Jennifer

So it actually started in the end of 2013, and I really didn't know anything at all about kidney disease or kidney donation was never a thing that was on my brain. But I was an instructor at a community college at the time, and there was a student of mine whom I, through an essay that she wrote, I found out that she not only struggled with kidney disease but was a single mother trying to raise a young daughter and that she was struggling to even stay in school, uhm, to keep a job because she had to do dialysis. And she had been on a kidney donor list for a few years and was not having any good luck with that. And when I found out that and I kind of knew her story, I just decided that I wanted to donate to her.

I think it probably took, to be quite honest, about two years to where I wasn't just this person who donated a kidney. And then after about two years, I kind of fell back into the routines that I had done before. So kickboxing is the hobby that I have, and I did start doing that again right away. But I kind of told myself that I couldn't compete, you know, I could do it as an exercise, but I couldn't get hit because if my, you know, kidney got hit, then it would be bad. So I had decided to just do it as a hobby. But after about a year of doing it as a hobby, I realized, no, this is- this is something that I can do, and it's-it’s-it’s going to be fine. Again, I looked at statistics about actual injuries and things that took place. And so I was able to logically decide, yeah, that's not really a huge risk that I should be worried about. So I, yeah. I started kickboxing again and I have been for, I think, four years. I've been back to doing it, so it's great.