Blood Intimate Blood

Blood is a very intimate thing, so you can hardly blame me for feeling a bit shy and hesitant about sharing the sight of my  blood with the world. Usually it is unseen inside the body. In the case of hemo-dialysis*, blood must flow outside the body in order to pass through the artificial kidney and then return, cleansed of toxins and fluid overload back into the bloodstream. 

Bamboo Shoots Inc crew on behalf of Sasktel MaxTV at dialysis pod.

Can you blame me for being shy and nervous about showing my blood -outside of my body- to the world? I am concerned...will the sight of this be more traumatic to the viewers as it was at first to me?

Blood having "Out-of-Body Experience".

I had to shed my misgivings before I could go ahead with filming this segment of the documentary. Our producer Amanda Bosiak was so warm and loving that everything flowed effortlessly on set. The "set" was my dialysis pod, at my request to raise more Awareness of Kidney Health. 

*Hemo-dialysis is a technological marvel, invented by Dr. Willim Kolf in 1943, that has come a long way to recreate kidney function. Dialysis sustains the lives of millions of kidney patients every year. Dialysis is the "Gold Standard" for life-saving intervention while hopefully, they await the "Gift of Life". This time of relative "stability" must not be mistaken for "complacency", as it is well known that a certain % of dialysis patients die while waiting for a transplant. 

"Dancing with Rejection"...the NYC connection!

My last post lamented that fact that the "Interior Formatting" of my upcoming memoir "Dancing with Rejection: A Beginner's Guide to Immortality" was making me crazy. Sure, I was able to figure out the formatting on my own computer...no problem. But when it came to uploading my impeccable file to my online publishing platform, everything went squishy and stretchy in a completely random way, or so it appeared to me.

After trying and retrying about fifteen times, I grew increasingly  frustrated. Seeing as how I am a exemplary specimen of male pattern baldness...I take after my Dad in this respect...I really do not have that much hair to pull out, so I was left without this pressure valve. All I could do was gnash my teeth and pound my fist on my desktop. Didn't help. I was still stuck, with my nose pressed against the glass, merely desiring to make it work, but left feeling impotent.

I did, however, reach out to my social network and was richly rewarded when a friend named Annaleigh Sage Bergman, herself a recent kidney donor, stepped up to announce that she has the expertise to create the interior formatting. This is a crucial step that we must take in order to go to press! I was like, WOO-HOO!  Sage is based in New York City and we recently met through the Facebook page Kidney Transplant Donors and Recipients that I founded about three years ago.

As I drill deeper into this writing project, I am meeting more loving, supportive people who are all combining their unique skill sets to make it a reality. I'm humbled and grateful to everyone who has offered their help. You will read all about it in the "Gratitude" section of the book after it hits the press in the near future.

Did I mention I am publishing a memoir?

A Passion Project of mine for the past several years has been first the collating, transcribing and then finally the writing and attending to the editing of the memoir/novel 'dancing with rejection: the beginner's guide to immortality'. It's a rollicking, adventurous drama that traces my life from the early death of my father, through to my own brush with death and on to chronicle the rise in my fortunes as a monumental mural painter and advocate for patients' rights. There is an early illustrated synopsis that you can view here: Near-Death Experience Fuels Quest for Immortality.

Getting closer to creating the official cover art for my upcoming novel 'dancing with rejection:
the beginner's guide to immortality'.

My latest project is to promote the cause of, wait for it, 'Reasonable Efficient Notifications and Action Law (RENAL)'. This begins with a petition that I invite you to sign. Takes like 15 seconds in total. We are asking for better, clearer, more timely communication between kidney transplant centers and their millions of potential kidney donors and recipients. Please, take a few seconds to sign, if you know anybody with kidney disease. Chances are, you do.