3 years
Today marks 3 years since my very first liver transplant. The person who stood on that side of things could have never anticipated how things would have unravelled. The person who walked into that hospital isn’t the same person who walked out.
Everything has changed.
3 years feels momentous. 3 is the number of full days that passed between my first transplant and my second. In those early days I always said healing came in 3s. I felt significantly better at 3 months, again at 6, 9 and 12. And now we’ve rounded the corner into year 3, and I feel that same realization sinking in my bones. 3 is the number where everything changes.
I am immensely grateful for the life I’ve created. And I am absolutely devastated by grief. I used to think it had to be one or the other. I kept waiting for a magical moment when I would feel over it. There is no over it. There’s only learning how to live in such an intimate relationship with death. It’s always been both.
I could write paragraphs and paragraphs and still never come close to touching the edges of what it means to live this broken open. This day, mixed with such profound brokenness and such deep gratitude in the same breath. Society likes to only focus on the highlight reel, the rebirth part. I’m far more interested in talking about the fertile soil of death from which I grew.
I don’t talk about my transplant story as much as I used to, and part of that is because it’s easier for me. I live so deeply interwoven with grief and gratitude, and there is no separation of the two. It’s a lot for people to stomach. It’s a lot for me to stomach. The acute physical pain and embodied trauma has never left me. The way I so fluidly travel through darkness, the way I thrive there, the way death has always been a portal for me cracking open into more life. I’ve done talks and given interviews since my transplant where I talk about this, the portal of pain, how its awakened so much magic in me.
I’m really, really proud of the person who has grown from such devastation. It’s 3 years, and who I am is fundamentally different. New worlds have opened up to me, new ways of understanding have made themselves known to me.
It’s 3 years out and in a lot of ways this year marks a return, a shift in the way I’ve been operating, a further explosion into more and more healing. I’ve gotten to be part of so many amazing collaborations in the world of holistic chronic illness and transplant support and my career is founded on offering these supportive practices, insights and containers to the world. Being a transplant doula (more on this soon!) and an embodiment facilitator and being able to write and share my stories on what is a now national level, it’s more than I could have ever dreamed of. And the work I do now, every bit of it is for that girl in the ICU bed. It’s so the next person navigating this knows they don’t have to choose between grief and gratitude, that is always gets to be both.
I hope to share more soon in the coming days and weeks about what this all looks like, and how my post transplant life is unfolding in all its magic. For now, I’m holding myself through the intensity of anniversary week. In all its gratitude, in all its grief.
3 years in and its been a wild ride. It’s been everything.
