I follow a number of blogs and other sites revolving around organ donation, lung transplant and whatnot… One of the blogs I follow is written by a girl up in Canada named Bree… It’s titled The Blog Blog – subtitled, When life hands you an illness… Spread it. I’ve been following it for quite a while – I love reading her thoughts, and her wit and sarcasm… There were so many times I understood how she might have been struggling or suffering – but she had me doubled over laughing with some of the thoughts and antics she wrote about…
After a long wait, and watching her celebrate people around her getting their lungs, she got her lungs in August. Reading her journey through recovery has been a lot of fun – and more than anything, I always smile when I see how often she circles back and brings up the person who saved her life – her donor…
She titled a recent post, The last of the summer days… I thought these were a couple of beautiful paragraphs:
Tonight also saw me utilizing these beautiful creatures called lungs. I took the dogs for a walk with both parents and me and Madyson ran a few times. RAN. I've already run, but still, 3 months ago i was still out of it from surgery. Running was not the first thing on my mind. I'm pretty sure nothing was on my mind but the pain i was in and how much i wanted food. And it was as Maddy and I were running that I had this thought: here I am, breathing with someone else's lungs. Unlike a liver or a kidney, where you can't feel them as they work, with lungs, you can. You can consciously make the effort to inflate and deflate them. I can inhale as deeply as i want, and hold it, and hold it, and hold it, all on my own will. But these aren't mine realy: i wasn't born with them. They were entrusted to me b/c my donor was awesome and had the compassion to save others lives in the event of their untimely death.
Again, 'thank-you' fails to encompass how this really is for me. You can't thank someone for that. You just can't. I ran tonight people, and I walked 100 stairs and then some. You cannot wrap that in a box and place in under a tree or anything. It is basic human kindness in the most extreme degree. It may seem simple but it was the most beautiful thing I could think of, on one of the most beautiful days of November.
I have nothing to add, other than I know how she feels…
