I live in Toronto, and having to travel to Montreal and back seemed a little daunting. Thankfully my Mother lives near Ottawa so I decided to spend some time post-surgery at her house to recover before making the big trip back to the T-dot. I left a day early so I could set up my room with everything I needed for my recovery. I procrastinated all morning the day I left, and ended up leaving in the early afternoon. The drive was easy and I drove the four hours in one shot. It was a beautiful sunny day. I felt like the universe must have sensed what I was in for and cut me some slack on this ..read more

You can read my selected Journal Entries here.  For those of you looking for the "short and sweet" version of the events that took place, I have included a summary below: After receiving a tentative date for my surgery I became ill. The transplant team was going to pull Lynda and I from the chain we had been selected for in the paired exchange program, but I fought for our right to be in that chain. They ended up delaying only my surgery. All other surgeries went ahead as planned. Normally in a paired exchange situation they want all surgeries to be within a day or two of each-other. B ..read more

Hi ... I'm Laura!  I decided to create this blog after having a difficult time finding detailed information on being a kidney donor. There were lots of websites and blogs, but they seemed to skip the part in the middle … they went straight from going into the hospital to being fully recovered. Because I had never had surgery, and I’m the kind of person who thrives on information, this made me nervous because I wasn’t sure what to expect. It was like there was this giant gap. The big unknown!! Then I came across Jackie’s blog and it was like I had finally found what I was looking for ..read more