It's Time

What many people don't realise, which is often the case with chronic conditions that develop over a long period of time, is you don't always appear to be 'ill'. IgAN is fairly asymptomatic and so I often forget that I have it as do those around me. As time has gone on I have started to experience more symptoms - I feel a bit like a leaky bucket - sometimes my face is numb because I need my potassium medicine, sometimes I need to inject myself in the leg on account of the anaemia and it has been the case for a while that at gigs I need to take quinine tablets to stop my hand from cramping whilst I am playing the guitar. These are all quite unseen symptoms though - people who know me well have spotted them but in general no one would notice that I am ill. The one symptom that I have noticed and is ongoing and has increasingly got worse over the past months is tiredness. It feels some days that I am wearing a cloak of tiredness, constantly dragging me down, making it impossible to find the energy to do often quite simple things like running back upstairs to get my sunglasses before we go out or staying awake till the end of a film at the cinema.

I have had in my mind for quite some time that I wanted to work, right up until the transplant. I didn't want to be a 'patient'. My job as a performer involves one key ingredient that I think has kept me going - adrenalin. If I were an office worker I think I may have packed it in a while ago but going up on a stage and performing gives me the buzz to see me through one more encore, one more pack down and make the increasingly heavier speakers possible to carry.

Towards the end of March, and not through any deliberate forward planning, I had an intense run of five high energy gigs one after the other almost as my last hurrah before I hang up the strings for a few months. Weddings, parties and pubs and all of them an absolute blast.

As the last notes fell at my last gig I felt a particular calm, a real sense of not having to keep going anymore. I'm not an athlete (dodgy knees!) but perhaps it can be compared to the last few hundred metres of a race and when you see that finish line and everything hurts you push yourself for that last little bit and when you cross that line you feel lighter, not necessarily because you've finished but because you haven't got to do it again the next day. The week after my last gig I was speaking to my mum and telling her about this feeling and how now I didn't have anymore gigs I felt I had finally succumbed to the tiredness. The operation date looming in both our minds mum just turned and said to me, 'it's time Tara, it's time.' She was right of course.