One hour and thirty eight minutes

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that I was getting into a spin about a couple of things that I had to do, mainly contacting a friend who I had lost contact with and just got a number for and the other being the bone density test that I have to have to give my doctors a baseline (in Holland they do a test every 5 years to check that I am not losing bone density due to the hormones).

Well, the bone density test is on Tuesday afternoon, I’m still nervous – but have done lots of research online about what it is and how it is done.  It sounds painless – but crossing x-rays through my body just sounds wrong J  As a child I had a lot of x-rays and being a geek I did a lot of looking through encyclopedias and looking through books in the library (wow, remember the days before the Internet when you had to do that and couldn’t just put a search string into Google?) and to be honest I wasn’t happy with what I found.  They are not pleasant things, and it’s something that has a yearly limit.  Which in my at the time underage mind turned into you should avoid if at all possible.

So, I’ll be happy when it’s done and the thought of the buzz that the x-ray generator makes when the power is put through it is in the past again…  Fingers crossed for the result, too.

The other, the phone call.  I tried calling him over the last couple of week and always got his answer machine (some things don’t change – he was always difficult to contact by phone J).  In the end I decided to do something that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with, I decided to use the only other way of communicating with him that I had available.  Facebook.  I’m trying to think of a less suitable way to tell someone this information, and to be honest I’m kind of coming up blank…  But, it worked. He answered my message and we spent the rest of the evening passing messages backwards and forwards.  Mrs Stace commented that after eight years of not talking to each other we then spent the entire evening sending Facebook messages.

I got his house number and we arranged to chat last night.  It was great – we had great and open talk about my situation, about life in general on both sides, about other friends that I have lost contact with and reminiscing about our time in school.

He was really open about how he was taking it, and it turns out that after we lost contact he worked on the urology ward at the local hospital with Mr Terry and Mr Thomas. And so probably knows more about the next step of the process than I do.  He was saying that when he found out he accepted it straight away – after all that is the right thing to do (his words). He spent the next few nights thinking about it and trying to work out what must have been going on in my head and trying to figure things out and…  Couldn’t.  As he said it’s just something which he has no sphere of experience, and the only thing he can do is offer support in whatever I do.  I don’t think you can ask for anything more can you?  I can quite imagine that if you haven’t spent your whole life trying to deal with the constant thoughts in your head it must be really difficult to try and understand.  I find that a very open and fair comment, and was pleased that he was able to be so open with me.

He also surprised me in being one of the few people not to say “But you work with computers and ride motorbikes!”  I really don’t know why so many people I know think that women can’t enjoy working with computers or riding fast bikes…

All in all it was a wonderful call and we stayed chatting for 1 hour 38 minutes. It is a great weight off of my shoulders.