It is hard to fully grasp what has happened in our lives. On October 7th, my husband, Phillip, donated his right kidney to me. Since surgery, I have been laying low and healing: no blogging and no internet, lots of naps and nourishing food. It is fabulous – I highly…
I recently had the pleasure of talking with the insightful Joan Friedlander, author of Business from Bed: The 6 Step Plan to Get Yourself Working Again After a Health Crisis. She has written a wonderful guide to creating a business or career that is in alignment with your values and…
On our flight back from the last book tour stop in Spokane, Phillip and I made an exhaustive list of things we wanted to get done before the transplant. It is unique that we will both be in surgery, and we wanted to have our home and lives a well…
My kidney transplant date is set and it is just a little more than a week away on October 1st! My donor? Well, that is my gorgeous, generous, loving, amazing husband Phillip! And now I’m crying… I am a huge puddle of gratitude for the way all of this is…
The time came last week for me to begin temporarily scaling back. This is the most important thing you can do to preserve and honor your health when you’re hitting a rough patch or going through a flare-up. This is also the hardest thing for driven, goal oriented individuals like…
Participating in a clinical trial can be intimidating. There are certainly lots of things to consider based on what it being tested. That said, you can also participate in making history. During September of 2011, I traveled to the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland to participate in…
I met a woman a few months ago who’d had knee replacement surgery. She said that she tried everything under the sun to avoid surgery – all of the woo-woo and not-so-woo-woo stuff. She finally relented to the operation when she could not longer walk. Before she spoke they showed…
Have you ever had a grouping of words strike you so profoundly that you almost need to pull your car over when you hear them? Fortunately, I was pulling into a parking spot when they came over the radio, or I would have done just that. I was listening to…
Illness requires us to let go of a lot of things. I sometimes think it’s a spiritual quest toward non-attachment. Priorities become clearer as we need to clear our plates to allow for healing. I had to let go of two things today. I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow where…
The cankles have arrived! It’s lovely to watch your ankle expand during the day to eventually swallow any definition you previously had between your calves and feet. The one lesson this has taught me is that strappy sandals are not a good choice at this point in my care. We…