The Truth After the Transplant

Before: the version of “better” I pictured

I thought a liver transplant would solve everything. Not in a dramatic, movie-ending way. In a boring way. The kind of boring where you wake up and just live.

No calculating energy like it’s a currency. No checking the clock against symptoms. No planning every outing like it’s a military operation. I wanted to do everything without planning. I wanted to say yes without doing mental maths first.

I held that hope with both hands, because hope is useful like that. It gets you through appointments, tests, forms, consent conversations, and the long stretch of waiting where everyone talks about “the journey” and you nod like you’re not quietly begging for the next page.

When the transplant finally happened, people treated it like a finish line. A miracle. A reset. The language around it was bright, clean, and certain.

I wanted that certainty more than I wanted to be realistic.

After: the medication schedule that became my life

The first unmistakable sign that “better” wasn’t coming was a medication schedule.

Not a simple one. Not something you casually remember. A schedule that doesn’t care if you’re tired, grieving, nauseous, anxious, or barely functioning. A schedule with alarms, boxes, timings, refills, side effects, cautions, interactions, blood tests, clinic calls, pharmacy runs, and the constant low-grade fear of getting it wrong.

The transplant didn’t end the crisis. It traded it.

The old crisis was a burning building you could point at. The new one was a house wired with smoke detectors that never stop listening. Every cough, every ache, every temperature, every change in appetite. You learn to monitor like it’s a skill and then you realise it’s become your personality.

My husband needed me. He needed me in the practical ways first: organising meds, keeping track of appointments, pushing for answers, filling out paperwork, noticing changes, remembering what the consultant said because he was too tired to hold onto it.

Then he needed me in the other ways. The ways that don’t come with instructions. The reassurance. The steady presence. The sense that he could lean on someone without that person folding in half.

I was his carer. I didn’t apply for the title, but it arrived anyway, like a delivery you cannot refuse.

And I was not prepared for what it would do to me.

The thing people want me to say (and the thing I can actually say)

People want reassurance. They want the story where the transplant is the hard bit, and then life starts again.

They want, “It gets better.”

I understand why. People need a promise to hang their fear on. If it gets better for you, maybe it gets better for them. Maybe the world is fairer than it looks.

But what I learned is cruel in its simplicity: sometimes it doesn’t get better. Sometimes it becomes different, and you become different, and the best you can do is learn how to live inside it.

That is not uplifting. It is also not hopeless. It’s just honest.

When I quit being his carer

I didn’t quit in a brave, cinematic way. It happened in a small domestic moment, the kind that usually passes without meaning.

It was the medication schedule again. It always comes back to that. The pills laid out, the next alarm waiting, the day already shaped by timing.

He asked me something ordinary. Maybe it was, “Have I taken the morning ones?” Maybe it was, “Can you ring the clinic?” Something that would have been nothing in a normal marriage.

I heard it, and something in me went quiet.

I knew, in that moment, that I couldn’t do it. Not that day. Not again. Not in the way I had been doing it, with every part of myself pressed into service.

I said it out loud. I said I couldn’t be his carer anymore.

I watched his face change, and I hated myself immediately. Because he didn’t become angry. He became afraid. That look you see when someone realises the person holding the railing has let go.

A person now depended on me, and I stepped away anyway.

If you want to judge me, you can. I judge me too.

The shock: I regret the transplant

Here is the sentence that sounds monstrous, and I have tried to sand it down into something more acceptable. I have failed.

I regret the transplant.

Not because I wanted him to die. I did not. I wanted him to live.

I regret it because I believed it would give us our life back, and instead it demanded a new life we never agreed to, and it took more from us than anyone warned me to expect.

It took our freedom. It took our ease. It took the casual, ordinary intimacy of two people who can be tired without it becoming a medical issue. It took our future plans and turned them into vague suggestions we whisper about, like we’re scared of jinxing them.

It turned love into logistics.

It turned me into someone I don’t recognise.

I know how this sounds. I know the chorus of sensible voices: “But he’s alive.” As if being alive means you must feel grateful in the right way, at the right volume, forever.

He is alive. And I am grateful he is alive.

And I am also devastated by what survival has cost us.

Those things can be true at the same time. Humans are messy like that. Your brain doesn’t tidy your emotions just because the surgery was successful.

Depression and the desire to be alone

After I quit, I told myself I was taking a break. I told myself it was temporary. I told myself I was burnt out, which is a tidy word for something that feels like your insides have been emptied out.

The truth was uglier.

I was depressed and I wanted to be alone.

Not alone for an hour. Alone in the way you want when you cannot stand the sound of another person needing something from you. Alone in the way you want when every request feels like a weight added to a body that is already sinking.

I became tired of my own voice saying, “It’s fine,” when it wasn’t.

I became tired of being the emotional grown-up for both of us, when I was quietly falling apart.

And because depression doesn’t politely appear and announce itself, I spent a long time thinking I was simply failing at being a wife. Failing at being supportive. Failing at being the person a transplant story is supposed to produce.

The shame of it was constant. The shame made everything worse.

If you’re reading this wanting reassurance, I can’t give you the kind that says it all turns out okay. But I will say this plainly: depression after prolonged medical crisis is not a character flaw. It is a human response to sustained stress, fear, responsibility, and grief.

And it deserves real help, not just endurance.

Acceptance: the small, unromantic kind

Acceptance is not a warm bath. It is not a breakthrough. It is not a quote you put on a mug.

Acceptance is noticing the medication schedule, feeling the resentment rise, and taking the pills anyway because the alternative is worse.

Acceptance is admitting that the transplant didn’t fix us, and still choosing to stay in the room.

Acceptance is understanding that I can love my husband and still grieve the life we thought we were getting back.

It is also understanding that if I am going to survive this, I cannot be his everything. Not anymore. Not at the cost of myself.

So I am learning how to live inside it. Inside the routine. Inside the disappointment. Inside the responsibility that arrived wearing the mask of a miracle.

Some nights I still want to run. Some mornings I still wake up angry at a body, at a system, at fate, at whatever you call the thing that reshuffles your life without asking permission.

But tonight, I fill the pill organiser. I set the alarms. I write the refill date down, because future me will forget.

Then I sit back down beside him. Not with a promise that it gets better, because I don’t know that.

Just with the truth of what I can do.

I can stay. I can keep going. I can learn this version of our life, even if it is not the one I wanted. ❤️