THREE WEEKS POST TRANSPLANT: NOT ALWAYS MY BEST SELF

To begin with, Piper is doing very well.  She is spunky, funny, happy and active.  She continues to use a feeding tube at night in an effort to gain weight, and she sees her doctors at A.I. three days a week for blood work and other tests to make sure the kidney is working and her medications are tailored perfectly for her.  She is, in a word, awesome.

I’ve had a lot of time to think over the past few weeks, and I’ve really learned quite a bit about myself.  It all really hit home when I returned to work earlier this week and found that, for the first time in seven-plus months, I am actually happy to talk to other people.

For the last seven months, whenever people (usually coworkers, but others as well) asked me about Piper, I never really knew what to say and as a result, didn’t really want to say anything at all.  How are you supposed to respond when you don’t really know the answer?  You can’t say “I don’t know,” and no one wants to hear “not very well,” so what do we all end up saying?  We say things like, “she’s ok,” or “she’ll be ok,” or “we’re hoping she will be fine,” yet, you don’t really believe or know whether those things are actually true.  Today, the first time someone asked how Piper was doing, I was thrilled to respond, “she’s doing great,” and truly meant it.

In fact, I’ve been happy to tell everyone who asks that Piper is doing great.  Yes, she has some challenges ahead of her, but to see the little girl running around my house compared to the zombie child we had several months ago seems like nothing short of a miracle.  They took MY adult sized giant kidney and put it in HER and she peed immediately!  Now she won’t stop peeing!

Anyway, back to my point, which is that I haven’t really been myself for the past 7-8 months.  I have been short with people, easy to frustrate or anger and defensive.  Everyone is understanding about it, but it can be frustrating when you know you aren’t yourself yet there is nothing you can do about it.  I have always worn my emotions on my sleeve.  That’s just who I am.  When I’m down, which is pretty rare, everyone knows it.  I even know that everyone knows it, but I can’t change it.  Erin, on the other hand, is very good at not letting anyone know how she feels.  She can still go about being friendly and patient even on her worst days.

The way I really knew I wasn’t myself was the number of times on any given 10 minute drive I would yell obscenities at other drivers.  It took me a while to figure it out, but I was threatening great bodily harm on bad drivers at least once every 2 minutes, which is high, even for me.  What’s funny is that I would get really mad at the idiots on the road and then immediately wonder why I was getting so mad.  I knew it was ridiculous, but I couldn’t control it.  Now that the transplant is over, I’m back to a much more reasonable once every 10 minutes, which is probably lower than the national average.  

I’m still feeling the emotional and physical effects of the transplant and I think that will take some time to work through, but I can feel myself getting back to my normal, polite, patient self fairly quickly.  The stress which was weighing so heavily upon our backs is mostly gone and that does wonderful things for a person’s outlook and mental and physical self.  There is certainly still stress, but we’ve done everything we can do for Piper.  This kidney should last her a very long time, but of course there is a chance that it won’t.  We have to live with that every day, but there’s not much use in worrying about things you can’t control.  That’s easy for me to type, but not something I’ve been very good about doing in my life.  Maybe now is a good time to start.

Thank you all for the food, prayers, love, support and mostly, food.

Love – Chris and Erin

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