Thanks for visiting my fundraising page. I'm excited to once again participate in the NKF Kidney Walk. This will be my first year participating in person! I wanted to use this opportunity to share my story with those who don't know it and provide an update for those who have been following. There's this concept in literature called the "muddy middle". It's the part in a story where characters have been introduced, some progress has been made but there is still much confusion as to how everything will arrive at a resolution. I tend to think of my kidney disease journey as a "muddy middle" story. It's often been filled with uncertainty and at times some pain and suffering. But there's also been a lot of growth and hope and surprisingly even peace. In 2015, I was on travel in DC when I started having some stomach pain. I went to the emergency room and was told I would need an emergency appendectomy to get my appendix removed. They also informed me that they had seen lots of cysts on both of my kidneys and suspected I had PKD. That's the first time I heard that term. It stood for Polycystic Kidney Disease. I remember thinking to myself, this thing has a name and "disease" is a part of it. I knew nothing beyond the name for it at that point but I had to put it aside so I could focus on the appendectomy I was about to have. I would come to find out that Polycystic Kidney Disease is a genetic condition in which clusters of non-cancerous cysts form within your kidneys and cause them to enlarge and lose function over time. Remember the "muddy middle", the mud was getting thick and about to get thicker. Back in Rochester, the week after my appendectomy, I began having having more abdominal pain and episodes of elevated heart rate. My wife is a social worker and much more adept at handling the human condition than I am. She suggested that maybe I was having a panic attack. Great, as if the kidney stuff was not enough now I had this to deal with. And the panic attacks did not stop. They became more frequent and I quickly slid into a depression. Anxiety and depression were having a huge effect on my family life and work. I was having panic attacks and crying episodes all day long. Every day going to work felt like going into a battle. I would come home drained from trying to quiet my thoughts and manage my anxiety. I later realized I had built a good part of my identify as a person on being healthy and my PKD diagnosis had robbed me of that. And with this diagnosis, there was no going back. As an engineer, I was trained to fix stuff and I couldn't fix this. I'm a Christian, so this was a time of intense prayer for me and seeking answers by reading the Bible more intently than I ever had. My grandma would always tell me to read the book of Psalms, so I started to. Many of the psalms were written by Kind David. The more I read his writings the more I realized that I could identify, in him, someone that also suffered through depression and anxiety (he had his own issues, we all do). But this was King David, a man after God's own heart and the Bible presents a record of how God took care of him. I'm no King David but the Bible also says that as God takes cares of the birds, surely his care applies to us. But in the anxiety and depression that I was going through, it was hard for me to believe this. I remember one time I was laying in the couch silently praying for guidance and my oldest daughter, she was about 5 years old at the time, came to me out of the blue and asked, "Papa, do you trust God?". I said "Yes", and then she said, "Then everything is going to be okay". I don't think signs get any clearer so from that point on I decided it was time to figure this stuff out. I got to understanding PKD more and I started working harder to implement the coping strategies I was learning at therapy. My PKD was asymptomatic, and I had good kidney function at that time. 50% of people diagnosed with PKD get to be 60 years old without losing their kidney function. Spoiler alert, I'm on the lower end of that statistic (more on that in a second). It took me about six months, but I was able to process what was going on and with the help of God, my family, and therapy, I was able to get back to being fully engaged at home and work. Everything was relatively stable until 2018 when we noticed that my kidney function was decreasing more rapidly than before. This brought another round of anxiety and depression to my life. This time I knew what to do and I was able to recover more quickly. My doctor told me about a new drug that had just been approved called Jynarque that had been proven to slow kidney function decline in PKD patients. I started taking it and things remained good until 2020 when my kidney function had gotten low enough to begin the process to get on the transplant list. Going through that process wasn't as rattling as I had feared. It had the potential of throwing me into another anxiety/depression spiral, but it didn't happen. I had accumulated enough coping skills by now that when the anxiety came I could handle it. We knew what the next steps would be. I wasn't at the point of kidney failure yet, and there was a chance that I could skip dialysis if we could find a donor. Finding a donor was the only thing left and we were naive enough to not understand how precarious that process can be. So we were feeling good with where things were headed. Our plan was to wait for me to officially be on the transplant list before telling people about our next steps and asking for potential donors. While we waited, my wife went ahead and started the process of getting tested herself. Not long after, we got the news that she was a match! It happened so effortlessly for us that it's only with time that we've realized how blessed we were to have Jessica be a match. The story of how we met during our high school years is for another day but suffice to say that our miracle started then. Now that we had a match, we had to settle on when to do the surgery. This was in the middle of the pandemic, and we weren't sure how that was going to work out. Though I still had some kidney function, we were already managing my blood pressure, my phosphorus, and my potassium levels with medications. We decided to move forward with getting it scheduled knowing that it would take time to get everything planned. Not long after that decision, our medical team reached out with their plan, and this was when the last little curve ball in this journey was thrown at us. Apparently, my kidneys were so large due to the cysts that they wanted me to have them removed first, recover from that surgery, and then have the transplant. This was a bit different than what we had prepared ourselves for. This involved three major surgeries in one year (two for me and one for Jessica) and dialysis in between them since they'd be removing both my kidneys at once. By now we were so certain of God's care over our lives that we just gave it all to Him and went with it. I had my double nephrectomy in early June of 2021 and the surgery ended up taking 9 hours (twice what they had estimated). In most adults, the total weight of both kidneys is less than a pound. Mine weighed 10 lbs. A normal kidney is about the size of fist. Mine were the size of a football. With the surgery complete, I now had to recover for 3-4 months, and then we'd do it all over again for the transplant. Getting used to dialysis was not as bad as I expected. The staff at my center was so attentive and welcoming. They made a challenging experience much easier. Dialysis can be grueling for a lot of patients; I was young and healthy enough that the experience was not filled with complications but for many it is. Four months later, at the end of September 2021, Jessica and I were walking down a hallway at Strong on our way to checking in for our transplant surgery. My mom snapped a photo of the moment and it's one of my favorite photos. Jessica and I have been through a lot in our 15 years of marriage. A lot of highs and a lot of lows but we've always done all of it together. A friend once shared a Facebook meme and it said, "Afraid. Do it afraid." I love that phrase because I know so well what those words mean. It's defined my life over the past 7 years going through this journey. That photo is the clearest visual representation I have in my life of this sentiment. We were both afraid, but we had no choice but to do it afraid for the sake of my life and our family. The transplant was a huge success. My doctors were surprised at how well my new kidney was working after just of few hours. My numbers very quickly came back to normal. And Jessica recovered well. It'll be a year since my transplant next month and everything has been going great with it. Work is going well and I feel like I'm back on a career path that had been put on pause for a bit. So that's my muddy middle story. It's still being written but I can look back now and see how God kept showing up for us in big and small ways and how our family grew stronger through this journey. There are so many people who have helped me and my family throughout this journey. The work done by organizations like the National Kidney Foundation is so critical in supporting families like mine. Please consider joining me for the Kidney Walk and donating to this great cause! Thanks!