What I have learned in 7.5 months

A little over 7 and a half months ago I learned about my kidney failure and started all of this process. Here are a few things I have learned.

My wife is a strong person. She has surprised me at times at her ability to handle all of the things that we have had to go through. She has been the one to help keep me focused on the good things. I am a lucky man.

I have a lot of good friends. Whenever I needed some positive thoughts and energy, there has always been someone to call or drop an email or come see me personally. They didnt know I needed them and usually the call or email would start with "hey I was just thinking about you..." They have been there to celebrate each small success I have had as well as helping me out of some funk. And then there are all of the folks, some I dont even know or know well, that have volunteered to be tested to see if they are a match. Words cant adequately describe how grateful I am to these people. More on that in a later post.

Not all Doctors are bad and not all are good. Obviously I am finding it hard to trust doctors what with the Doctor that created this problem and with my first Nephrologist that was full of bad advice (I am being polite here). I find my self second-guessing everything they do or say. I look up every drug that I am prescribed (often in the Doctor's office) before I will take it. However, I have met some incredible Doctors that I do trust and am grateful to have working on me.

The human body is an amazing machine. Most people take their bodies for granted and abuse them. I know I did. To think that the body can use fluids in the abdominal cavity as a replacement kidney leaves me speechless. Ditto for knowing that if it only has one kidney, the kidney grows some to work more efficiently. I was told in October by a couple of Doctors that they were surprised I was alive or not in a coma with the test results they got back on my kidney. My body kept working and adapting to keep me alive.

I work for and with some great people. OK, obviously this doesnt apply to everyone like a certain unnamed group that is extremely late in paying thousands of dollars for services I did for them over 6 months ago, but they are the exception to this rule. Last fall I had clients volunteering to take me to the Doctor or pick up prescriptions for me. They worked around my hemodialysis schedule (back when i was going to the clinic 3 times a week for 4 hours each time). They covered meetings and events for me. I even had vendors that would drive 40+ miles to my house to pick up things on days I didnt feel like leaving the house, even taking things to some of their competitors for me.

There are a lot of people that have kidney problems and lots of people with transplants. Even though I had done some work in the past for the kidney foundation, I never really grasped this fact. It seems almost everybody I know knows somebody or is related to somebody that has gone through this. There was even a King of the Hill episode on giving a kidney (also a South Park episode but I couldnt bring myself to watch that one). CNN did a story Wednesday night on kidney donations. Cojo was on Oprah yesterday to talk about his transplant. All of this helps reassure me that everything is going to be all right.