Once I had started peritoneal dialysis for my kidneys (April 2024), I was eligible for the three or so year-long waitlist for a deceased donor, but a transplant center needed to accept me first. In April 2025, I was accepted as a future donor recipient at UNMC. At that time, I started an awareness campaign to let people know of my need for a living kidney donor.
And the waiting started.
No, it wasn’t a long wait, as many who need a kidney donor are waiting multiple years. But when you are waiting for someone to step forward, every minute seems like a week of waiting in real life.
Waiting for a kidney donor reshapes you in ways I didn’t notice at first. I didn’t realize how much of myself was being rewired in the hours, the long days, the month-long stretches where nothing changed on the outside, but inside, my kidneys continued to get worse. I thought I was just passing the time. I didn’t know I was being remade through the waiting.
There were mornings after kidney dialysis had completed, when I woke up already tired, but I still whispered small prayers I’d never prayed before. Not dramatic ones. Just simple, steady words. I didn’t just pray for miracles. I prayed for enough strength to get through the next appointment, the next lab draw, and the duration of waiting on an unknown timeline. Those moments taught me more about faith than anything I’d learned when life was easy, as The Divine Timing of the Kidney Transplant was underway.
Strength didn’t come in big, cinematic waves. It showed up in tiny, almost forgettable ways. The day I realized I could stand a little longer than the week before. The moment I caught myself laughing at something stupid on TV and felt my shoulders loosen for the first time in days. The breath I took in the car after an appointment, when I realized I had been bracing for more bad news. Those were the markers. Those were the hours when strength came without announcing itself or me specifically requesting it.
And somewhere in all of that, something inside me took shape. Not one precise thing, not a sudden revelation, but a slow, steady forming. A sturdiness and resilience I didn’t know I had. A sense that I was being carried forward by something deeper than fear or exhaustion. It was silent, like a foundation settling under a house. But I felt it. I still feel it.
Waiting taught me how to live inside uncertainty without letting it swallow me. It taught me how to hold on to hope without gripping it so hard it breaks. It taught me how to stay open, even when everything in me wanted to shut down and protect whatever sense of normalcy I had left.
And then the knock at the door came, late September of 2025. The moment everything shifted. The moment the waiting had come to an end, a new beginning opened in front of me. I didn’t feel triumphant. I felt humbled. I felt the weight of what it meant to be part of a cross-match donation. My friend Jeff is the person who made part of all this possible. Without him, I might still be waiting. I also carry my actual donor with me in every breath, every step, every ordinary moment that now feels extraordinary.
Looking back, I can see how the waiting shaped me for what came next. It didn’t just prepare me for transplant surgery. It prepared me for living again. For receiving again. For stepping into a future, thus kicking me out of the “waiting room.”
I’m still learning from that waiting as it will be a lifelong lesson. I’m uncovering the ways it changed me. But I know this much: the waiting wasn’t without purpose. It was forming me, strengthening me, softening me, and teaching me how to hold life with both hands open.
And now, on the other side of dialysis, the waiting, and the transplant, I can see the truth that carried me through. I wasn’t just waiting for a kidney. I was being reshaped from the inside out.