Reflecting on my first year on dialysis and the feeling of having lost my identity as I began to make more and more accommodations in my life for dialysis to the point where I no longer recognised any resemblance of my past self
Charting my life of sitting in waiting rooms as a Child of Chronic Kidney Disease to a University Student with IGA Nephropathy to present day a Young Adult on Dialysis.
Struck by the serendipitous moment of returning home to a bare fir tree after a long hospital appointment has left me feeling all the sentiments of Wendy Cope's "The Christmas Life Poem". Finding the small joys in this trying season as all dialysis patients do.
The Final Instalment: the mental toll of moving to a higher dialysis prescription. It held hostage my mind, my future and my sense of self. Only through self compassion and the undeniable truth from the nephrologist, was I able to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
My name is Lai and my kidneys failed at the age of 23 at the height of the pandemic in 2020. Ever since I have been living and working on home peritoneal dialysis for 9 hours a day, 7 days a week.
