My husband, Ralph, and I spent more than seven hours at the transplantation clinic at Yale-New Haven Hospital.
We learned about kidney transplants, nutrition, medications, and had private consultations with several health professionals. I had an EKG and chest X-ray and gave what seemed like a lot of blood, twice.
I have PKD - Polycystic Kidney Disease - which is an unfortunate family trait. I wrote about it here in October, and again here in February.
Two wonderful people have offered to give me a kidney, but we have no idea if either of them will be able to do so.
My nephrologist referred me to the Yale clinic to get started on a journey that I know many, many people have taken before.
There were more than 17,000 kidney transplants performed in the United States in 2014, which is a much bigger number than I had thought.
In March I published a month of posts to help raise awareness of PKD. I hope it did.
Ralph and I now are armed with more information and a better sense of what this journey will eventually entail.
It's not easy to write about myself. I take that back...it's easy to write, just not easy to hit the "publish" button. But I'm about to do so.
Thanks for reading.
