Transplant Encouragement Quotes

I encourage readers recovering from a kidney transplant to heed the advice of their medical practitioners.

Hope was no longer a tiny, flickering flame. It was a bonfire.

As an LA transplant the concept of being fake was still a bit lost on me. Don’t get me wrong. I was familiar with fake tans, fake nails and of course fake boobs having already undergone my breast enhancement surgery but I didn’t have any idea how insincere and calculated people can be. It never dawned on me that the girls I was about to be spending a lot of time with had ulterior motives beyond simply being friendly and that all of their encouragement was just for show. As I’d come to learn, they saw me as a useful pawn in their twisted game of Playboy chess.

The attachment voids experienced by immigrant children are profound. The hardworking parents are focused on supporting their families economically and, unfamiliar with the language and customs of their new society, they are not able to orient their children with authority or confidence. Peers are often the only people available for such children to latch on to. Thrust into a peer-oriented culture, immigrant families may quickly disintegrate. The gulf between child and parent can widen to the point that becomes unbridgeable. Parents of these children lose their dignity, their power, and their lead. Peers ultimately replace parents and gangs increasingly replace families. Again, immigration or the necessary relocation of people displaced by war or economic misery is not the problem. Transplanted to peer-driven North American society, traditional cultures succumb. We fail our immigrants because of our own societal failure to preserve the child-parent relationship. In some parts of the country one still sees families, often from Asia, join together in multigenerational groups for outings. Parents, grandparents, and even frail great-grandparents mingle, laugh, and socialize with their children and their children's offspring. Sadly, one sees this only among relatively recent immigrants. As youth become incorporated into North American society, their connections with their elders fade. They distance themselves from their families. Their icons become the artificially created and hypersexualized figures mass-marketed by Hollywood and the U.S. music industry. They rapidly become alienated from the cultures that have sustained their ancestors for generation after generation. As we observe the rapid dissolution of immigrant families under the influence of the peer-oriented society, we witness, as if on fast-forward video, the cultural meltdown we ourselves have suffered in the past half century. It would be encouraging to believe that other parts of the world will successfully resist the trend toward peer orientation. The opposite is likely to be the case as the global economy exerts its corrosive influences on traditional cultures on other continents. Problems of teenage alienation are now widely encountered in countries that have most closely followed upon the American model — Britain, Australia, and Japan. We may predict similar patterns elsewhere to result from economic changes and massive population shifts. For example, stress-related disorders are proliferating among Russian children. According to a report in the New York Times, since the collapse of the Soviet Union a little over a decade ago, nearly a third of Russia's estimated 143 million people — about 45 million — have changed residences. Peer orientation threatens to become one of the least welcome of all American cultural exports.

Because faeces are not drugs, and all you need is a kitchen blender, some saline and a sieve, with a little help from YouTube videos, anyone can administer their own faecal transplant, and many thousands do. Among those giving it a go, not surprisingly, are the parents of autistic children. Dr Borody himself has seen improvements in autistic children following both faecal transplants and after repeatedly delivering faecal microbes via a flavoured drink. His intention was to relieve the gastrointestinal symptoms, not the psychiatric ones, but Borody says several of the children improved following their treatment. The most encouraging was a young child with a vocabulary of just over twenty words, which shot up to around 800 in the weeks after the microbial therapy. For now, all this is anecdotal. As yet not a single clinical trial has been carried out to test the effects of faecal transplant on autistic patients, though some are planned. The lack of evidence won’t stop the parents though – for many, anything is worth a try.

For those of us with chronic illness, we’ve had to give up some or all of those freedoms. And they probably didn’t seem like freedoms at the time. We likely took them for granted until our bodies took them from us. Now here we are, active brains inside limited, broken bodies. But as technology has yet to create a way to get an entire body transplant, we’re stuck with it. Unless, of course, you have a neurological problem, as I think I might, in which case I’m sorry about your brain. Getting a brain transplant is a seriously bad idea. You would not even know who you were, and would not appreciate how much better you were feeling. I

Wilson’s book spoke to me. I wanted to write him a letter and tell him that he had described my home perfectly. That it resonated so personally is odd, however, because he wasn’t writing about the hillbilly transplants from Appalachia—he was writing about black people in the inner cities. The same was true of Charles Murray’s seminal Losing Ground, another book about black folks that could have been written about hillbillies—which addressed the way our government encouraged social decay through the welfare state.

you’d like to encounter more of Jim Woodford’s story, we encourage you to pick up a copy of his book Heaven, an Unexpected Journey: One Man’s Experience with Heaven, Angels, and the Afterlife (Destiny Image, 2017). You can also connect with Jim at JimWoodfordMinistries.com. THREE LUNG TRANSPLANT RECIPIENT MIKE OLSEN DIED AND MET HIS ORGAN DONOR IN HEAVEN MEET MIKE OLSEN Louisville, Kentucky pastor Mike Olsen suffered for several years with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a disease that kills almost as many patients as breast cancer. Mike was relieved when he received a call from the doctor letting him know that they had received a pair

It is in your replanting or transplanting that you can do some of your best work and expand your roots to grow, thrive, and flourish. Whether you have needed to change places physically or metaphorically, replanting and putting down new roots will encourage new possibilities.