T + 387. To Paraphrase Carly Simon 'Your slow veins'

One other bit of news I had yesterday is that I have to go back on the Pentamidine inhalers once a month, this is to treat a very specific type of pneumonia to which  low immunity sufferers are prone. Originally I was quite pleased to leave these behind and take a pill called Strepsin instead because Pentamidine - although a life saver tastes like leper cheese and makes you want to turn your  mouth inside out over your head. Strepsin though, may be the reason that my platelets have started getting stepped on and as I'm red lining on 3 separate immuno-suppressants - with more being added, so I'm going to cut my losses and smell the cheese    - choose life.

Midnight Weds/ThursMorning - More sleep deprived night time gabbling, waking up partway through a dream to a conversation I'm having with no-one in the room. Laptop on - I can easily see how the sheer diverse range of entertainment content online keeps kids pinned indoors on PCS and drives them batshit with sleep deprivation.

Came across a fascinating blog today called http://sometimes-interesting.com/ These guys are urban/industrial explorers with a special interest in abandoned military, industrial, theme parks, holiday resorts and ghost towns across the world. With land so tight and at a premium in the UK and people crawling over each other like puppies in a basket to get here,  it kind of boggles the mind that the rest of the world seems to have so much space that it just leaves vast tracts of brown land filled with venerable old buildings to be ivy split and sand blasted out of existence. Detroit is mind blowing and looks a bit like a set for a videogame

Better get that baby goop down ya double quick fella

Well the transport posse didn't screw up today - just my veins. I think there's a bit of input fatigue going on and they couldn't really stay inflated properly so the photo-pheresis took nearer four hours than the usual two but wtf where did I have to go anyway? It's not like I was "Hurry hurry get me out of this sh***y part of South London forthwith there's a much shittier part of South London I need to be" - Funny enough though that's what most of the people I saw today seemed to be thinking...I think they call it commuting.

Felt most sorry of all for the guys running the dept - they were mobbed today - all 6 machines running full tilt and a waiting room full of fresh punters. We all sit up in the air on dentist chairs with clear plastic tubes plumbed into our forearms and once the process starts you ideally need to keep your arms as still as possible to maximise the blood extraction flow to 50ml per minute. Problem is if you kink your veins or the tubes move and the flow drops too much the machine sets off an alarm which needs to be reset before it will continue running so it's a real pain in the a**e for the nurses if it plays up. There is a weird kind of ceremony to it all which has become evident over the weeks I have attended. The first thing is to get as much tea, coffee, food and hydration into ones faces as quickly as possible and set up ipods or e-books before being hooked up to the machines. Once you are hooked up you're pretty much stuck in one position until the blood has been gathered into the machine (1 - 2 hours). Then you get one arm back as two tubes now get plumbed into the left arm for the return of the photo activated blood. Oh but before that the light sensitising meds are injected into the bag of cells and if it's a sunny day, this is he point where we all don our sunglasses in unison like some kind of crappy raddled terminators. Otherwise you can end up with incredibly sensitive skin and eyes for the next 12 hours. May need sun block in summer.