Blue Chickens

On What's Happening, and What Happened Here, on Substack.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

A few months ago, one of my student-friends offered me her kidney.

I had just finished teaching a yearlong memoir class, and we had all gotten very close. Her offer came out of the blue. I hadn’t said I was looking.

My kidney function has been dropping swiftly the past couple of years. I had read a NYT article about how Ozempic could help people with kidney disease—even be protective and reduce cyst size—and I convinced my doctor to let me try it. In three weeks, I went from having 35% kidney function to 20%. And suddenly my doctors were preparing me for dialysis.

And then my friend offered me her kidney. Not just an offer. She had researched this. She had spoken to her doctor. She wanted to do this. I told my doctor I didn’t want dialysis. I had seen my father go through it. I asked, “Can’t we go straight to transplant?”

Here I will compress three months of phone calls, letters, emails to transplant center at Georgetown Hospital and my insurance into one sentence, and you’ve got to take my word for it: I tried. Even though I have a potential live donor, my BMI was too high for them to perform the surgery. Their recommendation was that I have bariatric surgery to get myself healthy enough to have the transplant. The other option was to try a different GLP-1 drug like Wegovy, but there remained a chance I would react the way I did on Ozempic and lose even more kidney function, fast. I don’t have another 15 spare points to waste if my body reacts that way again.

So I have been praying a lot. I’m a person who believes in God. And I asked God for a sign that I should definitely do the surgery. I said if I should do it, show me a blue chicken.

(A blue chicken! So you can tell I didn’t want the answer to be yes.)

Well, here on Substack, I am randomly following a watercolor artist named Jill Badonsky. When I signed up, Substack asked me for my interests, and I said creative writing and art, so I get a lot of original art in my feed that I love. But all of a sudden after I made this request of the universe, it seemed this artist was posting a new blue chicken every day!

Jill Badonsky on 9/10

As desperate as I felt for a sign, I resisted.

Jill Badonsky on 8/30

I was on my way to dinner with my family, and I told my daughter I don’t know...this might be too big a decision to leave to blue chickens.

Jill Badonsky on 9/5

Like, some of these are clearly roosters. Do they count? And there are other colors in there, and these are drawings…I mean?

I told my daughter, “Maybe I should cancel this surgery and just try the medicine.”

“Well...you could ask for another sign,” she said. “You could be ask to be shown, like, a pink duck.”

We were headed to a restaurant we don’t ever go to. She had never been there. But look at at this picture I took literally 10 minutes later when we went to dinner at Founding Farmers.

So how can I resist that? Right? I mean, I could. I could resist that. I could say that it’s not really a pink duck. It’s a statue of a duck. I could just say that signs are meaningless, and it’s probably coincidence. But I’ll tell you what happened.

Immediately, the stress of the impossible decision was gone. And I could think clearly and prepare calmly for this choice to have the surgery. For the first time in two months I felt lighter in my shoulders. I wasn’t waking up anymore in the middle of the night to pace the floor of my bedroom. I felt at peace. So whether it is real or not doesn’t matter. What matters is the reality that it gave me a sense of peace to face what’s next.

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to write a little today, I have a portal you could try. I offered it today during Grief Writing Sunday—a portal about the presence or absence of signs in our grief, whether we believe in them or not, and whether it matters.

A Grief Writing Portal: Lovingly describe an experience where you felt you received a sign or message in your grief that brought you comfort. If this has not happened to you, imagine an experience like this that you would like to have.

If you write to this prompt, I hope you’ll send it along so I can be a compassionate witness for your words. And if you know where I can get temporary tattoos of a blue chicken for my left arm and a pink duck for my right, please advise. 🩷

Love,
Diane

P.S. Diane’s surgery is on October 7 with a long recovery period. Her free classes, Grief Writing Sundays, will begin again in November. Message her to get on her mailing list so you never miss a class.