“Having said that I am not as mentally troubled as I would have been a few years ago. Misfortunes have a certain advantage of making you stronger. Perhaps that is why I have not uninstalled social media apps and alike — my coping mechanism in the previous days.”
Even before the national lockdown, I knew that the next few months are going to be harrowing for me. Intuition. I seem to have a sixth sense.
Walking is necessary for me, for a kidney transplant recipient. What they do is, they cut a big vein which goes through abdomen towards one of the legs, and plant the transplanted graft (kidney) there. Thus I have to keep my legs moving. Else there might be complications like blot clotting (in the graft arteries) and high blood pressure.
There is an added, and perhaps bigger, issue of weight-gain, something which is troubling me nowadays more than it should. I have gained a total of three kgs in two months, two of which came in the last two weeks.
Of course, I am myself to be blamed — I have been eating a lot of peanut butter, and jam. When I walk I can feel the movement of my chest muscles up and down — manboobs are back. I can feel the bag of my stomach sashaying when I move. Good looks aren’t a concern. Everyone wants to look good. But good looks become secondary when it is a matter of life and death, and if I gain too much weight, I am going to be diabetic, and that would decimate every chance of another transplant. Medically, diabetic patients are not allowed to have transplants, because a diabetic body will kill any new graft, and also surgery is very very tough because of an absolute chance of over bleeding.
Having said that I am not as mentally troubled as I would have been a few years ago. Misfortunes have a certain advantage of making you stronger. Perhaps that is why I have not uninstalled social media apps and alike — my coping mechanism in the previous days.
But there is always a lingering fear…. And I need to work on my mind. I need to take deep breaths and calm myself down. And I need to be happy. Stress and anxiety is a bigger reason than weight-gain when it comes to diabetics.
I need to laugh with friends and have fun with them. Do stupid things. Stupid things become necessary when you are all cooped up and you do not really understand what’s going on. No one can understand what a person in the need of a kidney goes through, and I do, and its worse than death. And if it happens in these uncertain times, I might end up losing all the mental strength that I have gained over the past few months, and do something that I should not.
I need to take a leaf from the passages of the great Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato and work on myself. And I need to let my friends let me be childish, and not judge me. Because that’s really who I am — a child caged inside a sick body.
