Fear & Dreams

This blog will be posted some time after it was written due to an outside directive to not talk about my living donor experience until after I have donated.  If you are reading this, it is because I have completed the donation process.

******************************************************************

May 26, 2011

I had another little anxiety moment while lying in bed last night about this "kidney thing". I don't know how the thought came about but all I could think of was "what was I thinking and why would I do this to myself.  Its going to hurt and its going to suck". What scared me more is the weird clarity I felt when having these thoughts, like the whole rest of this journey had been clouded somehow by optimism and goodwill.  I worried that going forward this was the only feeling I would have and that naturally it would only get worse with time. For some reason I thought the feeling would erase all the mental preparation and plans I had built up thus far.

Eventually I fell asleep but dreamed of nothing but kidneys, being late to the hospital and not having the right things at the hospital. I dreamt of trying to catch a bus to get there in time to prevent my bed from being given away. In one particular dream they were not going to let me into the operating room if I didn't have three books to read afterwards.  I was frantically trying to call Charlie and explain to him where those books might be (still in their Amazon mail wrappings, on the floor of the spare room as they are in real life). I woke up several times in the night very stressed, always having to use the washroom (which in my half awake state lead me to wonder if something was wrong with my kidneys-I mean why else would I have to urinate what seemed like every hour. I wondered if they were secretly angry with my decision).

I eventually woke up for good with my alarm at 5:01 AM. What a night-I was tired and felt like I had been running or something physical for hours. I got up, tripped over one of the Amazon books and started my day. In the shower I contemplated my initial fear and the dreams it created for me as I slept. Luckily the fear and anxiety had subsided for the most part and I was back to my cloudy optimism. Or sleepy optimism, depending on how you look at it. With a little over a week to go, let's hope that was it in the fear category.