It’s been quite some time since I last updated you on my journey with chronic kidney disease. Mostly that’s because I’ve had little to tell you – I’m still receiving dialysis three times a week and the sessions are progressing well. I’m feeling healthy and am still trying to fit as much as I can into the rest of my life, with greater or lesser degrees of success.
Now however, we appear to be making progress and I suspect that life is about to become busy in the best possible kind of way.
At the end of February we submitted my application for the kidney transplant to the Department of Health. For anyone reading this who is based beyond the borders of South Africa, that may be a puzzling statement, so I’d best explain.
In South Africa, if you have a living kidney donor who is unrelated to you by blood, you need to obtain permission from the Minister of Health to go ahead with the transplant. From my understanding, this is to minimize the risk of coercion or financial reward being the reason that the donor is participating. There are a number of checks in place to prevent this type of wrongdoing from happening.
If my donor were related to me, we could skip this step. But since, in my case, my donor is a friend, we need to do it.
Now that all the forms and medical details have been sent, it will take a few weeks for the request to be processed. The department may ask for additional information or more assessments to be done, although the medical team we are working with have tried to be as thorough as possible and ensure that every question has been answered in what they’ve submitted.
For now we are playing the waiting game. And keeping fingers and toes crossed that we will receive approval to go ahead in the next few weeks.
Then it will simply be a question of setting a date for the surgery to take place.
Till then, all will continue as it has been for the last year. Only now, it feels like the end is in sight.
