Five Months

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.

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

March 29, 2011

It has been five months since I started this blog and more importantly started down the road to kidney donation.What a long, amazing, complex road it has been so far. I've learned so much about myself, my life, my body, my family and friends. I have an awareness of  a range of diseases I never really knew existed.  I have been exposed to stories of hope, strength and community from people living with kidney disease (and their families). I think the process has made me smarter and stronger. It certainly has run me through every feeling and emotion imaginable.

It's been a long time since I've really wanted something that I was dependant on other people to "give me". That has been humbling, frustrating and rewarding all at the same time. It's so strange really that to give a better life to someone, you have to put your life in the hands of someone else.

I wonder if I do get to donate, if that will change anything for me. Other than of course the obvious being down to one kidney ad the challenges that could bring. Will this somehow take me down another path I never could have imagined or will it be  the same path with just one less kidney?

If  I can't donate how is that going to make me feel? In the beginning I know I said if I couldn't donate I'd be disappointed but would accept it as it is "what's best for me medically". But ever since that awful appointment with Dr. N I'm not so sure I'll just be left with a light feeling of disappointment and regret. I don't know why that appointment changed the tone of this journey so much. You'd think that the blog issue would have changed the mood more but it was more like an argument in a solid relationship.  Ever since Dr N came in the picture though I feel like I'm in a relationship teetering on the edge of breaking up-and I'm not sure what to do to bring it back to being okay. Its not that I am disinterested or don't care-but everything feels so much different. I do think if I was told no, there would be a lot more anger than I think I thought there would be in the beginning.  That and a sense of failure for not being good enough or perhaps staying or doing the wrong thing at the wrong time somewhere along the way that took things off course. Woulda coulda shoulda.

Next week I should have results. I'm still excited about learning the fate of my "extra" kidney but now its mixed with a lot more fear than before-fear or failure, or the regret and how that will feel. In the end, even if its not the "answer" or purpose in life I thought it might be, it really has been the experience of a lifetime and I will be stronger because of it..