Greetings followers,

OK this is a long one but it’s a very important post so please soldier through. I need to get this out in the open.

     

     Like a broken record here I am once again waxing poetic about how I never have enough time to blog. During my battle for Bali I got back into blogging with my competition blog but after that was all over I once again spiraled into blogging obscurity and disappeared.  So here I am once again, clawing my way out of the deep dark hole of creative silence. The words are dusty and my writing hand stiff but things will soon fall into place I’m sure.  I just need to make sure I keep my footing and don’t slide back down the hole.

Anyway, I’m back on the blog because there is some big stuff happening in my life and having been recently given permission by the people involved to blog about it, it’s time to get it out in the open so that I can for one, get it off my chest and secondly, I can get the word out so that I don’t have to keep answering questions about what’s going or tell the same news over and over again. Once it’s out in the blogosphere there’s no going back.

So here we go….

     As some of you may or may not know, I am leaving Thailand at the end of this month.  I originally gave my notice in December convinced that I’d win The Best Dive Job in the World and would be rolling on over to Bali in July to live my life free of IB coursework and mountains of marking. Just me and the fishies. That however did not quite go according to plan and in what seemed like the endless battle to the peak I was overtaken in the final month. I ended up scrambling to the summit in second place which was incredibly difficult for me to accept considering that I ate, breathed and slept that competition for half a year.  Coming in second was an incredibly difficult pill to swallow; I think I cried for a week straight.  But as I wrote on my dive blog , pills - even the bitter ones - are meant to cure us. I just couldn’t figure out at the time what needed curing.  It has in the time since however, become very clear and as it turns out, the pill wasn’t meant for me at all.

     There is no graceful or poetic way to say these things so my apologies if my words seem ineloquent; sometimes words are not enough to sweeten the bitter taste of reality.  To put it bluntly, my mom is sick. Very sick. We have known for a while that she was not well but since April it has become clear that she is much sicker than I, or any of us, understood.  To make a long story short, she needs a new liver and due to her very rare blood type there is pretty much no hope of her getting one by waiting on the transplant list. So we’ve had to go to plan B… Fortunately, I have also been blessed with the rarest of blood types which makes me a positive match for a live liver donor transplant. So what does that mean? Well, to put it simply, I give mom half of mine.  All of this came to light when I was home in April for a visit. I ended up spending most of my trip in the hospital either with mom or meeting the transplant people. In fact I didn’t even tell anyone I was there. So if you are one of the few who got whisper that I was home and were feeling shafted that I didn’t give you a call, you now know why. 

A scientific diagram of what the surgery entails

     So anyway, back to that bitter pill…well if I would have won, there is no way that I could have accepted the prize, all things considered which in the end would have been even more painful than having lost. To be handed something only to have it taken away. The surgery is pretty intense and I’m going to be in recovery for at least 3 months and then having to take it pretty easy for another 3 months after that. So that means you folks over there in Canada are going to be blessed with my presence for 6 glorious months.  I’ve been told by the doctors that once I have fully recovered  I will be as good as new and will be able to do everything that I did before the surgery…and yes, that includes diving.  The liver is a pretty crazy organ, it’s the only internal organ that actually regenerates. They will be removing about 60% of mine (one lobe) to give to mom and by the time I get discharged from the hospital (about 10 days after the surgery) it will already have grown back about 70%! I will never have a 2 lobed liver again just one big mutant lobe but it will be pretty much the same size as my original liver. The part that I give to mom will also grow to the size of a normal liver. Hell, who needs two lobes anyway right? I also lose my gall bladder in the surgery but hey, once again, who really needs one of those? They said that I will have to watch my intake of fats with no gall bladder but all that sounds like to me is an excuse not to eat shit and get fat. No complaints here.

So ya, that’s the news. Mom said it’s ok for me to blog about the whole thing. Perhaps it’s selfish but my blog is therapeutic in ways and this is a pretty big deal that is going to require me a bit of blog therapy. There will be some difficult times ahead as well as some amazing times ahead. I’m sure I’ll have lots of adventures to write about over the next few months as I get scanned and MRI’d and ECHO cardiogramed and psychologically assessed and then sliced open from my chest to my belly button.  I received my list of pre-transplant assessment appointments yesterday and they’ve tentatively booked the operating room for September 17^th as long as I pass all the screening.  I guess things are becoming more real now. I’ll be home on July 7^th and my barrage of testing begins with an MRI on the 10^th and pretty much 2 or 3 assessments a week after that until the end of July. They only do one living donor transplant a month so September was the first date we could get in.

     So mark your calendars ladies and gentlemen, things are about to get a little wild over at the Zeiler household. My sister will be moving home in September to nurse me and mom back to health so it’s going to be a Zeiler lady super party for a few months.  When it’s all over I’ll let you sign my scar! …then I’ll tattoo over it.

     Anyway….back to the diving because as I often say, all things happen for a reason. It’s become very clear why I didn’t win, I was never meant to win. I have bigger things to do.  So why then did the powers that be, whatever they are, make me spend all that time and energy on a fruitless venture.  I think there are a lot of reasons. That whole thing made me realize how many amazing people I have in my life. Hundreds of people were behind me the whole time, people I barely know, people I don’t know, people I haven’t seen in years. What a wonderful thing to realize as I head into such a difficult time . Secondly, although I didn’t win, I did come in second and the boys and Blue Season Bali have been amazing.  I told them about everything that was happening and apologized that I would not be able to claim my second prize (which was 20% off my DMs and a fully sponsored IDC!) because I wouldn’t be back in Asia for a year.  They would have nothing of it though. They said that not only would they shelve my prize until I was better but they also wanted to give me something to look forward to so they are going to fully sponsor both my Divematers and my IDC when I am ready to come back!! I cannot thank these guys enough. They truly are an amazing company.  In a world that revolves around dollars and cents, it’s so nice to see a business that sees the bigger picture.          

     They truly are 1^st class.  So, to all of my dive friends. If you are ever in Bali, BLUE SEASON BALI is the place to go.  Go have an amazing dive and while you’re at it thank them for making my and my mother’s recovery that much easier because we now know there is something amazing waiting for me at the end.

Ok so that’s that.  I will be blogging on here a lot more often now as I move back to Canada unemployed and bored out of my mind. And hey, what else am I going to do while I’m bedridden with surgical staples running up my torso?  It’s time for the princess to become the bad ass blogger of days gone by and hey if you’re lucky maybe I’ll post while I’m all doped up on pain meds…that would be an interesting read for sure!

Ok, that’s it for now

Cheers from the organ farm

J