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 first leg of my journey. I got there, unloaded my things and set up my room. I made sure I had books to read and there were tables beside the bed so I could easily reach things when I needed them.
It was pretty hard to sleep that night, knowing that the next day I would be on my way to Montreal to give someone a kidney. Things went through my mind like “Ok – someone is going to take an organ out of my body and put it in someone else’s body. And I’m ok with this?! How is this possible??” But when I would think about helping Lynda, and helping this other person I didn’t know, and being a part of something so awesome, it was pretty easy to be ok with someone reaching into my body and extracting something.
The next afternoon my Dad was there to pick me up. We loaded my little overnight bag into the car, and away we went. The trip was relatively fast, and we made it to the hotel in good time. We unpacked, found a little restaurant and had dinner. I was pretty stoked that they had a salad bar. (I am a very big fan of salad bars –no one seems to have salad bars anymore, therefore this was a very exciting moment for me) That night I slept pretty well … surprisingly well, in fact. And the next day I checked out of my room and we were off to the hospital!
