Today Robert and I celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary, just under four months after our 18th transplant anniversary. I learned recently that timing—the surgery preceding the wedding—was very purposeful. At least on Robert’s part.
academia lied
September 30, 2019 was my last day of clinical practice at UCSF. But it wasn’t until June 30, 2023, that the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) no longer gets to claim my identifiers of being Black and a woman as a testament to their “commitment to diversity,” when the reality is that fewer than 1% of its faculty at the associate professor (my title when I left) are Black. The technical delay in complete separation was to allow me to spend down the remainder of my grant funding. Because I don’t believe in leaving my money on the table. Perhaps it’s my free school lunch background that has made me this way.
the kidney biopsy: old vs new(ish) school
Long before anyone asked the Make America Great Again crowd to pinpoint exactly when America was great if you were Black, I heard a White stand-up comedian joke about how he could pretty much go back to any time in history and be ok, and acknowledged a Black person would not be ok. Hell, we’re still not ok.
But when I think about medicine, no one could go back in time and expect to be better off. And not just from the discovery of antibiotics or anesthesia perspective—from all the perspectives!
so you think you want to stop dialysis?
After recording my latest YouTube video for the fifty-leventh time before getting a usable version, I realized I didn’t answer the question posed by the inspiration email. In the video, I talk about how to bring up the notion of stopping dialysis to the nephrologist, but the writer was asking how to bring it up to their sister on dialysis. Anyone familiar with the vernacular “fifty-leventh” knows that means I did not have it in me to do even one more take. But I can address their question here.