Two years! I've had a few people tell me, "It seems longer than that somehow." I understand why. We've had two years packed with the fallout of a kidney transplant: Medication side effects, hospitalizations, financial catch-up, Make-A-Wish planning and travel.
I wish I could honestly say that things are better now than they were before the transplant, but I can't look at her school record for these past two years and imagine that she is healthier than she was in the two years before the transplant. Sure, dialysis sucked. And we were living an ignorance-is-bliss life before she went on dialysis. I must say it's easier living with a chronically ill child if you haven't noticed yet that she IS ill.
Perhaps if we'd been stuck on dialysis for two years instead of the blessedly few months we were, I'd have a different view of her overall 'healthiness.' She's been a transplant recipient nearly three times longer than she was a dialysis patient. The memory of the ugliness of that time is certainly fading, but she is still suffering nearly everyday. Headaches, bellyaches, mild viral illness that take WEEKS to clear....
I don't want to appear ungrateful for the transplant - I'm not ungrateful. But it didn't fix my Babygirl. I've seen blogs by kidney transplant recipients who also to struggle with what I'm feeling right now: How do you admit that life will never be what it was, ever ever again? How can you properly mourn what you've lost when you're supposed to be feeling happy for what you have? Is it wrong to wish things were different, or that time would go back? There is no way to describe how angry I am that my child was born into the wrong gene pool: That she pays every day for something she has no control over or responsibility for. I am guiltily grateful for not being the one who gave her those genes, grateful for not needing to bear the feeling of any personal responsibility for making her sick. When I really let these feelings loose, I'm stunned by the depths of my grief.
DeeDee
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