New comic!
I hope this kind of communicates how intense this process was. Everyone was really nice! Their sole focus was to make sure that I wouldn't be unnecessarily harmed. The living-donor program doesn't make any sense if it just creates 2 long-term high-resource patients. So there was a lot of tests, blood draws, scans, all of that.
But they also needed to know that I wasn't being coerced or doing this out of an inaccurate sense of what it would be like, so there were a lot of sessions of just explaining what would happen, how much pain I could expect, my short and long term recovery.
And then they also needed to know that it wouldn't ruin my life - that it wouldn't trigger mental health problems that could increase my risk of suicide, that I had supports in my family and community who could look after me while I was sick, that I wouldn't lose my job.
None of this was certain, of course. I could have had an adverse reaction to any part of the surgery and ended up needing a liver myself. But the whole screening process had to confirm that I was as low risk as I could be.
But maaaaan it kind of sucked sometimes. It was basically a whole summer of performing this sort of patient, reasonable, good natured, thoughtful, and, yes, sane person (though I hate the term) who just really wants them to remove a third of a vital body organ.
