Rise Above The Challenge: Part 1

Rising to a challenge (whether it is with my health, my career, or my relationships) has always been something I do not shy away from. I am a strong competitor at heart, and it all stems from my own family's fight to survive kidney disease and hepatitis C.

Many share stories of my mom in her younger years, only 4’10”, 95 lbs, and pregnant with me. Small in stature, but she had the willpower of a super hero. During each of her doctor's visits she was upbeat, positive, and ready for the next chapter of her life to begin.

My mom's difficult pregnancy

She was not allowed to gain much weight during pregnancy because, then, the doctors had no idea if having a child after a kidney transplant would even be possible. You see, my mom had gotten her new kidney from my grandma (her mom) in 1965; It was placed in a small pouch in the front of her lower-right abdomen. Because of thing, and being pregnant, the doctors did not want the baby (me) to be damaging this fragile organ - which was keeping my mom alive. So, for just shy of 9 months, my mom lived on jaw breakers and popsicles. Sounds nutritious, doesn’t it?  Sure, she ate other things too, but to ward off all her major cravings, she chose those two items to snack on.   Doctors would warn her of the dangers of having a baby, but she basically tuned them out and pushed forward to the only mission she ever wanted in life... to be a mother.

My birth

I came about 3 weeks early and it was not your typical delivery room atmosphere. It was a full-on operation room filled with dozens of doctors on the floor, and as my mom recalled, she was lying there looking up in the observatory room above filled with more interns, doctors, news reporters, you name it. She went through labor delivering me naturally, had minor set backs in the amount of blood loss (having a blood transfusion), but other than that, she made medical history - forever in the medical books. She was the first woman in the US to give birth after a kidney transplant, and about 5th in the world.  Good Housekeeping later published my mom’s story, “Bonnie Morgan’s Miracle Baby”, in the March issue of 1969.

Read Part 2 here