Psalms 47:1 Clap your hands, all peoples! Shout to God with loud songs of joy!
Oh, the joy of it! Ten years ago today, I felt incredible joy – yes, in my soul – but also in my kidney! I remember how I pushed my IV pole into my sister JoAnn’s hospital room. She was propped up in bed with a tube still in her nose, color in her cheeks, sparkle in her eyes, and her beautiful smile. Radiant joy! I’ve often said it was her hair that caught my eye. If hair can come to life – lustrous, shiny, glistening hair, that’s what her hair did. The healthy sheen of hair speaks to me, saying, “the kidney is working, Alleluia! It is performing its miracle we call life.”
A doubting Thomas or a snide, skeptical person could attribute the giddiness, the soaring, rocketing joy I felt to the anesthesia I had only hours earlier. Yes, it was the miracle of modern science and transplantation to remove a healthy kidney and place it into another person- someone with diseased kidneys. An unbeliever would say it was not angels or miracles.
Aah, I feel sorrow for the doubters! The miracle of life, the gift of faith from my ancestors, the lessons of courage they taught me, and the power of prayer and what it can do was the greatest lesson I experienced ten years ago today. Blessedly it changed my sister’s life, just as our mother and other sister’s lives were changed by the magic of organ donation. But, for me, the whiniest, most terrified and reluctant donor on the face of the earth, it transformed my life. I never would’ve been able to do it without the support of St.William, my beautiful daughters, family and the best friends a woman could ever have.
I live now with a feeling of gratitude and am ashamed I didn’t always. My sister, JoAnn, untethered to a dialysis machine to keep her alive, is doing well. She danced at both of her daughter’s weddings and met her new baby grandson on the day he was born.
The joy brings the gratitude, but the gratitude brings a sense of duty or a calling to me. I am embarrassed to be called a hero. I dislike it so much as do many of the living donors I’ve met. I know (and you know) I would never have been a living kidney donor in a zillion years if I wasn’t lucky enough to be born into such a magnificent family. A family with lousy kidneys caused by polycystic kidney disease (PKD).
There is much work to be done. I want to tell the world about PKD, to find a cure, and try to bring hope! I have family battling PKD now. I have friends battling it. One just became a grandmother. A young mother, a father, a teenager (she’s a princess of a girl), and a gorgeous grandmother all stunned by the unfairness of a mutation. There are strangers with PKD I’ve never met who have become friends. I want to cover my ears and cry when I hear about transplants that failed, donors who have lost their recipient, or about someone who doesn’t have a donor. They spur me to work. It frustrates me to hear about another fistula being put in another arm (two within one week in one family) and yet my heart knows dialysis is a lifesaver. I want to wave a magic wand to stop the relentlessness PKD makes into lives – back pain and flank pain, nausea and vomiting, diverticulitis, aneurysms, liver cysts, or any cysts. My joy today seems wrong because so many suffer, especially when two of my cousins died unexpectedly last year (kidneys). That’s not Catholic guilt. That’s humility when I know I can do more to help others.
Today I will celebrate. Tomorrow I will roll up my sleeves and try to do what I can. Today, tomorrow and always, though, I will be grateful.
So beautifully written. And what a fantastic event to celebrate.
December 29th marks my 10 year kidney donation. And we will be celebrating life and remembering the losses too.
We can never forget to keep spreading the word for the need of organ donors.
Happy Kidneyversary….
Yes Life and loss – joy and sorrow – so much a part of organ donation. Thank YOU for being a donor, too, and working so hard,not only to raise awareness for the need of organ donors, but in the fight against PKD, too.