I was diagnosed eight years ago this week. I remember sitting in the clinic with my parents and having loads of information thrown at us. At that stage there were far more questions than answers. I had absolutely no idea what most of it meant then, let alone what it would continue to mean eight years later. It’s been both so much worse and so much better than I ever expected. I remember leaving the
“It doesn’t escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else’s.” – Lupita Nyong’o
My hair and I are in a long-term love/hate relationship. For many years, I absolutely hated it. I’m adopted, so nobody else in my family had hair as curly as mine. My parents weren’t particularly adept styling it when I was growing up, so we just kind of ignored that it was the way it was and did the best we could. I brushed it out and tied it up and…it didn’t always go very
If I had to think of a list of words to describe myself, “sporty” or “athletic” would absolutely not feature. I don’t really even like to watch sport, and I not-so-secretly pride myself on being the least rugby-knowledgeable Kiwi most people will ever meet. Attending an event like the British Transplant Games wasn’t something that really ever registered in my mind. I knew friends of mine had been in the past, but I never considered going
Sometimes, I compare myself to other patients. Thanks to both my level of charity involvement and the wonders of social media, I am pretty well-connected to a very large number of other patients and transplant recipients. All of us have different situations and different experiences. Some are “much worse” than me. They have stories, from a health perspective, a personal one, or in many cases both, that I cannot imagine having lived through. As the
I’m Holly. I’m a writer, speaker and kidney patient advocate currently living in northern England.
