I decided to write and share. I don't know if I'm going to put my old stuff back up — transplant feelings are complicated. Right after you get your surgery, people tell you how grateful you should be for your second chance at life. Everyone has this romantic idea that you've had a transplant, and now you're fine, and everything is great, and you feel happy and grateful. If I'm being honest, I wasn't grateful for the first two years. It had nothing to do with my donor or the m

People are far stronger than they give themselves credit for. Consider the pandemic: if you had told the world five years ago that a virus would sweep across the globe, kill millions, and leave us largely defenseless for an entire year, plenty of people would have said, "Nope. Not doing that. I'll just die." And yet — one pandemic later — here we all are. There's a widely accepted misconception that strength means never feeling vulnerable, that courage means never feeling afr

During my second round of liver failure, I was sent home briefly — but I wasn't getting better, and the next day I was readmitted. That's when I noticed a familiar face in the hallway: a neighbor from our area. Her niece, Jenna, was on the same floor, being treated for cancer. Jenna and I ended up sharing a room, and it was a relief to have someone my own age around. Our families already knew each other a little, so visitors would drift between our bedsides, and the room was

Truth be told, before anyone told me I needed one, I never believed I would survive a heart transplant. The wait would be too long, or I'd be too sick — I was certain it would never happen in time. When non-cardiac doctors first started bringing it up around age 12, my response was immediate and firm: I didn't want one. If I was going to die anyway, why bother getting my hopes up? In January 2019, I went in for my biannual cardiology and liver appointments — the usual rotatio

When I was little, I would cry before every poke and prod — screaming louder and louder as it got closer. The moment it happened, I'd go quiet. Adults always assumed it meant the worst was over. It didn't. It meant I'd lost. All that screaming, all that begging and pleading, and none of it had changed anything. There was nothing I could do to protect myself. So I stopped fighting and went somewhere else inside myself. I was sitting in an ER recently when I heard a child cryin

Here is where we are. I was admitted to UCLA on October 24th, 2019, and listed for transplant five days later. On the evening of November 5th, three doctors walked into my room and told me they had found a match — a heart and a liver. They called it a dream come true match. Surgery began November 6th. My new heart went in, and most of the liver transplant was completed. The surgical team let me rest for twenty-four hours, then went back in on November 9th to finish. The surge

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