WE ARE FAMILY

The whole time you are going through this process you are asking yourself several questions.  How long the recovery is, how this will affect my life after, what will people think, what if I’m not a match, are they going to find something I didn’t know about, what kind of cool scar will I have.  All the Questions you tend to ask tend to be very selfish and only concerned with yourself.  Once you come to grips with those questions you start to realize, I am going to have to tell people, I’m going to have to tell my parents and Kate’s parents.  I know those seem like little worries coming from someone who has willingly decided to write a blog about this but they are daunting questions. 

Kate and I decided that we didn’t want to lie at any point about what we are doing, so that left us with a decision when we found out that we would have to travel to UNC to have the testing done.  We didn’t want to make up some story and then have our families ask us why we just didn’t tell them in the first place so we decided it would be best to tell them before we went to UNC.  It sure sounds easier as I write it now than it felt when we were preparing to tell everyone.

I’m not one hundred percent sure of the exact timing, and I am sure Kate will correct it later, but we got back from Europe at the end of April and were going to UNC at the end of May, so I believe in the beginning of May my family was in town so we decided we needed to tell them.  I remember we had just finished eating dinner and we were sitting out back at our house.  As you have probably figured out from my proposal story that I tend to be a little slow at being able to get things out.  I run them over and over again in my mind trying to come up with the best words until it is just time to blurt things out.

We told my parents, I really wasn’t exactly sure how they would take it, I mean I don’t have any kids yet, but my thought is you probably never want to hear that your child is having surgery, yet alone voluntarily having a surgery.  They had a lot of very good questions, they voiced a lot of very good concerns, and we talked about it for a good while.  The funny thing is that no matter how old you get they are still your parents, you don’t have to ask their permission, but it sure helps if you have it.  My parents were great, for my safety they would really rather I not do it, but they understand what I am doing and are willing to support me through something that they might not necessarily choose for me.  It really is all you could ask for; I can only hope I can follow their example someday with my own children.

Next we had to tell Kate’s family, her whole family happened to be in town including Betsy and Carl, Kate had made the mistake of telling Betsy (granted she had to or Betsy was going to leave before dinner) that we had something to tell them at dinner, so they had spent the whole day coming up with crazy ideas (Carl suggested I was getting a sex change) and mostly they thought we might be announcing that we were moving to Peru.  I’m not sure what to think but all of them would rather I give a kidney than move to Peru.  They asked a lot of the same questions, had a lot of the same concerns and were just as supportive, I feel very lucky to have them as in-laws.

There was a lot of needless anxiety and a lot of prayer leading up to sharing this with our families, but Paul says it better than I ever could so I am going to close with that.

Philippians 4:6-7 “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”