New Year, New Start...

I guess the title of this post is a bit of a give away.

My brother has decided to opt for a direct transplant, instead of the pooled scheme. He has decided this because the responsibility of letting another pair down, is too much. At least this way he can do the transplant, when he is ready and on his terms.

We have decided that we'd like to do the transplant in January and have a very tentative date set, which is the 24th January 2014. There it is! An actual date. My brother will be getting my left kidney, which i have named Lucy!! You know for lefty loosey, righty tighty!!

I thought hearing the date would scare me more than it has. Of course I am scared but I am also relieved to have a rough of idea of when it is going to happen. At least now we can both make some plans, I can let my employers know and organise my recovery period.

For the past 18 months or so, I have felt like I have had to put certain aspects of my life on hold because I never knew when the transplant was going to happen. Yes, there were definitely times when this was very frustrating for me but you have to remind yourself why your making these sacrifices. I am giving my brother the greatest gift you can give a person, so in the grand scheme the sacrifices I have made are a drop in the ocean.

One thing I do have to do prior to surgery is quit smoking!! So with that in mind I have signed up for Stoptober. It's a little early, true. However, I figure, I'll never again have a better motivator to stop smoking than donating kidney. So wish me luck.

The Fear

Donating a kidney is not something that should be entered into lightly. It’s a big thing to put your body through. Hence the reason you have to go through so many tests and meet with a counselor.

If you didn’t feel some degree of fear, I think you’d have to be superhuman. The surgery itself, is cause enough to feel scared. However, this is not a fear that I have felt, but I’m sure I will once a date is set.

The fear that I experience is a fear of failure. This is not new to me, it is something that I have always fought with and more often then not it’s gets the better of me. Some people that suffer with a fear of failure, for them it usually involves trying something new and failing. That isn’t the case for me. My fear is more to do with failing to achieve. I am always up for trying something new, sometimes it takes a little persuasion, but I’ll usually give it a try. However, when it comes to pushing myself to achieve more, I’m afraid I wont be good enough or that I wont reach my goal. So rather than face all that, I don’t try and make lame excuses and usually miss out. Then the inevitable kicking oneself usually follows.

Donating a kidney to my brother, hasn’t been safe from my fear of failure either. I worry that if it doesn’t work, I have failed him and my family and that is a lot of pressure to deal with. There have been a few times when it has gotten the better of me, but good friends have been there to reassure me that I am doing a good thing. So with a little help from friends and members of the kidney team, I have realized that if the transplant doesn’t work for whatever reason, it wont be me that has failed, after all I’m giving away a healthy organ. It took me a long time to accept that, but now that I have, I can finally begin to let go of that fear. Hopefully, I can transfer that logic to other areas of my life.