My first “pecking”

In 2011 I had to raise money to be able to finance my operation. For that occasion I started blogging on my previous site “hendur.is. This is the first blog I made to start that campaign.

Well, here is my first attempt at blogging. While I sit with a pencil in my mouth and stab at the keyboard, I am thinking pecking would be a better name for what I’m doing. Today the web site is going up, www.hendur.is, and I hope most people who hear of it will come by and take a look and perhaps “give me a hand”.

The road to this point in time has been long and has often seemed very unreal.

The strangest place though, might be where I am today, at a point where I can be whole again and nothing is in the way except money.

For the first time in History, it is possible to get a transplant of arms that I lost so many years ago. Like you can imagine, I have thought about that moment a million times over-what it would be like to wake up one day and see my body whole again. Could I even describe that moment with words? After waking up with tiny stubs sticking out of my shoulders and meat sacks that once were my upper arms, lying on the pillow next to me. After going under the knife more than I would like to remember, to have yet another piece of my too short arms removed. After walking around with a liver that got worse and worse every day for 4 years. After being Canary-yellow these 4 long years, without arms and unbearable itch…

After undergoing an eight-hour liver transplant surgery only to get so violently ill that I was flown unconscious to Copenhagen and had to undergo another transplant a month later. After walking around for fourteen years helpless to the things that everyone else takes as a given-like eating, using the restroom, hugging your children, brushing your teeth, scratching yourself, having balance, using your arms to break a fall, drinking coffee without using a straw, going camping, going shopping, washing your car, travelling without paying double, turning the page when you read a book, going to the ATM without having have to push on the numbers with your nose, using the keypad on the phone and looking at the screen at the same time, shaking people’s hands without making them embarrassed, writing my name, rolling my sleeves up when it gets too hot, swimming, pulling up the comforter, reaching for my wallet. I could go on forever- even adding in things that are way too personal for this pecking!

God has been good to me and more often than not I have been able to keep my eyes on what I CAN do rather than what I CAN’T do. He has surrounded me with the best people imaginable, carried me through the most difficult periods. He has led me to this place and I have faith that he will take me through the rest; and that the day will come when I see that this struggle was for something.

I’m not one to complain but in light of what I am trying to do, I feel compelled to let you in to my life and to show you some of my daily challenges. Help is the single most difficult thing for me to ask for, but like so often, asking for help is the only thing I can do. And I know it’s not making things any easier that we are living in hard times, when people are losing their homes and even standing in lines to get food. I realize others are also struggling. But if you who are reading this, see any way to donate even the smallest amount, it helps and I am forever grateful. Many hands can give two arms J