Alternate title: this one weird trick adds hours to your day!
I cannot stress enough how much I do not recommend going into kidney failure and then having to do in-clinic hemodialysis for hours on end three days per week.
But I can tell you that if you want to feel like you suddenly have all the time in the world, doing that and then getting a successful kidney transplant is by far the most effective way to go.
I’m making light of a really difficult situation, but it’s true. I simply cannot believe how many hours there are in a day now. Before all this started I felt like I was in a dead run, hopping from task to task. The days were short and time flew by. Then I got sick and suddenly I really knew what it was like to not have any time. I would get up at four in the morning, be at the dialysis clinic by five, start dialysis around five-thirty, and then drive back and start an eight hour shift at work which would last until after seven o’clock in the evening. If I was lucky I could potentially carve out a couple hours before bed time to do all the other things I needed to get done.
But now, I wake up at six-thirty, take care of our pets, make my wife’s breakfast, and then have a nice leisurely time catching up on the internet before I start work around eight-thirty or nine.
I get off around five, go for an evening walk, have dinner, feed the pets again, and still somehow have three or four hours to do absolutely anything I want. And they’re usually not short hours either, they’re full, legitimate, non-abbreviated hours.
Some days I don’t know what to do with all this time. It’s funny because I don’t really have more time than before I got sick, it’s just that I perceive the time differently now. I guess I just never appreciated it before, or at least, never realized how much time it truly was.
I suppose if I were to give any advice it would be to try to take a moment, slow down, and realize how much time you really do have in your day — and just skip the part where you get a life threatening illness that truly takes your time away.