Twelve months ago last Sunday (18th May), I had a kidney transplant. It basically gave me my life back, so Sunday was kind of like a birthday. The kidney was donated by my mother, so she not only gave birth to me back in 1967, she gave me my life again last year.

The operation went well, recovery was un-problematic, and aside from a few initial difficulties getting used to all the anti-rejection drugs I have to take, my health just keeps getting better and better.

And although the twice-daily ‘pill-salad’ I have to take kind of sucks, it sure as hell beats the shit out of spending about 6 hours trapped in a chair (comfy as it was), hooked up to a dialysis machine, three times per week. Dialysis added up to about 20 or 25 hours a week including preparation time and cleaning up afterwards, equivalent to a half-time job for both me and my partner (I dialysed at home, thanks to the dialysis machine and supplies provided by the hospital. I am so glad that I live in a civilised country with a public health system for all. I’d probably be dead if I lived somewhere barbaric like the U.S. where access to decent health care is dependent on your income or wealth)

As well as the enormous improvement the transplant has made to my daily life, I’m looking forward to travelling again. Travel was basically impossibly impractical on dialysis. Post-transplant, it’s quite possible as long as I’m careful and take appropriate precautions (the anti-rejection drugs partially suppress my immune system, so I’m at higher risk for catching some infectious diseases)

Best of all, the greatest risk of losing a transplanted organ is within the first twelve months – if the transplant survives that long, there’s an excellent chance that it will survive ten or twenty years or more.

And I’m hoping that, if I ever need another kidney, in five or ten or twenty years time they’ll be able to grow me one “to order” from my own DNA, so no risk of rejection.

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