Five Years

🎤She’s beauty, she grace, she’s queen of the abdominal space🎶.

5 years ago yesterday, (I posted about it 5 years ago today) the nurse from the transplant team called to tell me my blood and my liver were a match for Derek and we were a go for transplant. Five years is a long time and not that long at all and I’m suddenly filled with a weird euphoria thinking about my sweet liver getting split in two.

What a champ she was and she was so cute! Whenever I look at the 3D scans I think she looks like a little jaunty bonnet, keeping the other organs in line, up for anything. The lobe she left behind in my body is nearly full size and sometimes I want to tell those young whipper snapper hepatocytes a thing or two about the 60% they never got to meet. How she fought like heck to keep Derek alive, how the surgeons said she was pretty and perfect.

I miss her. I wish sometimes she could have been Derek’s forever liver, that maybe she would have given him the ability to quote 80s movies or convinced him raisins are the enemy. But I also know she was proud to do the job she did and happy to pass the baton to the new liver that took her place. Drink an extra glass of water in her honor tonight. She deserves it.