Meeting Henry

I have to admit, organ donation is something that I know very little about. Even though I’m on the donor register, and have been for some years, I hadn’t really thought about where my bits might be going. Yes, I’ve promised any part of me that medical staff might want, but frankly, I’d hoped I wouldn’t know anything about it once they got my hands on me.
So, it was with much interest and not a little awe that I met with Henry Kimbell, a genuine, bona-fide kidney transplant recipient. This brilliant bloke popped into the office to chat about his experiences, and why he is passionate enough about the cause to organise an evening dedicated to telling others about it.
Henry explained to me that he has Dents disease, a rare illness that causes a build up of calcium in the kidneys that leads to deteriorated function. The disease is found in x chromosomes and so comes from a female carrier, Henry’s mother in this case, but shows in males.
‘I’d always had regular doctors visits to check my how my kidneys were functioning’, Henry explained, ‘but by the time I was 17, it had dropped from 40% to only 14% in the space of 18 months.’
‘I was doing my A levels at the time, so had to chose between having a transplant then or being on dialysis and having a transplant later. I chose to finish my year at school, although I had to have dialysis 3 or 4 times a day, and then had my transplant on the 17th of September 2004.’
‘My Dad was the donor, so on the day itself I was worried about him, but I think the whole experience has made him understand the condition better. The operation went ok, and I was put on immunosuppressant drugs so that my body could adjust to the new organ.’
‘It took me about a year to get back to normal, but I feel very lucky. I’d like to try and do what I can to help people who are less fortunate: I had my family around me and I had a living donor which made the situation that bit easier.’
‘There’s a misconception about organ donation that you have to give something whilst you’re still alive, and this simply isn’t the case. I hope that by listening to me talk people will have a better understanding about what organ donation involves.’
Henry has planned a free evening event dedicated to educating students about the intricacies of organ donation where both he and his Dad will talk about their experiences. There will also be two doctors from Guys Hospital London speaking: Lisa Burnatt, the living transplant coordinator, and Francis Calder, a surgeon, and the audience will have a chance to ask questions.
This evening will also include a raffle to raise money for the National Kidney Federation, and there will be a free bar. Seriously, this guy means business.
I have so much respect for a person who can talk about something like this with such breath-taking honesty. Henry explained to me that the kidney that he has now may last him for the next 10 years if he’s lucky, but he will have to have another transplant at some point. That kind of grim determination is truly inspiring, but Henry seems to take it all in his stride.
‘I met a lot of interesting people on the way,’ he told me ‘and in a way I’m glad I was exposed to it. You just do what you’ve got to do really.’

Lessing - a women's woman?

This week I have mostly been reading… Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. And it’s nothing if not a good door stop. At 575 pages (in my edition at any rate) it’s a whopper of a read, and certainly not one to be undertaken if you’re feeling even a little bit sleepy. That said, it has to be one of my favourite novels; apparently it’s one of Barack Obama’s too, which gives me a certain feeling of superiority when ploughing through its complex narrative layers.

The book’s intricate structure is one of its most original features. The central character, Anna Wulf – single mother, political activist and writer with writer’s block - documents her life in a series of four notebooks. First, the black notebook, written about her experiences living in Africa as World War II began, the events of which inspire a best-selling novel whose royalties she lives off; second, the red notebook, which discusses her involvement with the Communist party and her political life; third, the yellow notebook, which is her ongoing work on a story with its own plot and characters; and finally the blue notebook which serves as a diary for her personal thoughts. These sections are interspersed by sections called ‘Free Women’ (an irony in itself), and it only becomes clear at the end that these parts too are Anna’s voice. The four notebooks are finally brought together in the golden notebook.

Sounds complicated? It is. I found myself constantly referring to previous notebooks in order to work out what was going on. Fortunately, Lessing flawlessly links the different aspects of Anna’s life and presents them as both complimenting and conflicting each other. The entire novel is framed by an undertone of Anna’s dubious sanity, and her visits to her analyst, Mother Sugar, reveal deep-seated problems. Whilst many see The Golden Notebook as a feminist work, there are many aspects of it that are not particularly female-based. There is a very political message too, and Anna’s decision to leave The Party towards the end of the novel symbolises the collapse of the Left at this time. Yes, there are women musing about needing a man, but this shouldn’t be off-putting to any male readers. Lessing’s stark, shocking writing about confronting yourself will appeal to anyone.

