Time

aka Taking it Back to December When I Meant to Write About March

In December I received an email from Luvvie Ajayi-Jones’ newsletter, promoting The Book Academy®—the program she created. December is a blur for me now but I remember reading the email, feeling very drawn to purchasing and committing to the program and ultimately deciding not to. The timing did not feel right.

Back in December 2025, I was a couple weeks post transplant. I was living in my sister’s family’s house in San Francisco with her, her husband and my two nephews. My four tweens were living in the East Bay with their dad and step-mom.

For the first six weeks post transplant I was required to have 24/7 adult supervision and I was not allowed to drive. Looking at my calendar for that time I see:

Lab work two mornings a week, requiring a blood draw at specifically 9:30 am. This either required a cross-town drive during rush hour traffic or a freeway trip south. My sister took me to each of these. I sat in the back seat wearing a huge quilted coat and holding a stuffed animal to protect my belly full of staples and stitches from the seatbelt.

A weekly trip to the transplant clinic to be seen by a transplant surgeon. My friend Phyllis came to pick me up each week which involved an early-morning freeway drive for her and some complicated parking at a huge medical center with major construction going on in multiple directions.

Bi-weekly nurse visits at home from a service contracted by my health insurer because I was seen as a medium-risk for returning to the hospital.

“No offense,” said the staff member who came first.

None taken, sir. I’m just glad you don’t see me as high risk! Score for me. Insert emoji of choice here.

Newsflash: I did indeed return to the hospital. Argh. And had a tantrum about it because we felt like we were doing every single thing in our power to get an issue addressed but I still ended up hospitalized for an infection in my abdominal wall that somehow got missed even though we kept pointing to it. Sigh. Boo. Hiss. Systemic communication challenges. I digress.

Weekly home visits from a physical therapist who helped me do exercises such as. . .standing still with my feet in certain positions and balancing while standing still. I was a Division 1 athlete in college btw. Each exercise for a count of ten as my legs shook due to a complete lack of muscle anywhere in my body after two years of increasingly poor absorption of nutrients and ultimate malnutrition.

Weekly home visits from an occupational therapist who worked with me on. . .I honestly can’t remember what we worked on in December. By January we were working on eye exercises for my separate and officially (harrumph) unrelated to liver failure condition—the benign schwannoma on my right optic nerve. The harrumph is in response to the aggravating certainty with which Western medicine practitioners proclaim that things happening in my one body can not possibly be at all related. Pero por que? Y pero como se sabe?

Have any of them ever taken care of a 48-year-old woman with multiple autoimmune disorders who has had two liver transplants and given birth to two sets of twins one year apart? No? Then please at least acknowledge the possibility that there are things we do not know about how my body operates. Of note, one young doctor asked permission to write up a case study about mouth sores I developed in 2024 that took five separate practitioners in five different departments and one hospital stay for someone to finally diagnose and effectively treat. Wait. No, six. I DIGRESS.

Oh. And I also had a kind young nursing student come visit once a week to help me take a shower. We talked about being SF natives as I stood naked in my sister’s shower, washing my hair. Having a human body is humbling and tender. He will be a wonderful nurse.

All of this was happening. I also did not have an official address, as I had rented my home to a friend. My kids came to visit and stay with me in my sister’s house for two separate five-day stretches. I still could not drive. My brother, sister-in-law and my two young nieces stayed with us to take care of me and help take care of my kids.

So I looked at the email about signing up for The Book Academy® and knew it was not the right time.

Then came January. I’d missed the window to sign up for this writing program at a huge discount. The incomparable Luvvie Ajayi-Jones’ offered a free Masterclass about The Book Academy® and I attended. And every single thing she said about her program and the reason a person should sign up spoke directly to me. Well damn.

I still did not sign up.

I thought about it every day though. Having already experienced the sacred time after a liver transplant once before, 25 years ago, I knew that I was in an era that would not last forever. This felt like the time.

Having missed every single bonus I might have been given as a gift for signing up earlier, I signed up on the last possible day.

Many voices were loud in my head. No time. No money. Too much rebuilding to do. Too many other priorities. True priorities. My health. My housing. My kids’ healing. My family’s well-being. My finances.

Still signed up. Not just for The Book Academy® but for the Accelerator version.

This essay was meant to be a write up of this past March. Because last week the admins of The Book Academy® celebrated the end of the month with us and also asked us a question.

What was our biggest challenge in March?

I paused before replying.

I read the replies of others.

I kept thinking about it, especially when I felt what felt like excuses popping up.

I pondered the difference between excuses and explanations as some memories of different events and appointments and experiences floated to mind.

Then I decided to come here and write about March. For accountability to myself. And as a writing exercise. And to be able to post a link for anyone in the cohort who wanted to read it, rather than trying to summarize in the thread what felt like a long answer to that question.

So I came here and wrote. . . about December. Heh.

Stay tuned for my next post which will (hopefully) be about March.