Being isolated and being set free.

William has been much better today, although he needed several fluid boluses (fluids pumped in quickly in resonse to dehydration shown in blood tests) and is currently having a blood transfusion as his red cell count has dropped. He has a funny bug in his line that set the infection control team into a bit of a spin so he is now in isolation. The good thing is peace and quiet for me but the bad thing is that Wills can't go to school. He should be out of isolation soon as his temperature is responding to his antibiotics really quickly this time. I hope we will be re-activated on the transplant list at the end of the week or beginning of next.

I was due to begin a journalism course at London City Lit today. William's fantastic school health care assistant came in so I was able to go. The nurses were really impressed that I left Wills and set out to do things I wanted to do, in my nice sleek hair (yep, it is still sleek and I am roud of my straightening skills!) and dressed as best I could in the circumstances. I was so glad I made the effot. I do writing courses by distance learning but I so yearn to get out and meet people. Being Mum to a child like Wills is very isolating. I was really pleased when the tutor announced that all her groups tend to stay in touch after the course and support each other in establishing their careers. That was exactly what I was wanting out of this. I learned some useful nuggets of advice in this first session. I hope I can get to enough to bond with the other students. It only took 30 minutes from our Chelsea Pad so there is no reason why I can't continue while we are there. Birmingham is a different issue. Maybe it is good to start things that I hope to finish before we get the call. Maybe the call is more likely to happen that way. City Lit is an amazing place. The whole college is dedicated to adult learning and it was full of vibrance and creativity. I passed rooms of people playing instruments, painting, singing 'Killing Me Softly' as well as writing. The whole place was full of energy with people keen to learn new skills for leisure, self-discovery or career change. I will really look forward to Wednesdays. Most of the courses are one two hour session a week and a term long. I fully intend to have one on the go each term and am already selecting the next.

I am experimenting with photography to capture this hospital admission in an 'artistic' way (if you call this kind of thing art) or 'reportage', 'documentary' or just weird and slightly crazy pictures...anyway, some are about to go up on my arty-farty blog. I will then do some very exctiting things such as registering student membership of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), giving me a pass to access 'press only' areas and functions. How cool is that? Maybe I will be able to take pictures in the Tate with that? I was stopped the other day and I was just taking shadows of people in a white room with big red canvasses all around them. Not fair really, painters and drawers can work in there and record whatever they like but not photographers. From now on, I am a student photographer and journalist and am going to start behaving as such!