I was on dialysis for 18 months before the transplant, so it was important I tried to look ahead to days like my comeback this Saturday. You need those big goals to drive you on.
Organ donation is very personal to me. My mother, before her death, was on kidney dialysis for several years.
A patient healthy enough to undergo a kidney transplant might someday no longer need dialysis. That would free up a slot for a new patient.
I would cancel dialysis to be in the [hopefully upcoming Firefly] movie.
I had been living with dialysis for three years or so, and the new kidney felt like a reprieve, a new gift of life. I felt alive again and I guess that has had an effect on my use of colour.
There is a risk of death associated with donating a piece of liver. It's about one in 500 for the risk of death. The risk of death of donating a kidney is about one in 3000, so this is a riskier operation than donating a kidney. The stakes are usually higher for the recipient of the transplant because unlike kidney failure, where you have a dialysis machine, in liver failure we don't have that kind of machine that allows a patient to survive until they can get a cadaver organ.
I became a hero to everyone because I didn't take dialysis and was still alive.
I had severe asthma and kidney problems and would get 105-degree fevers. I actually almost had to go on dialysis for my kidneys. I was also in the hospital for pneumonia.
I didn't go on dialysis because I was 81 years old and I'd done everything I wanted, or so I thought.
Gratitude is a dialysis of sorts... it flushes the self-pity out of our systems.
We had a big controversy in the United States when there was a limited number of dialysis machines. In Seattle, they appointed what they called a 'God committee' to choose who should get it, and that committee was eventually abandoned. Society ended up paying the whole bill for dialysis instead of having people make those decisions.
It was in 2003 that I realised there was no choice but to have dialysis treatment - by the time of the World Cup that year, I could barely walk. A year later, I finally had a kidney transplant.
or simply:
