The Sparrows of Greenlane.

A ninety minute trip up the motorway from Hamilton in the Waikato mist, in the dark; finds us at Greenlane Hospital. We have appointments starting at 8 am, and I am nervous about getting stuck in the Auckland Motorway traffic, so we actually arrive about 7.15!

We have the final blood tests, X-rays and anaesthetic clinics before Callum's transplant takes place in two weeks. There is time for "Muffin Break" in between the twelve tubes of blood they took off each of us, and the chest X-rays.

I will be nervous about the final cross match until I hear that it is all ok in a couple of days.

There are always sparrows when you sit outside at cafes. I love them, and feed them, and generally create a health hazard for those who disapprove of bird shit on the cobblestones!

I don't care. I'm not afraid of bird shit!

Lucky my friend Connie isn't here. She's not afraid of hiking in the back blocks of Vietnam or jumping out of aeroplanes, but she is most discombobulated by sparrows.

We sit outside and enjoy the sun on our faces, and the sparrows. Callum says I have to add a disclaimer like they do on films that says something like...

To protect the innocent, some sparrows are composites! I ask what this means. Apparently, to protect the sparrow's identity, in the absence of pixel fuzzing, I must use composite images of at least eight sparrows and morph them altogether somehow. ....Right......

I can see how the weeks of recovery will be filled with such conversations, which is good, because they are silly, and it makes a change from when he will be grumpy, which will happen .

And I will be super woman and leap tall buildings in a single bound within three days of giving away my kidney. Not... I'm not allowed to entertain any such thoughts because I have the pain relief police and Sister Funnell reading me the riot act about trying to go back to work early, let alone leaping any kind of buildings. Maybe I will be excellent at shopping quietly. Riding the escalator at 277 in New Market, and wandering through the Domain to the Trelise Cooper fabric store in Parnell. With the sun on my face. But probably I'll just be grumpy too!

But I won't blog about being grumpy, promise. It'll just be about the Trelise Cooper shop and the gardens in the Domain, and a few graphic pictures from ICU which may or may not be composites LOL!

And enjoy the odd cafe, outside with the sparrows.