Do What You Can – and Keep Smiling
This is a guest post.
When a disease kills a number of your family members, and threatens your life and the lives of others you love, the disease is asking you a question: What are you going to do about me?
Many possible answers present themselves:
(1) Try to enjoy your life without thinking about the disease, and hope it doesn’t kill you or anyone else.
(2) Become obsessed with the disease, letting its looming threat drain your joy.
(3) Keep your mouth shut, hoping that your silence can prevent people from feeling sorry for you / worrying for you / declining to hire you / declining to date you.
(4) Fight back, without losing your smile and sense of humor.
At 19 I learned that in addition to height and an interest in reading, I had also inherited polycystic kidney disease from my father. Cysts, or pockets of fluid, grow on and throughout both kidneys of people with PKD, often causing high blood pressure, aneurysms and renal failure by the mid-40s or early 50s.
My grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather had all dropped dead of heart attacks in their mid-40s. (My father had died at 42, though not of PKD; he drowned.) I am now 41. For many years I tried not to think about PKD. I definitely didn’t talk about it. I hoped that science would advance in time to save me and my siblings.
Then my first cousin died at 35. A great guy, Mike was just five months older than I was. We had grown up together. PKD gave him high blood pressure and an aneurysm, and when he died he left two young children and many other shocked relatives behind. I decided I couldn’t wait for science: I had to give science a hand. I wanted to help fund the research that would cure PKD, saving not just me, but two of my siblings, my cousin, their kids, and the other 600,000 Americans — one in every 500 people you see — who have PKD.
Doing this makes me feel good. I’m glad to know that my small contribution is much better than nothing. It lightens my burden to meet others who are also fighting PKD. And raising money to fight PKD has also taught me interesting things about people I wouldn’t otherwise have learned. Some close friends whose help I expected have given nothing, while many people I knew much less well have given a great deal, blowing me away with their generosity. I’ve heard similar things from other fundraisers. People are funny.
If you’d like to help, too, please check out my music video at www.kennythekidney.com.
If it makes you smile at least once, please pass it on to a friend or two.
And if you can afford it, please click the “Donate” button and donate $5 or more to help cure PKD. (Sadly, donations under $5 cost more to process than they’re worth.) If you enter your middle name as “Lyved,” I’ll be able to tell Andrew that you heard about me on his site — and that’ll make Andrew feel good, too.
Thank you!
Best,
Kenny the Kidney