Kevin's Kidney & me

As mentioned in my previous post, I am adding a sentimental post today, although I didn't know it would be this. I had spent the better part of the last two weeks trying to write the letter to the family of my kidney donor. Each time I'd start off fine but then at some point I'd go dark. It's 5:45 in the morning as I write this and the entirety of this letter, albeit a short one, was written over the last two hours and considering the difficulty I had in finding the right words to say... that's saying something. Although tomorrow is the anniversary of my transplant, for this year and this year only I'm seeing today as the anniversary because it was a little after 6:00 on a Sunday morning a year ago that I got the call. This morning sorta completes the year for me from phone call to thank you letter. And the timing feels appropriate as a means of really wrapping this blog up. And with that, I'd like to share with you the letter I have chosen to write an

I should have written this a couple of weeks ago. I have no particular reason why I didn’t, although I have to admit that I’ve become a Netflix junkie and find it very easy to become addicted and distracted to the new series that come out every month... every week. Just this week I knocked off two fairly recent series.. “Sisters” & “Maniac”. That’s 17 hours of dedicated television watching. Add in that I watched an episode of “The Good Place” an episode of “Better Call Saul” and two episodes of “Wrecked” and I’m up to 21 hours of television and that doesn’t take into account the myriad moments of CNN where I found myself so disgusted by the goings on of the republican side of our government I had to switch to something else and that led to many satisfying hours of laughter and tears through Sisters, followed by several hours of a mind boggling psychological Alice in wonderland meets the matrix meets the X files meets twilight zone meets 80’s retro imagined future-realized-es

I'm not one to form addictions, though I've certainly tried. It probably sounds funny, or odd to some that at 26 I made an effort to become an alcoholic. I was living in Oakland California at the time and I was in search of an experience that I've never had... which literally could have been anything because I was raised so sheltered and lived such a Leave it to Beaver life that I was naive about the world and I was ill prepared to live in it, though I wasn't aware of it at the time. I just assumed we all thought the same way, we all did the same things, we all believed in simple black and white definitions of what the "right thing to do" meant. But I had this need to move away from the safety of my family's arms. I needed to not have the comfort of my friends and girlfriend conveniently available on a whim. I wanted a hint of struggle. I wanted to know aloneness or perhaps loneliness, maybe both. I couldn't tell you why I needed these things, I jus

I tried to write this post last weekend... let me rephrase that... I wrote this post last weekend, in fact I wrote it over and over again but couldn't find a point at which I felt good about it. Ultimately I opted not to post it. About two weeks ago was my most recent kidney team doctor's visit and it went mostly well. Last Sunday was my ninth month since transplant and Monday was my 53rd birthday. Something about these two events orbiting each other made it feel bigger than it really was but my life wasn't living up to the grand idea of the feelings surrounding this auspicious occasion. So perhaps there was never anything that could have been written to make me happy. It's a fault I must admit to, a cross that I bear, that I am particularly hard on myself when I'm judging my actions. There are people I carry with me at all times... they live within the voice in my head and tell me that my performance is worthy of whatever it is for which I'm trying to tak

It's happened again, another month has passed... eight months since the transplant and other than the fact that I'm gaining weight and going bald I have very little going down on the kidney front. That being said, it is approaching the time I need to start thinking about reaching out to the family who lost a loved one and whose loss led to my gain of a nicely functioning kidney. But I'm not sure what to say. That first month or two was very emotional for me. Thinking about it in more than abstract terms would always overwhelm me and could even bring tears to my eyes. These days I'm more in control of that, which is probably a good thing but, means I'm less capable of writing a full throated emotional letter and I hate feigning emotion. So I guess I need to sit with myself and really dig deep for some kind of memory of those first few weeks when this was all new and even a little frightening. These days its all routine, maybe too routine. Too routine? Is my life

So there are a few open ends I need to tie up from my previous two posts. In Agassiz Banana I mentioned some health concerns and an anxiety regarding the health of my kidney. I mentioned these concerns to my doctor and she explained that the results that had suddenly appeared a couple of months ago were simply the result of a different person running the tests. In other words, any two people can interpret the request for a battery of tests to mean two slightly different things, one focusing on these twelve important factors and another just doing the full array of seventeen. Once the person who ran the full array did that it added the categories into my prior test results, all of which I can see comparatively side by side on my computer screen. So to me it appeared as if some new information suddenly appeared and it sounded like warning signs. Once that mode entered into my brain I believe I became hyper aware of anything and everything that seemed unusual and I exaggerated into more

Month seven has passed pretty much in the blink of an eye over here. It's been two months since my last doctor's visit ( and these are my sins.... am I right? All you Catholics were saying it right along with me ) and another week before I'll see her. In general I still feel pretty good, but there have been a few concerns over the last couple of months that I'm anxiously waiting to see the doctor about. Back before I went on dialysis there were some signs that I didn't recognize that suggested I was going downhill. A few of those signs are rearing their ugly heads and it makes me nervous. Mind you... these same signs could be almost anything else including coincidence, but my last few test results have had some interesting results that previously were blank and these results literally describe the physical results of what my disease actual does to my kidneys. Now... I still have my two kidneys given to me by my makers and they function at some small percentage a