27th of September.

Hi everyone, I am sorry I haven’t updated the blog for a while. The recovery from the operation is going well. I’ve had a few setbacks but will go into those details in a post later.

For this post I thought I’d tell you about the operations which ended up taking a lot longer than everyone thought.

I find that before any major operation I really battle to sleep well. I’m sure it’s the nerves that keep me up. This didn’t concern me because I knew I would be catching up on this lost sleep over the next few days.

Both Shay and Taniele (Dusty’s wife) got to the hospital very early. I was very grateful to have Shay by my side. She calms me and helps me keep my focus on what is important. The last thing we do before I go into theatre is pray. We had everything over to our Saviour and know that there is nothing more we can do.

The procedure of the day is Dusty would go into his theatre an hour or so before me then I would get wheeled into my own theatre and once I was ready to receive the kidney only then would his surgeons clamp the vessels leading to and from the kidney, take it out and then transport it to my surgical team. From there Prof would examine the kidney, flush it and insert it in me. Normally these operations take up to 5 hours, but due to the excessive scar tissue from my previous operations just opening me up took much longer. This meant that Dusty’s team had to wait and what was meant to be 5 hours ended up being closer to 7. Even with all the stress of the day Taniele had a sense of humour and likened Dusty to a big cooler box.

This image below shows that the new kidney is not put near the old kidneys, they put it in your groin.

Both operations were successful. Dusty was taken to ICU and I was taken to isolation in surgical ward 1. The next chapter was about to start and neither Dusty nor I knew how hard things were about to get.