This is arguably Lessing’s most revered work, and rightly so. Its dealing with feminine domesticity leading to madness was seen as incredibly revolutionary when it was published in 1962, not to mention Lessing’s almost blasé referencing of periods and the female orgasm at a time when such subjects were taboo. The novel gives a real sense of the political movement in 1950s Britain, along with a brief glimpse of Central Africa in the Forties. Time, place and mood are effortlessly captured, and Anna’s observations of those around her open a reader’s eyes to inevitable social flaws present in all of us. Her destructive relationships finally culminate in her meeting Saul Green, an American with more than a few problems of his own…

It’s very difficult to write a convincing review of such a book in anything less than several thousand words. The Golden Notebook is a marathon of sex, insanity, motherhood, friendships, attempted suicide, an alcoholic wife, war, politics and growing up. I’d thoroughly recommend it, but put aside a week.

And so the time has come for me to tackle my dissertation. Ah, the library. That mythical place that only third years and nutters venture has become my new home. Today, armed with a cheese sandwich and a Thermos of tea (all things are better with tea) I trudged up the hill and plonked myself in a corner. Having sufficiently spread out my books, pens, lunch etc I got to it.

The truth is, I'm really very interested in what I'm writing on. Despite this being only my third post, you may have noticed that I love women's writing. Indeed, how could I be a women who writes without having some admiration for those who came before me. So I spent my afternoon trawling through media archives trying to find reviews or comments on some of the most influential female authors of the last 50 years.

I love channelling the geek in me, and this project has enabled me not only to look at book reviews (brilliant), but also newspapers. My inner journalist practically salivated at the thought of reading examples of work that actually made the public think about certain books in certain ways. The media's grip on society is fascinating in a scary way - reviews of book, films and the like really do influence the way we read or watch them.

To think I want to be a part of that!

Special, the various connotations

Today I have been reading Gertrude Stein. Or rather, I did an extra shift at work (bah, student debt) and grappled with Stein in my lunchbreak. How civilised.

For those of you who haven't encountered this woman, and I hadn't until I was forced to today, her poetry is not what one might call conventional. Initially, I revelled in this fact. To go off on a slight tangent, my lovely boyfriend cooked me a wonderful, romantic dinner on Saturday night, and made me feel thoroughly special. When I mentioned this, he laughed, and told me that I was indeed, extremely special. Whilst he might have been imagining the 'special needs' side of my personality, I delight in not being normal. Not in a weird way, I hope, but in a kooky, try-something-different, be-your-own-woman kind of way.

And so, Stein. Ok, she doesn't follow the expected form, and her poems don't always make a lot of sense, but that doesn't stop them being stunning: even if people don't do exactly what you'd expect, and you don't understand why they do some of those things, it doesn't mean they aren't uniquely beautiful. Stein's poems when read aloud have an amazing aural quality that I have seldom experienced. The words simply flow through you as you read, and it's less about understanding the words as a whole, but feeling each syllable as you form it in your mouth...

But, of course, I have to talk about this in a seminar in 12 hours time without resorting to some over-simplified rant about how everyone is special in their own right. Yes, I love that Stein is different, but let's not lie, I've got to write an essay on it now, and to do that, I feel like I should try and understand it. Rrrrubbish.

Blogging - a worrier's thoughts

So, I thought to myself, the best way to get my thoughts out of my head (so dangerous to keep them in there with work due) and to share them with a vast, potentially faceless, community is to set up a blog.

Articulating ones thoughts is therapeutic, cathartic, but almost certainly narcissistic, surely? My dissertation for my final year centres around women's diaries: it seems that for hundreds of years people have been recording their thoughts in this deeply personal way. Who hasn't read Samuel Pepys, Anne Frank, Virginia Woolf and thought 'wow, that's a real insight into that time, or place, or situation'.

Diaries seem to have become, at least in the minds of many critics, a women's medium. The feminist within me argues that this is because is a wholly patriarchal literary world, it is one of the few openings for personal thought that women have left. I don't know how I'm going to dispel or argue this in 8000 words that will hopefully cement my first, but we'll see. Our fascination for exploring the lives of others is apparent through the popularity of novel such as Fielding's Bridget Jones' Diary, a personal favourite, not least because I can see some of myself in the hapless, hopeless central character. Of course, this was entirely Fielding's intention: Bridge (we're on personal terms) is an every-woman for that single, 30-year-old career woman that we all are, have been, or expect to become.

I've kept a hand-written diary for 6 years. Sad, maybe, but to return to my earlier point, is it narcissistic? I'm not sure whether my diary has an intended reader, but my blog does, and that's you, if you've got this far! Is diary-writing for those who feel they have no one to talk to, those who have a lot to say, or those who just enjoy the sound of their own voice (keyboard). Things to ponder, for sure.