Yesterday's Rochester Run was, thankfully, uneventful. Her labs are stable, and they are again decreasing one of her transplant medications. She's been flipped from the medication that looks like bright yellow finger pain to a pill. Antivirals have been gone for few weeks.
No trip is complete without a walk, a restaurant, and music and conversation. All of it was interesting, fun, and relaxing.
Next visit: TWO months.
DeeDee
Most donor families stay pretty quiet about their sacrifice. There must be donor families everywhere, given the sheer number of transplant recipients there are. We don't generally hear a lot about them, or from them. I can't begin to imagine the range of stories, tragedies, incomparable pain.
I heard one of these stories today.
In the early 1990's, the mother I met today let her asthmatic daughter go to that last swim class: The one, her daughter argued, that would prove she was a good enough swimmer to go to camp and not have to "swim with the babies." Later that night, her daughter went into anaphylactic shock. It was one of those, "We did all we could do, but..." moments. No one had any idea what happened. Chlorine? Mold? Her mom will never know.
Her heart and lungs were damaged by the anaphylaxis. Her family, in what was certainly the worst moment of their lives, donated her kidneys, liver and pancreas.
Not long after, the patient's mom saw a news article about a man who'd received a kidney from a very young donor. She connected the dots, and she learned his story. He was a young adult with 2 kids. His kidney failure was lifestyle driven. To get on the transplant list, he had to get clean, stop smoking, and turn his life around. When he learned the transplant donor was a child, he changed EVERYTHING. He became a good and consistent father to his small children. He never went back to old habits. He became a better person.
The donor's mom finds comfort in this. The donor's little brother, on the other hand, doesn't want to hear any of it. It angers him, somehow. He was pre-kindergarten when everything happened. He and his sister were about as different in age as my little brother and me. I can imagine, had I died young, that his life would have been radically different. I was his big sister. At those ages, despite the age difference, we were important to each other in ways that we didn't understand until years later. I can't imagine how either of us would be without the the other.
Babygirl's life has been saved, twice over, by deceased donors. The price their families have paid for that incredible, unimaginable, anguishing gift beggars imagination.
DeeDee
