5 Things I’ll Never Forget:
Choosing to be Empowered

This post is Part 5 in a series based on a presentation I recently did. The rest of the posts can be found here. The more I’ve got to know a very broad cross-section of our little “renal world”, the more I’ve wanted to do something of value within this community, something to help other patients. I know I’ve written before about how lucky I am that I’ve come into contact with a lot of

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5 Things I’ll Never Forget:
It’s ok to not be ok.

This post is Part 4 in a series based on a presentation I recently did. The rest of the posts can be found here. I have some friends who joke that there’s some debate over whether I really qualify as a renal patient. Compared to what some of them have lived through, and in many cases are still dealing with, my own circumstances look like a walk in the park. I have a successful transplant,

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5 Things I’ll Never Forget:
Building Relationships

This post is Part 3 in a series based on a presentation I recently did. The rest of the posts can be found here. When I was first diagnosed, I lived in New Zealand. As brilliant as the medical treatment I got there was, NZ is a tiny country population-wise, and I only knew one other renal patient! Patient support groups don’t seem to exist there to the extent they do here, particularly for young

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5 Things I’ll Never Forget:
I don’t know what to say…

This post is Part 2 in a series based on a presentation I recently did. The rest of the posts can be found here. Figuring out how to juggle being “healthy” and “sick” at the same time was extremely challenging, and it was made even harder by the fact that everybody else in my life was trying to work out how to do the same thing. I heard this phrase so many times in the first

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5 Things I’ll Never Forget:
“Is this really me?”

This post is Part I in a series based on a presentation I recently did. The rest of the posts can be found here. The photo of me on the left is how I thought my life was always going to be. A busy, full-time career working as a primary school teacher. That is, until it wasn’t. Three months after this picture was taken, everything changed. I’ve already written about what happened to me when

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