues, still not really feeling perhaps right with myself, to the third stage which is just starting now that, “Yes, I’ve put things right.” I’ve done something positive and, from now on, I will go on in the third stage of my life.
 

At first, in the hospital, we were both completely different characters. I’d got my Irish personality, very talky. He’s Dutch, quite reserved. So there was a kind of, almost a getting to know each other on another level because this was a kind of an intimacy that we were thrown into, that maybe we hadn’t taken account for. Because once we stopped working together, it had been quite a few years gap actually. And I might come out to go out to the Greek islands and spend some time with him, and he’d be off and be working. And I would see him for a coffee or a beer or something. But I didn’t really spend a lot of time with him. He’s a bit of a private person actually, if I’m honest.

After the operation I was visiting in his room, and we were chatting a little bit. He was quite fragile because he was still on a lot of machines it seemed. Where I was actually off more or less. I had the drip for a while and then that was taken away. I can’t remember the days, two or three days after. You can move around with that anyway.

When he came home that was the real problem. Because he went into some kind of internal low period for whatever reason. Even to this day I think that he was affected in ways that he couldn’t understand. And he found it hard to communicate about them. When we discuss it now he says that he thinks it was the effect of the medication, because he was taking a lot of pills, like about thirty or forty pills. I can’t remember.

So we went through quite a difficult period. Because I’m Irish, I wanted to talk, he’s not talking. There’s no one else, so that was very hard. I found it very difficult. So there was a bit of a strain on our relationship, in terms of it getting kind of, I think it was just that particular circumstance.

Then that November he came to England and he was on terrific form. We just got on so well, stayed where I lived, stayed with me for three or four days. And we had a great time. We really had a fantastic time.  

And then I went the following year. On the anniversary I went to Holland, where I stayed with him and I had a lovely, lovely time. But our friendship entered a new phase and it’s been growing ever since really.

He’s obviously, in a sense he’s a less demonstrative kind of person emotionally, where I’m quite the opposite. But he’s a very special person and I think that was the feeling also why I decided to do it. I saw this person as being somebody quite incredible. And it was shocking to see him so ill, to the point where he was now on dialysis. His life was probably going to be shortened, you know. So yes, the relationship is growing in a completely different way now and whenever I go to Greece now, he completely looks after me. Completely.