First Posting

I have no idea what this is supposed to do for me, but I thought I would at lease try it out. This past week has been fairly weird... then again, most weeks are a little strange when you're a dialysis patient. In the past few months I have watched five people die due to kidney failure and other, respective, illnesses. It's scary because they were all mentors to me in some way or another. Ms. Booker was always feisty and full of life. Every other day she would tell me never to let dialysis defeat me. But I watched it defeat her. She went from being this woman who didn't take any shit from anybody, to a mute. It hurt my heart to watch her being rolled in on a gurney. The ambulance techs just treated her like some ragdoll. She couldn't say anything because she had had a stroke and could no longer speak. One day she just gave up. It was the same for the others. Mr. White had a stroke while he was on the dialysis machine. He sat a few chairs away from me. I watched him being rolled away on a gurney barely conscious. He died a few weeks later. I never imagined that I would be experiencing anything like this in my life.

When I first started dialysis, I was one of the youngest patients at my center. One of the hardest things to deal with was not seeing people who were in my age group going through dialysis. I felt alone, like I didn't belong there because I had barely had the chance to begin living my life. Everyone I saw was elderly. They had done many things with their lives, they had had their children, had married the loves of their lives. And here I was, barely out of college, still attempting to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. In a matter of, literally, a month, my life had changed considerably. I was put on a very restrictive diet, I had no income, no insurance, and had a four inch-tube protruding from the right side of my chest. Every day I would wake up and think that I had merely lost my grip on reality and at any moment I would regain it and move on with my life. It's been almost a year, I still haven't regained my grip, but I have also realized that maybe I didn't have such a good grip on my life anyway. So, I decided that I would figure out some other way to cope with having kidney (and now liver) failure and a new path in life. Hopefully, this will help!