I was booked in for a day of tests at the beginning of November - a few days before my actual 30th birthday.  Most of my friends were also hitting 30 at about the same time, and some of them were dealing with it better than others, but for me it was mostly an excuse to have a good time, I think I had about four parties; Rome, London, family and so on.

At about this time only a few of my friends knew about the kidney transplant, and I purposefully kept it that way, because until I got the results of all the tests I wouldn't know if it was definitely going to go ahead.  I think it was about this time that my sense of identity started to get a bit fuzzy.  You have all these people telling what a wonderful thing you're doing, and boy, you know they're right, because as it slowly dawns on you, the reality of what you're doing, it's really scary.  So, in a lot of ways my big birthday party in London was a way to be fabulous and being congratulated for just being me, not what I was doing.

I was also a bit thrown because a week before my birthday I had to go to a memorial service for a university friend of mine who had been killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11.  I told one of my friends who was coming about the transplant, because I knew that if I tried to keep it too much of a secret I would get drunk and blurt it out to her, but apart from that, no one knew.  So many things were going through my head that weekend, mainly that it didn't seem real, and that we all expected him to walk back in through the door.  I, perhaps a little inadvisably, spent the night with his best friend, who I had a bit of a flirtation with at university, but I guess that's what happens at funerals - concerns about your own mortality make you do stupid things.

So the first, really embarrassing test is that you have to collect your urine for 24 hours and bring it to the hospital.  Because of the impending operation I had, at about this time, taken to drinking in excess of 2 litres of water a day, and subsequently was peeing like a racehorse.  I was a bit concerned about the jug they were sending to me, until I realised it had 5 litres written on the bottom.  Picking that up from the Post Office was fun I can tell you.  I decided to take the day off work, because I really didn't want to have to explain a container of wee. 

I don't mean to get technical here, but personally my average wee is a lot more than what fits into one of those little tin foil containers they give you, and, if it's more than half full, I swear it's impossible to pour into the jug without spilling it.  (The whole thing's a messy business!)  Anyway I ended up doing tiny little wees (about four or five every time I needed to go) and pouring each one into the jug - which was just no fun.  I was terrified that I was going to wake up in the night or morning and do a great big wee, forgetting the jug - so I put all the toilet seats at my mum's down and put post-it's on the seat reminding me.  There is no way that was something I wanted to repeat.

The worst part was driving down to my mum's for the appointment the next day, with a 5 litre container of wee in the boot of the car.  Never mind clean underwear, goodness knows what anyone would have made of it if I’d had an accident.  Also I couldn't stop anywhere for a wee on the way down, without taking my jug with me.  Luckily I made it without incident, and installed the wee collection in the downstairs loo.

I have to tell you that first wee after you've finished the collection, when you can just let rip without having to stop every hundred millilitres is total heaven!

Carrying a sloshing container of about 3 litres of wee into the hospital is also slightly embarrassing, plus I was terrified of putting it down in the wrong place and someone pouring it away - so I hovered with my jug, until finally a sensible looking nurse told me to put it in the corner.

Then followed the obligatory blood tests.  This time I had come prepared as I always get a little light headed after giving a reasonable amount of blood; I have naturally low blood pressure.  The nurses laughed at me again as we sat in the waiting room deciding between Ritz crackers, cheese and onion crisps and Babybels.  I was, by now, developing my blood test strategy, which goes like this:  Wait for the doctor/nurse to prepare your arm, wait until they squint desperately at your arm looking for a decent sized blood vessel, and then mention calmly "I've got quite hard-to-find veins - Dorothy did it last time."  At which point they always call her over.

This is the time that they test you for HIV and Hepatitis, which is not something they do in the first round of tests.  For this you have to sign a separate consent form, which is slightly daunting as they have to ask you a whole load of form questions beforehand.  Despite being pretty sure that I didn't have HIV, as soon as the blood is drawn for this test you can't help but panic - I think that's just human nature.

After the bloods they sent us over to the other side of the hospital for the ultrasound, ECG and chest X-ray. 

