Poster Child or False Advertisement


While a majority of my posts pull at heartstrings, this one isn’t meant to at all. I find myself in tears writing these 95% of the time but this one I feel is more awkward than anything else. Why you may ask? Because no person, especially a self-conscious female, wants to draw attention to something they see as a flaw. So don’t take this next comment as me being cocky. It’s quite the opposite.

When it comes to my last surgery, my life changing transplant, I’m kind of a miracle.

I guess “kind of” is an understatement. It hit me while in Minnesota for my yearly checkup that no one expected me to have the life I do now. Long story short, I shouldn’t be insulin free. Given the surgery I had, they were able to harvest less than half of the normal amount of insulin producing cells to take from my pancreas and put into my liver. In majority of patients only half of those transplanted cells actually take and function.

I should be on constant a pump therapy to maintain my diabetes. The fact that I’m going on my second year without insulin is amazing but also unbelievable. I am forever thankful for where I've ended up and my amazing team of surgeons and doctors that have gotten me this far, don't get me wrong. They're amazing...I'm just torn.

My struggle now is do I try to be the face of a low harvest surgery or am I an unreachable standard? Will I give patients in my position hope of a great life post transplant or am I setting them up for failure? Of course they'll tell future patients the negative possible outcomes, just like they told me. They'll be completely open and honest about what their life may be like. I just don't know where, or if, I should fit into this equation.

I chose a long time ago to share my story in hopes of it helping others. Taking the hardest and darkest parts of my life and twisting them to show others that no disease has to win. It isn’t, and never will be, my intention to give anyone false hope. On paper I am a miracle and I beat the odds. Is it fair to give future patients the idea that they can be like me when it could easily be the opposite?

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