Tag: CarePages

Thanks, Carepages.

Posted in communication, hope, UncategorizedTagged , 1 Comment

Carepages goes dark tomorrow and I am going to miss it.  What is Carepages?  It was a health blog that you signed up for to notify your loved ones about your health journey.  We have used it as a lifeline for the past ten years.  When Wendy was super sick, we wrote every day, sometimes twice a day, to keep our loved ones up to date.  As she got stronger and better, we reduced our notifications.  Recently we only used it to mark big milestones.

The thing I loved about Carepages is that it made you really sit down and take stock of the medical day.  In any given day of craziness, it was good to really evaluate what was good, what was bad, and what were the hopes for the next day. And it buoyed our spirits to get messages from our family and friends telling us that they were thinking about us, praying for us, praying for Wendy.  Hospitals can feel isolating, and it was nice to know that people were supporting us from afar.

Today I spent much of the day copying and pasting all of the updates, over 200 of them, over the course of our 10 year medical journey.  I have to be honest, I wept reading a lot of the updates.  Wendy was so young and sick, and I knew, reading the updates, that things were going to get worse before they were going to get better.  I was so young too, and angry at our situation, the unfairness of it all. In 2007 and 2008 Wendy spent every holiday in the hospital, some 180 days.  I left my job, and Michael took an extended leave.  I slept less than three feet from my parents in a hotel room for months, and it became clear that we needed to move into an apartment.  We had two blissful hours with Wendy in the apartment at Christmas, so she could open up her presents, before we had to bring her back to the hospital.

I marked the day that Wendy’s kidneys started working again, the first time we made it home, the day she coded in the PICU, the day she was put on the transplant list. I read the day of her transplant, and the first anniversary, the second anniversary, the fifth anniversary.

As I read, I also read messages from loved ones who hadn’t gotten married yet, or hadn’t had their babies yet.  Friends who hadn’t gotten divorced yet.  Stalwart friends who were battling their own illnesses and have since passed away.  I am so grateful for those messages, to be able to read them, to be able to keep them.

At some point, Michael and I had decided to make Wendy’s Carepage public, so that other people could take comfort in her story, as I had taken comfort in the stories of others over the years, especially when we were looking for stories of kidney transplants.  We had people follow us from all over the world, and they wrote messages of support as well.

I’m going to miss Carepages, it was a part of our life for a long time. Now in the age of facebook and WordPress, it seems almost quaint to have a blog site dedicated just to an illness journey.  Perhaps that’s why it’s going away.  But it marked our lives.   It marked Wendy’s life, her health, her strength.

Today, Carepages showed me how far we’ve come.  A new town, a new home, a new baby (now eight years old), and new friendships along with the strengthening of old friendships. So thank you, Carepages, for everything, for the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Thank you for the hope.  Thank you for the journey.

 

Ripple Effect

Posted in communication, coping, Resilience, transplant, UncategorizedTagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Have you ever heard a story that just stays with you?  Something that hits at your core, that makes you think about it, and re-think about it, and connect to it, and share it.  Maybe you have stayed in the car a little longer in a driveway because you are listening to “Story Corps” on NPR.  Maybe it’s something you’ve read on facebook.  Sometimes, you don’t realize how much a person’s story means to you, in your own journey to understanding and recovery from a diagnosis or the diagnosis of your child.

This recently was brought to my attention when a woman asked to be my facebook friend.  I was pretty sure I didn’t know her, had never met her, but there were a lot of people I had met at the American Transplant Games, and many of the mutual friends she and I had in facebook were those same people I had only recently met in Cleveland.  So I decided to accept her friend request and see who she really was.

What I didn’t know is that I had been reading her blog posts for over seven years.

Her daughter, Lacey, had gone through two organ transplants, both a heart and a kidney.  The heart transplant happened when Lacey was a baby, and after many years of immuno suppression (which isn’t great on the kidneys) her kidneys gave out too.  Lacey’s brother donated his kidney to her.  I had read all about it on their CarePage.

CarePages are a medical blog where you can update your loved ones about your condition. There are other ones like it, the most popular being CaringBridge.   We had been blogging about Wendy’s illness from the first week that we were at Massachusetts General Hospital.  It was helpful because it kept everyone updated without having to tell the same story over and over again.  It also was therapeutic for me to take stock of the day in the evening and determine what had gone well and what hadn’t.  In a hospital where certain events happens quickly between long periods of waiting, it was helpful to think through every day to process it all and write about it for our loved ones.   It was also bolstering because our loved ones could write messages of support for us and for Wendy at the bottom of every post, carrying us through to the next day.  There was an option to keep it private, to have people ask to join the group, and initially that’s what we did, kept it closed for only family and friends.

At the point where we were told that Wendy was going to need a kidney transplant, we had never met anyone who had gone through organ transplantation before, so I searched in Carepages and found Lacey Wood’s site.  It’s called LuckyLacey, and it told not only all about her journey as a heart transplant patient, but also as a kidney transplant patient.  It told all about her competitions in the American Transplant Games and the World Transplant Games.  It talked about her college that has a special section for kids with transplants who are going through various stages of transplantation so that they can get the best care they need while still going to college.  I learned so much from this site, that there was a warm, caring transplant community that connected each other to the best care and resources, that there was a celebration of life and living.

At a time when I was very scared, this blog especially gave me hope.

It also showed me what was possible for Wendy.  We never would have known about the American Transplant Games, or the Transplant Winter Camp, or the Chronic Illness Initiative at DePaul University.  We learned though Lacey’s journey and through the generosity of her words in her Carepages blog.

Her blog made me re-think our blog, WildWonderfulWendy.  What if our blog about HUS and kidney transplantation helped someone else the way that LuckyLacey helped us?  Michael and I talked about it and decided to make Wendy’s blog public.  

And now, years later, I’ve started this blog.  I outlined why I decided to write it in the first place in my first post, Brave Fragile Warriors.  I realized that being the parent of a chronically ill kid can be incredibly isolating.  You have so many feelings and not a lot of people who can relate to you.

We never know what impact we have on another’s life.  We don’t know what our ripple effect is.

When Lacey’s  mother contacted me to be my friend on facebook and I realized who she was, I sat down and wrote to her to let her know how much Lacey’s blog helped me through the fear and isolation of being the mom of a kidney transplant kid.  Otherwise she never would have known her own ripple effect.

It’s so important to share these moments, so other parents know they are not alone.  It’s equally important to share with others how much their stories touch our hearts, so that they may continue to write.  We are many stories, but the Same feelings of helplessness, fear and love.

Thanks for reading my stories. Please share your own, in the comments below or with your own blog and then let me know so I can read them.

Forward together is better than forward alone.