I had covid three weeks ago, and it was intense for a few days. I didn’t have trouble breathing, but I had a lot of fever, and even had hypothermia! (34.5C) I came out weakened for several days. I had to take naps every day for a week, even though I wasn’t sick anymore. I arrived at my nephrology follow-up last week on edge. I was tired, and I was so over it. I say it again and again, it’s so long waiting to resume my life, without knowing when I can really live again!
Faced with my eyes full of tears and my apparent psychological distress, they took the time to make me meet the psychologist of the center of acute renal failure. I already have a psychologist that I have been seeing as needed for years, so I suspected that she could not help me and that she would refer me to my psychologist. But I was hopeful that she would particularly understand my distress related to the disease, given the environment where she works. Indeed, she couldn’t do anything for me, but that morning she listened to me when I clearly needed to speak.
What the disease made me lose for an indefinite time
By telling her my story from the beginning, I was able to see clearly how the disease came at an important time in my life. I worked so hard to get my Master of Business Administration from HEC Montréal between 2016 to 2018. In January 2019, I started my new career here at the CIUSSS MCQ, where I had the chance to do a job that had a real impact on the lives of CIUSSS employees and managers.
In March 2019, I started to be nauseated all the time. I was single by choice since 2014, because I preferred to be alone than poorly matched. At the beginning of 2019, I met Thierry, who became my boyfriend a few months later. On our second date, I told him that if we were together in a year, I wanted to start a family with him (I was and am very ready :P).
In October 2019, I learned that I only had 30% kidney function left and that it was rapidly decreasing, and I was told that I could not have a child before a kidney transplant. Thierry and I were therefore a few months away from starting our family when the news was announced.
And finally, in September 2020, I had to stop working because of the symptoms that were too important to continue.
So I had to pause my work, which made me so happy and for which I had really worked hard, and had to put aside my desire for family. At 34 at the time, I was cut off a lot of my motivation to move forward, and put on hold. I can’t really make plans anymore, because I don’t know when I’ll be able to make them happen. When I want to do really exciting things, I lack energy. I have to curb my ambitions.
It’s as if my life had been put on hold and I no longer had the right to dream, at the risk of being too disappointed by the impossibility of accomplishing anything.
It’s annoying. I was on the cusp of having the life I wanted, accomplished at work and an inch away from starting my family. I lost everything, or rather had everything suspended, just before my life was exactly what I had been working towards for years.
It’s not fair. But I know, life rarely is.
A different reality
I know I’m still doing things. I’m aware of that, but it doesn’t seem that much on a daily basis. I really just feel like I try to do stuff, I get too tired and then have to rest. Basically, that’s my life. But at the same time, it is by struggling like this that I manage to advance the cause of Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD) and living donation. That’s how I move forward little by little in my projects. I still manage a little…
It’s just that I don’t really feel it.
But this is my life. And it’s still a good one, anyway. I’m in a really happy couple, and I have people around me.
The goal is to appreciate what you have. And I appreciate it.
But I can’t wait to live again…
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