Ten years of gratitude

Ten years of gratitude

Anniversaries aren’t really my thing. I often forget the date Deano and I were married or the precise year my mother died. If it wasn’t branded into my identity, I’d forget my birthday too. But the marking of a decade of post-kidney transplantation life is significant, a weight of remembrance, a constant chart of loss and gain. A small unextinguishable light.

Ten years ago, at dawn on 3 December 2014, I pushed my way through the hydraulic-door hiss of the surgical unit at Westmead Hospital, all my anxieties, hopes and friendly ghosts channelling one prayer to the universe: please, let this work, let us have ten years. Just ten years. Deano and I hadn’t shared enough life yet. We’d only been married a couple of years, and it had taken me forty to find him. To know this kind of love. A love that embraced all of me, kissed my wounds, recognised my strangeness, daily celebrated the fact of my existence. I wasn’t giving that up without a fight.

Compared to what I stood to lose, giving him one of my kidneys seemed a small price. Yes, I wanted him to be well. I wanted him to live without the ever-dying light of kidney failure. I wanted the brightness to return to his blue-blue eyes. And I won.

Forget him for a second; forget the superlative skill and care of Westmead’s renal team. I won life’s lottery. For the past ten years, I have been loved. Absolutely loved. This love has fuelled everything I have done. Every word I have written, the new path of research I’m carving, the spaces of peace required to learn how to love others more clearly and fully: my children, my grandchild, my brother, my friends, random strangers, myself. None of this would have happened without Deano. My muse de bloke. My lover. My every-day, engine-stoking friend.

And now our ten years are done. Because the universe has a sense of humour, a couple of weeks ago a new threat emerged in the form of a bug, just an ordinary bug. But anyone who knows anything about immune-system suppression, which all transplant recipients live with, knows that ordinary bugs can turn into mortal enemies. These weeks have been stressful and scary. It didn’t help that the first sign of it manifested as splattered spots in his lungs that looked suspiciously like a malignant cancer. The body is a fun park, a garden of pleasure and pain.

All will be well, whatever happens next, and there is every reason to believe the bug will be vanquished. But a lesson has been learned: it’s time to simply live, to live more simply and in deeper gratitude.

When Deano first woke from the surgery with our new life coursing through him and the true-blueness of his eyes returned, he said he’d called our kidney Lucy, because the name means ‘light’. Now, Lucy is under siege, because the drugs used to treat the bug unironically attack kidney function. But she’s always been a tough little fist of flesh. And I will choose and choose to live more brightly in her light too, inside the privilege of everything she’s gifted us so far.

Image: creative commons collage