This blog is a record of my kidney transplant journey. I have attempted to journal the chaos of my sudden diagnosis, the surgery and recovery process. As I have learnt, rebuilding of resilience is a slow process, and I am cautiously learning what it means to become antifragile. During this process I have used the Antifragility framework by Anjani Gandhi, and was inspired by Dr. Nassim Taleb and his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. You can download the worksheet here.
Chaos
I did not feel sick. That was the most frightening part.
There were no symptoms. No warning. My wife and I walked into that appointment the way you walk into hundreds of ordinary appointments, expecting nothing more than numbers on a page. What we got was a diagnosis of chronic kidney disease so advanced that my doctor said I could not go home. I needed to be admitted immediately.
He used an image I will never forget. “Think of a sword hanging over your head, suspended by a rope that is down to its last thread. It can snap at any moment.” My wife and I sat there and felt the earth move beneath our feet. The room was the same room. The chairs were the same chairs. But something had been ripped clean through.
The questions came in a torrent.
Why me? I was not the person this happened to. I felt fine.
Will I survive? What does it mean to undergo a surgery you never knew you needed?
What will happen to my family?
And then, in the darkest moment of that first evening, I began to make a mental list of things I needed to do if I did not make it. This is what chaos looks like from the inside. It is not dramatic in the way films depict a crisis. It is quiet and terrifying. It is sitting in a hospital bed wondering if you have said enough of the things that mattered, to the people who matter most. There is no system, no rulebook, only the shock of events that overwhelm your capacity to respond. That was precisely where I was. My entire framework for understanding my life, my health, my plans, my identity as a person had simply stopped working.
Fragile
My mother gave me a kidney. I am still learning what that means.
When we established that a living donor was needed urgently my mother did not hesitate. She offered. She was tested. She matched. She gave.
I want to be careful here, because this moment deserves more than gratitude. My mother gave me a kidney. She gave me an organ from her own body. She went through surgery, through recovery, through her own fear and her own pain, so that I could live. There is no vocabulary adequate to explain that act. It sits beyond the reach of language in the place where love becomes something that moves through the body rather than an abstract feeling.
The transplant happened. And then came what I can only call the fragile phase. The long weeks and months of recovery where the body is technically repaired, but profoundly vulnerable. A fragile thing is not just weak. It is something that breaks under pressure, that cannot absorb any further shock without damage. That was me, post-surgery. Every infection was a threat. Every number on a blood panel carried existential weight. The family held itself together, but the strain was emotional upheaval that did not wait politely for the patient to recover.
My family carried so much during this time. The worry, the vigilance, the recalibration of an entire household around one person’s fragility. This is the cost that is rarely spoken about. I speak about it now because it is true. And because the people who held me steady during that phase deserve to be seen.
Fragility is simply a temporary state. Knowing that helped me inhabit it without shame. I was fragile. That was simply where I was.
Resilience
The body healed. Then the real work began.
Resilience is the capacity to absorb shocks and return to the original state. It is like a rubber band that stretches and snaps back. For months and then years, this is what I worked towards – getting back. Back to health. Back to routines. Back to some version of the person I was before the diagnosis.
But here is what no one tells you about resilience – the act of returning forces you to examine what you are returning to. When you have been stripped down to the essentials, when you have been in a hospital bed wondering whether you will see your family again, you cannot simply step back into your old life and pretend everything can go back to its original place.
Physical recovery was hard, but the mental recovery was even harder. I had to relearn slowly what my new body was capable of. I had to come to terms with an experience that had fundamentally altered how I saw my own mortality, my relationships, my sense of what actually matters.
And somewhere in that process, I started to learn new things deliberately, with intention. I picked up books I had always thought I would read some day. I began to sit with ideas I had never had the time to consider. I started to understand, for the first time in my adult life, what it means to pay attention.
AntiFragile
Becoming someone who grows from disorder
Antifragility is the most radical and demanding concept. It is not resilience. Resilience returns you to where you were. Antifragility takes the shock, the volatility, the disorder and uses it. The antifragile person does not merely survive stress. They grow from it. They become someone entirely new – someone that they could not have become in the absence of stress and difficulty.
I am not there yet. I want to be honest about that. But I am moving in that direction, and this act of writing and sharing is part of that movement.
What does the antifragile pursuit look like for me right now? It looks like building mental resilience practices that were not possible before I understood what fragility actually felt like. It looks like learning new skills and frameworks that I use to make sense of a life that has turned out to be larger and stranger and more precious than I knew. It looks like helping and mentoring others who are navigating their journeys through coaching, training and facilitation. Also helping others navigate health crises of their own. Because now I carry firsthand knowledge that is only earned by going through the storm and coming out on the other side.
Sharing My Journey
Writing honestly about an experience I did not choose, for friends and family that I genuinely care about is difficult. I don’t want to come across as self-obsessed. Neither do I want them to worry about me. I’m fine, I really am. But sharing my journey in such a public forum, I wondered if I could do it. I questioned whether I should do it. What motivated me was the thought of fellow travellers in difficult situations, and anyone who has ever sat in a hospital room, making to-do lists in case they do not make it.
The sword still exists, in some ways. We all have one. But I have learned that chaos is not the end of the story. If you survive it, it is the beginning of a better one.
If you are in the middle of your own chaos right now, your own fragile season, I want you to know that the tools and frameworks that helped me survive are available to you too. Not as a cure. Not as comfort in any sense. But as a map for a terrain that feels uneven, uncharted..
If this letter resonated with you, I’d love to hear what it stirred. Reply, share it with someone who needs it, or simply carry it with you. All of that is welcome.
With gratitude for still being here.