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.
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I think one of the most amazing, impactful forces on our lives is time. Its is dynamic, it ebbs and flows. Its travels rapidly at time, almost too rapidly. Ant other times it seems to inch along in a painfully slow manner and there is nothing we can do to make it go faster. My sense of time and how it is progressing can be dramatically different than the person going through the same things beside me. Time supposedly heals us, makes us smarter, helps us learn. Time frustrates us, makes us impatient and can heighten and seemingly prolong our negative emotions. Time gives us the space to think, the ability to believe and the understanding to accept.With my journey thus far with the "kidney thing" time has certainly played a pivotal and interesting role. You've heard me go on (maybe a little too much) about how the waiting was making me feel ridiculously impatient. Time also allowed Charlie (and perhaps some other people close to me) the ability to get past his earlier fears and inflexibilities in regards to kidney donation.It's seen my mother go several times from supportive, to worried, back to supportive to worried yet again. It's made my friends question the system and its ability to move fast enough to save the people who need the most help. Its shown me how wonderful my friends are and how many I dint even realize I had.
Time has given me the ability to forgive and better understand some people, organizations and flaws in the living donor system and the associated medical programs currently under development. I am no longer angry (for example) at Canadian Blood Services (although they'd be fools not to revamp their social media guidelines for living donors). I am no longer upset at how the program at Foothills handled the blog situation (although the fools comment applies to them as well). I know, over time (ha ha) these programs will get faster, better, smarter and stronger and help more people. I hope I can play a role in helping with that.
Time has introduced me to a world of people who are waiting for a kidney, watching a family member wait or who are organ donors themselves. For many people time is a double edged sword-they are racing against it but at the same time every day gives them hope of being a step closer to being healthy and "normal". I've also been fortunate to have time introduce me to more than one living donor and learning their experiences and strength has made me more sure of my decision.
Its funny-when people win awards or are otherwise thrust into a spotlight and asked to speak about their experience and give thanks or comment...no one ever "thanks" time. But without its impact and learnings on our lives I don't think anyone would be where they are today.
Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past even while we attempt to define it, and, like the flash of lightning, at once exists and expires. ~Charles Caleb Colton
