Hey Everyone,
So I am going to have my first transplant (tx) meeting with a tx team in two weeks, to become better educated on a tx and consider getting listed. I am told that my Lung Allocation Score is about 37-38. Anyway, I keep going over in my head ...
"Is it all worth it?"
I am 37 years of age and consider myself as having had a good life full of difficulties and tragedies. My parents passed when I was 11, and I subsequently lost my grandparents within a period of two years after that. I share this to convey that I very early found the concept of death to be very real, and I lived my life accordingly, never leaving a stone unturned, seeking adventures (travel, skydiving, surfing, you name it -and I've done it) and fighting the good fight (like all CF Warriors). Over the past 8 years my health started to go really south, which was initiated with having caught 8 parasites in a foreign country, and not being diagnosed with the bugs till over a year after catching them, which really advanced my CF issues. All that began an incredibly difficult path to where I am now, with pulmonary hypertension, elevated CO2 levels (giving me migraines and a v-tach last year), and looking at the prospects of a tx.
I am divorced (CF broke her already fractured spirit), living hand to mouth in a darkening economy, I have no immediate family to speak of, though I have become somewhat close with cousins, and have collected some amazing friends along my journey in the US and around the world. Things are tough, but I've lived a beautiful life.
So I ask, with an uncertain future - certainly full of ups and downs (I may be a bit depressed right now), as a single man getting older, and the prospects of a HUGE burden on my friends and cousins, I am wondering is all the effort that goes into a tx worth it? Is it worth it to the tx-recipient? And furthermore, do the care-providers (friends/family/etc.) really get that much out of sacrificing so much? I wonder if the tx even goes well (read some bad and good stories), can I live up to the responsibility of living a life that someone else donated and for which so many sacrificed for me 'to be'? I also wonder 'not to be': if it wouldn't simply be easier to let the ship run its natural course and run-a-ground by not getting a transplant, thereby ending all the uncertainty, difficulties, loneliness, and responsibilities?
Thoughts?
Thanks,
Grendel
So I am going to have my first transplant (tx) meeting with a tx team in two weeks, to become better educated on a tx and consider getting listed. I am told that my Lung Allocation Score is about 37-38. Anyway, I keep going over in my head ...
"Is it all worth it?"
I am 37 years of age and consider myself as having had a good life full of difficulties and tragedies. My parents passed when I was 11, and I subsequently lost my grandparents within a period of two years after that. I share this to convey that I very early found the concept of death to be very real, and I lived my life accordingly, never leaving a stone unturned, seeking adventures (travel, skydiving, surfing, you name it -and I've done it) and fighting the good fight (like all CF Warriors). Over the past 8 years my health started to go really south, which was initiated with having caught 8 parasites in a foreign country, and not being diagnosed with the bugs till over a year after catching them, which really advanced my CF issues. All that began an incredibly difficult path to where I am now, with pulmonary hypertension, elevated CO2 levels (giving me migraines and a v-tach last year), and looking at the prospects of a tx.
I am divorced (CF broke her already fractured spirit), living hand to mouth in a darkening economy, I have no immediate family to speak of, though I have become somewhat close with cousins, and have collected some amazing friends along my journey in the US and around the world. Things are tough, but I've lived a beautiful life.
So I ask, with an uncertain future - certainly full of ups and downs (I may be a bit depressed right now), as a single man getting older, and the prospects of a HUGE burden on my friends and cousins, I am wondering is all the effort that goes into a tx worth it? Is it worth it to the tx-recipient? And furthermore, do the care-providers (friends/family/etc.) really get that much out of sacrificing so much? I wonder if the tx even goes well (read some bad and good stories), can I live up to the responsibility of living a life that someone else donated and for which so many sacrificed for me 'to be'? I also wonder 'not to be': if it wouldn't simply be easier to let the ship run its natural course and run-a-ground by not getting a transplant, thereby ending all the uncertainty, difficulties, loneliness, and responsibilities?
Thoughts?
Thanks,
Grendel