I love to tell the story of my kidney transplant (I have retold it every October since starting this newsletter, and it was also the subject of Issue No. 1 several years ago). I always try to choose a different facet of the story to highlight each time. In honor of the fifth anniversary, I want to highlight something incredibly near and dear to my heart that came out of this experience.
I haven’t shared this story often, probably because I get emotional each time I talk about it. In the weeks leading up to the transplant surgery, I often thought about how it would feel to kiss my kids goodbye as I left for the hospital. I wondered how it would feel as I kissed my wife and hugged my parents when they wheeled me back to the operating room. I was super confident in my doctors, and they were confident the operation would be a success, but this was still a big operation. I was also concerned for my best friend, Jacob. He was married with a little one, and his wife was eight months pregnant with their second. Yet here he was, voluntarily undergoing major surgery and giving me his kidney.
