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Share the weight, show the way — together we carry the story.—🌿 Finding My Balance Again.

Just when you try to get back on your feet, life can pull you down and out. I was rebuilding my life, exploring different educations — starting with the dream of becoming a nurse. The hospital felt like a second home. I admired the pediatric nurses and doctors. I truly wanted to become a nurse someday. But while dreaming of that future, I was still a patient myself. After my kidney transplant, I hoped to become as healthy as the other children at school. Reality had its own pace.

💙 Life Inside the Hospital Walls

In the hospital, everything has structure. Doctors carry the responsibility for medical care. Nurses bring kindness, calm, and continuity. There is trust, motivation, and a shared goal: making health better. Fellow patients — each with different backgrounds and conditions — were in the same boat. There was a quiet form of social acceptance. Everyone walked their own path. The bonding was strong. I still think about these friends and sometimes wonder what happened in their lives. Many of us lived with the awareness that adulthood was not guaranteed.

🌤️ Lucky, Even in the Storm

I felt lucky because in my case, there was treatment: dialysis and a kidney transplant. The Rare kidney disease was one you could die from, so having a path forward felt like a blessing — even if it wasn’t an easy one. My arm had to be operated on. A shunt was constructed: an artery connected to a vein. Each dialysis session meant one or two thick needles — 1.4 to 1.8 mm. The first time was extremely painful. I fainted during the first session. My body was full of uremia — waste products building up in the blood — which didn’t help me stay upright.

⏳ Dialysis: Three Times a Week

Three times a week, four hours of dialysis, for more than a year. It was intense, but fellow patients had been on dialysis for five to nine years. So I felt no self‑pity. I felt lucky: a donor kidney became available after only 14 months. During this time, I went to school between the dialysis sessions. I was even allowed to join gymnastics class. Gymnastics was on Monday evening; dialysis on Monday morning. In between a few hours at school. Being able to go to the gym lit up my day. I couldn’t keep up with my peers, but the joy was still mine. Before dialysis, sports weren’t possible — uremia, medicine use like blood thinners, fevers caused by infections, and sunlight restrictions shaped my days.

🌱 A Door to Health — and New Challenges

When the door opened to a healthier life, new challenges appeared. Even though I worked hard to make the best of my life, the dark cloud of my rare kidney disease returning was always in my mind. Naive as I was, I tried to push the thought away. I was a teenager trying to live — school, follow‑up for medical checks, the burden of a bad immunesystem and side effects of medicine. Enjoying life with all its challenges. .

🌟 Live and learn

Hard lessons. The feeling of guilt never fully disappears — for the ones we lost and the ones who survived. How do we manage insecurity, powerlessness, boundaries? What happens when those boundaries are crossed? Is there a playing field, or a hard line? To this day, the answers are not easy to find.

👟 The Shoes That Carried Me Forward

One thing kept me going: physical exercise. Gymnastics after the transplant wasn’t possible anymore — the donor kidney in my belly made it too risky. So I opened the municipal guide of Huissen and looked for sports; however, contact sports were not advisable, and my newly regained health didn’t imply that I was fit enough for a team sport.. I started fitness and still do it to this day.

To illustrate a small anecdote of my experience with gymnastics during dialysis: “Once there was a sponsor marathon. Different obstacles to climb, a salto over the vaulting horse. For each round, we collected money from family, neighbours, and acquaintances. I finished with an average score in the age category below the one I actually belonged to.”

🌿 Living Day by Day

During childhood dialysis, life happened one day at a time. There was no sense of the future, no picture of what might come. You didn’t know how much time you had, or whether a new kidney would ever appear. The horizon was blank — and you learned to breathe inside that uncertainty.

🌧️ The Same Shadow, Years Later

During the period around my second transplant, I felt that same feeling again while going through a depression.I ordered custom‑made Nike shoes online, deliberately, as a way to push myself to start jogging. The delivery time for that order was two months. And when I clicked the confirm your purchase button, I spent every day in tension, wondering whether I would make it through those two months — whether I would survive long enough for the shoes to arrive.

✨ A Quiet Act of Courage

Looking back, it wasn’t about the shoes. It was about choosing a future; even when you weren’t sure you had one.

A small act of defiance.

A whisper of hope.

A step toward life.