life Archives - Page 5 of 8

There’s a crack in everything

Kintsugi (金継ぎ) is a traditional Japanese art form, with the name literally meaning to patch with gold. Kintsugi transforms broken pottery into new artwork using gold lacquer to repair the cracks. Being diagnosed with a serious chronic illness and needing an organ transplant are things you never think will happen to you, until they do. When I look back at my pre-CKD self, I find her almost unrecognisable. My life has changed forever. While I absolutely don’t believe that “everything happens for a

March 13, 2018 1 Comment

A “Good Enough” Recipient?

Sometimes, I compare myself to other patients. Thanks to both my level of charity involvement and the wonders of social media, I am pretty well-connected to a very large number of other patients and transplant recipients. All of us have different situations and different experiences. Some are “much worse” than me. They have stories, from a health perspective, a personal one, or in many cases both, that I cannot imagine having lived through. As the

March 11, 2018 24 Comments

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

March 7, 2018 1 Comment

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

March 5, 2018 No Comments

My Kidney Journey*:
5 Things I’ll Never Forget

A few weeks ago I was invited to be the patient speaker at a KQuIP event for medical staff here in North West England. Honestly, this was a bit of a daunting prospect! I’m not a confident speaker at the best of times, so the thought of standing up and doing a 20-minute presentation about some very personal, sensitive aspects of my life, in front of an audience vastly more knowledgeable than I am was

March 4, 2018 4 Comments

There’s a crack in everything

A “Good Enough” Recipient?

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

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

My Kidney Journey*: 5 Things I’ll Never Forget

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

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

My Kidney Journey*:
5 Things I’ll Never Forget