Today is a great day!

I got a CD of pictures in the mail today from my Washington D.C. trip with the DaVita Patient Citizens Organization. I thought this picture of me turned out pretty good (taken at the Georgetown DaVita Unit), considering I'm hooked up to a dialysis machine... Somehow I still managed to look half-way decent :) Maybe that's why some call it "Life-alysis" instead of Dialysis?

PLEASE - Those of you who haven't seen the new website design please come and visit it and SIGN THE GUESTBOOK!

The rest of the weekend (after the film crew was gone) turned out pretty good. I can't tell you how (or why) I am/was so exhausted from all the cameras, interviews and such, but I am. Even still today I am tired - I feel like I could drift off to sleep at any moment. I also have a lot of muscle pain/weakness, which in itself is a whole other topic I need to re-address with my doctor again. I guess maybe it was because I put so much energy into what we were doing that I used it all up. I really wanted to make certain the points I wanted to make got across in the film... I really hope people will find it helpful, a positive example of how someone can continue living a great life even being on dialysis.

Let me tell you - I learned a thing or two about how films are really made! All that stuff you see in other films or on television shows is actually quite staged. Usually something is done once "naturally" and then the Producer likes it and you do five more takes of the same exact thing. LOL By the sixth take its beginning to look (or sound) fake and then the Producer decides you've done enough. There is going to be one very funny moment in the film (that won't probably look funny, but I will be laughing...) that is worth mentioning. We went to the park (me and Alek and Ken) so they could film us doing "family" stuff. Well, we had intended to fly a kite but the wind was waaaaay too windy (unusual for this area) and the darn thing wouldn't stay in the air no matter what we tried. The Producer got a few shots of the kite in the air, and other people's kites that seemed to be doing better than ours and then he had a brilliant idea to make it look as though we were actually flying it. He had Alek and I sit on the ground and hold the little string holder while Ken stood above us holding the string tight and waving the kite around so Alek would look up as if we were watching the kite in the sky. Yes, I think Ken felt really silly and people were walking by us looking at him as if he was the biggest nutjob on the planet. Ha. So, that's how its done, folks - The kite in the sky isn't really a kite, its just Ken standing there looking silly and Alek and I pretending to be very entertained by something mysterious in the sky.