It was an inspiring and encouraging week, even before I went to the big Quill Awards night at Crown where a heap of journos I’ve known for a long, long time, kept telling me how well I looked.

And I got to repeat my now tired old joke about telling my doctors that ‘if you don’t find me a liver transplant soon I’ll be the fittest-looking guy in the cemetery’.

It was inspiring because of some people I came into contact with through my 3AW Drive program.

First there was 13-year-old Coen Ashton. He’s a refreshing dynamo of a kid who was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis as a baby and is now on the waiting list for a double-lung transplant.

While waiting he has to make repeated trips from his home in Maryborough, Queensland to the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne for treatment for CF and diabetes as his lung capacity hovers between 30% and 35%.

But that’s not all his does. Back in December, this adventurous teenager decided to jetski 2000 kms — the entire length of the Murray River — to gain publicity for...

When I took a couple of days of R & R last week I said I was living in a weird limbo land on two fronts.  Health and Courts.

One of those areas of doubt has been removed with the announcement from the Office of Public Prosecutions that my next court date has been set:  Friday, May 20.

That’s when I have to front the Magistrate’s Court again to be sentenced after the High Court rejected my case involving my campaign to ban suppression orders for serial sex offenders.

[The penalties on five charges, to which I’ll plead guilty, range from heavy fines to a jail sentence, or both.]

There’s also been some other movement in the limbo world of my health as I await a liver transplant. At least, movement in my mind.

I wrote recently that I got the bad news mid-October that I had only a year to live if no donor organ was found, and found to be suitable and that meant the transplant window was now about seven months. That’s less than 200 days.

I actually calculated it at 196 days...

It has nothing to do with Little Big Horn but that headline came to mind when I got up for a pee at the Austin Hospital in the middle of last night.

I had just emerged from 2-1/2 hours of surgery for some Google-type imagery of the Hinch terrain and the implanting of more chemotherapy beads. The third time the radiologists had gone up through my right femoral artery in a search and destroy mission.

On this sortie they found one tumour about 1-/12centimetres in size – which is quite substantial when you know a tumour of over 3cms, or more than three of them, will get you disqualified from the liver transplant waiting list.

The good news was that the cluster of satellite tumours attacked and demolished last November had not come back and neither had the mothership which was killed by the chemo beads several months ago.

Also the one tumour found yesterday was actually an improvement on what they thought they’d find. I liken it to a malignant star but at least it was standing alone.

And, continuing the extra-terrestrial analogy, the...