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.