If you've ever had an ultrasound of certain areas you'll know what the drill is.  You have to drink enough water to fill your bladder, and then hold it through the ultrasound, where, helpfully they press quite hard on your abdomen (who on earth thinks of these things!  I swear someone sits around making up the most embarrassing and humiliating things they can do to you.)  So after a cup of tea and a small bottle of water I was once again concentrating hard on not letting it all just gush out. 

So you check into the ultrasound department and they give you another humiliating thing - that lovely gown that opens at the back.  I believe they let me keep my pants and bra on, which is lucky, because as soon as you get in with the doctor that gown comes off. 

First you lie there and they pour clear goop all over your abdomen, I really don't want to say what it feels like (but if you're thinking of giving a kidney you're over 18 so you can probably guess.)  Anyway, so then they run the ultrasound thing over your tummy, and finally say, okay you can go to the toilet.  You have never seen a person move so fast outside of the Olympic games.  Unfortunately I moved so fast that I didn't give them time to wipe off the goop, so now my embarrassing gown looked like it had had an embarrassing accident.

When you go back they pour more goop over your belly, so that they can check that your bladder has completely emptied.  (Oh it was completely emptied alright!) 

Next comes the fun part (particularly if you have big boobs like me.)  You have to lie on your side, with your arm in the air, with yet more goop poured on your side, and do great big breaths to try and lift your rib cage out of the way so that they can see your kidneys on the scan.  The point of this is to check you have two reasonable sized kidneys, and to try and see how many branches (or blood vessels into the kidney) they have. 

Sometimes you have great nurses and technicians who treat you like an actual person, then you have people you treat you as a subject.  Unfortunately I was having one of those days.  First of all the doctor told me off for not breathing (I can assure you that I was - maybe not very deeply - but still).  So I started doing great big breathes, and let me tell you - do this for more than a minute and you start to feel

a) light headed,

b) nauseous.

Things improved slightly when the doctor (talking to the assistant) said "There, we've got some lovely blood vessels."

To which I replied "Why, thank you."

When I sat up to turn over he also noted that, as well as a sense of humour, I also had great boobs, at which point he started talking to me properly.  It's not that I really needed to know that one of my kidneys was slightly larger than the other, or that the lowest rib was slightly obscuring the blood vessels, but when you're lying on your side, mostly naked, covered in goop, with your arm in the air and breathing like an asthmatic elephant, it's nice to have a little conversation.

When it was all over I went back to my cubicle to get dressed, still, despite waiting for paper towels this time, slightly sticky.  As I walked away I remember feeling really violated, and dirty.

Strangely enough, it was also at about this time that I started having fantasies about one of my male friends, I think it has something to do with wanting to be touched with something other than a professional touch.

I was surprised by the ECG because I was expecting to have to get on a running machine or something so they could check my heart rhythms, but in fact they ask you to lie totally still so they get your resting heart rate.  To be perfectly honest, considering the amount of time I had spent in the gym preparing, I was a little disappointed.

The chest X-ray was fine, but as it was the last thing on the day I was just exhausted, I couldn't eat another Ritz cracker, and despite going to the canteen for tea and something to eat, I just felt nauseous and all I wanted to do was go home and have a shower. 

The X-ray waiting room is something else, full of old men hacking up their lungs.  I have never felt so healthy.  The worst part was the waiting, and then after they had taken their shots, waiting for them to check they had developed okay before being allowed to get dressed.

Finally they came out, and I had my X-ray and ECG to take back to the renal unit.  Frustratingly, despite looking at the test results, the nurses won't tell you if there is something wrong (just in case), so at the end of a very long, very humiliating day I went home, not knowing the results of the tests.

I was ready to crash out as soon as we got home, my head was pounding and I felt really sick, but my mum insisted I take a bath (just as well really with all that gloop), and gave me a pair of fluffy teddy bear pyjamas to put on.

It was at about this time that I realised that I desperately wanted the results of the tests to be okay, so that I could give Joel the kidney.   Despite feeling nervous and cosmically stitched up earlier, things seemed much clearer then.