Click Clack

Click clack, click clack. To most of you, that's the sound a keyboard makes when you type or the sound of women's high-heeled shoes. For me, it's the sound my pills make when I pick them up every day.

I never thought that at my age I would be picking up a daily pill counter from Target. The kind that most of our grandparents use because they're having to deal with various types of ailments. It comes with old age, it's normal. I'm reminded at least twice a day, once in the morning before breakfast and once right before dinner, my life is nothing but normal.

At first, it was daunting to have to remember when to take them, and which ones. Who ever invented this was a genius, it seems like such a simple concept but someone had to come up with it first. If it weren't for a frustrated pill taker who had the where-with-all to invent such a thing, I'd be forced to look at a bunch of bottles everyday and hoping I got the right pill.

This is just a glimpse at what my life has become. Brooke sees me gag and eventually down these pills each morning. I call them "mommy's vitamins". She must think I'm super strong with all these vitamins I take every day. And some of them are doozies. The fish oil ones you see there are like horse pills, yuck!

So to continue my update... after my initial email asking family and friends for a kidney, I received a number of emails and phone calls from people. Some wanted to simply say they were sorry, others wanted to help. I'd like to take a moment to thank all of you for being my friend. I was fortunate enough to have met and made some really great people in my life. I was fortunate to have the ability to email more than 300.

But I'd especially like to thank the ones who stood up when many others couldn't nor wanted to. (I know some of the things I say here in my blog will offend some people. But this is my journey and most of the time, it hasn't been pretty.) 38 people came forward, half wanted to help right away, the other half wanted some information. All friends, none were family except my brother and my husband's family.

While they were getting informed, so was I. I had to go through an evaluation which was made up meetings with a social worker, nephrologist, and case worker. Once I was deemed a good candidate for transplant, my case would be evaluated by a committee who would then place me on a kidney donor list.

Like many things, this took time. In the meantime, if there were any potential living donors, they needed to get screened right away. Out of the group of 38, ten people came forward. Out of the ten, 3 people were screened first and they were all a match! My husband is one of them.

He has since gotten his final work up done and unless they find something glaringly wrong in the results, I can expect to have surgery this summer! Not since high school was I ever this excited for the school year to end...

But for now, click clack goes my pills.

Back From Falling Off the Face of the Earth

It turns out, I was here all along. I wasn't hiding nor in seclusion like Sandra Bullock... I was simply and quietly accepting what was happening to me.



I struggled not only with the kidney disease. I like calling it "the kidney disease" much like calling it "the Facebook". I find that amusing... I don't know why. But I also struggled with how and how much I was going to share this experience. After my initial email to more than 300 people asking for a kidney, many people had asked me what happened after that.



A lot happened and sometimes, not much happened. It was a lot of testing, more tesing, tears, more tears, and testing again. They were events that I didn't expect anyone to really care about except for a handful of people of course. I struggled with what next for the 300+ people I reached out to. Since I never wanted to be thought of as "the sick girl", I never wanted anyone to feel sorry for me. I was still working out how I was feeling and dealing with the whole thing. As anyone can imagine, being diagnosed with a terminal disease can shake up your whole life.



After I accepted the kidney disease and coped with it by deciding to set aside time to cry about it, get angry about it, and then forget about it. Only then was I able to get out of bed every morning, be a wife, a mother, a friend. I decided to take control of the situation and only deal with it on my own terms.



So when people would ask me about the kidney disease, I would get angry if it happened at the most inopportune times. To me that simply meant, when I wasn't in the mood to talk about it. I would envision myself in an episode of GLEE where Mercedes, Rachel, and Finn would sing Telephone by Lady Gaga. "Stop calling, stop calling, I don't want to talk anymore..."



I would break into hives imagining how many people I would have to rehash updates to. I wasn't strong enough to talk about it over and over and over and over again. I wouldn't remember who I told and where I left off.



But I admit, this was selfish. I realized many people care and wanted to know how I'm doing and what's been happening since I sent out that desperate email. Not knowing what to do, I left it up to people to reach out and if I happened to be in the mood to rehash it, I did. If I didn't... well you know what happened.



So a good friend suggested blogging about it. I never thought I would do this. I was one of the people skeptical about the Facebook and other social media outlets. This is a new adventure for me, but since my diagnosis, I've been jumping in head first into many things and trying them out. Life is too short!



So here goes nothing...