Another of my writings from "A Picture is Worth a Bunch of Words" on Medium.com.
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This is my son. He was born with one working kidney. When I was 20 weeks pregnant, the doctor noticed in my ultrasound that one of his teeny-tiny kidneys was full of dark circles. The other kidney was a healthy, grainy-gray, bean-shaped mass. What were the circles? We wouldn’t know until the baby was born.
Thank the Lord the dark circles turned out to be cysts, not cancer. His right kidney still would never function, but his left kidney was twice its normal size to make up for its missing partner. Which was fitting, since my son was born with a personality twice the size of his body.
Sometimes I worry about him. He’s a real daredevil.
"Watch out! You'll run into the..."
"That's pretty high! Are you sure you can do it?!"
He does things that people with two working kidneys shouldn't do. See the red spot under his eye? That's normal. His legs are covered with scratches and bruises, and his pants are full of holes to prove it.
This boy doesn't walk when he can run.
He doesn’t talk when he can shout.
He believes that he can fly, if he flaps his arms hard enough. And nothing is going to stop him– not his small stature, not his cystic kidney, not even gravity.
"Mom, I'm fine! I can do it!" he shouts back to me.
And then he does it.
Maybe I don’t need to worry about him as much as I thought.
Someday, this kid is going to take on the world.
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