My hair and I are in a long-term love/hate relationship. For many years, I absolutely hated it. I’m adopted, so nobody else in my family had hair as curly as mine. My parents weren’t particularly adept styling it when I was growing up, so we just kind of ignored that it was the way it was and did the best we could. I brushed it out and tied it up and…it didn’t always go very
If I had to think of a list of words to describe myself, “sporty” or “athletic” would absolutely not feature. I don’t really even like to watch sport, and I not-so-secretly pride myself on being the least rugby-knowledgeable Kiwi most people will ever meet. Attending an event like the British Transplant Games wasn’t something that really ever registered in my mind. I knew friends of mine had been in the past, but I never considered going
In September last year, I turned 30. My younger self always thought I’d be married by now. In my mind, it was just how life worked. I would finish secondary school and university. Then I would build a career, buy a house and somewhere in between all those milestones Mr. Right would appear. He would eventually be followed by children and we would be set. Funnily enough, a complex medical condition, multitude of scars and
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
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
I’m Holly. I’m a writer, speaker and kidney patient advocate currently living in northern England.
