Today I am sitting here...

Today I am sitting in a pretty comfortable chair here on dialysis. My entire blood stream circulates through the machine about twenty times during the four hours of treatment. My blood flows out the bottom of two needles (Arterial) , makes its way through a plastic tube, then passes along through a specially-designed artificial kidney...then through a series of pumps comes back into my bloodstream via a second tube which is needled back into the Venus site.

Just another day on dialysis...

The treatment goes on for four hours, three times a week. I'm not saying anything here at all that the hundreds of thousands of dialysis patients are not fully aware of. It is our weekly reality. We are pretty much all praying for a solution that will allow us to return to a "normal" life. That would be...the blessing of a living kidney donor. As many of you reading this will already know, my dear brother Steven donated one of his kidneys to me in 1979. This selfless act resulted in over 34 years of amazing health for me. He still enjoys perfect health after all these years, so it can be said that his "Gift of Life" in no way compromised his health, thank God.

However, it can also be said that his donation was not a cure for me and that it is time for another "Earth Angel" to step up...as dialysis is fraught with hidden dangers. I pray every day that there is another savior out there who will eventually step up to offer that precious gift so that I can have my complete, unhindered life back.

Do you hear me, do you hear my prayers?

"Dancing with Rejection" Available Across Platforms

I was happy to discover some advanced features at the FriesenPress portal for my first book ...

"Dancing with Rejection: A Beginner's Guide to Immortality"  this morning.

Cover Art features a remake of my "Recovery" mural, originally designed in 1979.

The book is now available at Amazon.com in the "Kindle" version at this link.

You can now preview the first 40 pages at this link.

Who will this book appeal to? Certainly my fellow Dialysis Warriors (this book is for YOU!) and also kidney transplant donors (Earth Angels ALL!) and of course kidney transplant recipients...but also, art lovers of all stripes.

With a couple of my bestselling author buddies in Saskatoon...Left -Right: Jefferson Smith, Wes Funk and myself.

Michael R. Gaudet was diagnosed with end-stage renal failure only fourteen years after his father, Robert, died of kidney disease in Michael’s childhood. After his initial diagnosis, Michael was determined to achieve a measure of immortality. 

He designed and painted the seminal mural "Recovery 1", which he donated to the Toronto hospital that saved his life. This singular act cast the mold for the rest of his life, in which he battled chronic kidney disease and forged a career as one of Canada’s best-known mural painters. 

Michael has since designed and painted over 60 large murals across Canada. Today, he lives with his wife Sharon in the resort village of Manitou Beach in central Saskatchewan, where they own and operate a seasonal art gallery called “G-G’s Gallery & Gifts.” 

Michael is in the final stages of releasing Book 1 of the trilogy "Dancing with Rejection: A Beginner's Guide to Immortality". Please steer your search engine here to visit the Facebook page that was created to usher in the launch. Curious? Could this be the book for you? Come on over, we'll see you there.

KidneyMatch.org...An Interview with Founder Dylan Loewe

My friend Dylan Loewe of WestWingWriters fame has recently launched an amazing new website called www.KidneyMatch.org that is designed to facilitate the successful matching of kidney donor to recipient.  This website operates on the premise that should a kidney patient in need of a living donor present with a so-called "incompatible" donor ( which means a willing live donor, but of a different blood type) then the pair is entered into a massive data base which seeks the most "compatible" donor and then unites the well-matched pair. The incompatible donor is then also united with their best match!

Dylan has very generously offered to answer a few of my questions regarding his role as president of www.KidneyMatch.org, wrapped around his busy schedule today. A couple of months ago, this gentleman joined the Facebook group that my wife Sharon and I founded called Kidney Transplant Donors and Recipients. This group is one of the busiest places on the internet for all things "kidney", with almost 12,000 active members from every corner of the globe.

MRG: What was your chief motivation for launching www.KidneyMatch.org?

DL: I wanted to empower kidney patients. I wanted to give people an easy way to meet each other, find each other, and save each other's lives. And that just doesn't exist right now. 
I remember reading an article years ago about a young woman who found a paired match by searching message boards, and I just thought, there has to be a better way. And that really was my inspiration for Kidney Match. Coping with ESRD and dialysis is already hard enough. In my view, it's just completely indefensible to have a system that is this complicated and difficult to navigate. It should be as simple as using an app on your smartphone. Which, by the way, we are currently developing for Kidney Match.

MRG: Is there a cost for potential donors and recipients to take advantage of what the website has to offer? 

DL: Absolutely not.  And there never will be. Using the site will always be free.  Here's how I think about it: when we help facilitate a paired swap, the hospitals that perform the transplants will make money.  The insurance companies will save money because a post-transplant patient is far less expensive than on on dialysis.  The pharmaceutical companies will make money because they will have new people taking immune suppressants and other post-transplant medications.  That's a lot of companies that will stand to profit if Kidney Match is successful. So it should be them-and not the patients-who support our yearly budget.  And by the way, they agree!  They've been nothing but supportive in our conversations so far.

MRG: Has the website been successful in its mandate? I appreciate that these are early days, but do you have any success stories to share? 

DL: We're obviously still in the very early days, but I can confidently say that, yes, it has been successful so far.  People on the site are communicating with each other on a daily basis and many of them have found potential matches.  I suspect it'll be another three months or so before the first of those matches goes all the way to the transplantation stage.

MRG: Will you post these stories of human triumph on the site?

DL:  Absolutely, with permission, of course.

MRG: How do you propose to share the information that is garnered on your website with the medical community to expedite the successful candidates for their life-saving surgery?

DL:  We work directly with transplant centers to help coordinate and facilitate matches.  Once two pairs on the site let us know that they want to match with each other, we run their medical data (with permission) through a complex algorithm to determine the probability of a successful match.  Then we pass that information along to the transplant centers, where they can do confirming cross match testing.

The algorithm we use was developed by one of the world's foremost experts on kidney exchange algorithms and software.  He currently works on the team that manages the algorithm and software for UNOS.  He's brilliant and we are so lucky to have him.

One other thing I'd add:  Sometimes when patients join Kidney Match, they don't even have to start searching for a match, before we contact them to tell them that we've found one!  That's because we run everyone in our pool through the algorithm software the moment they sign up, to see if they have an ideal match already on the site.  We want to be as proactive as possible, so if our software tells us you have a match, we'll get in touch and start the process right away.

Dylan Loewe (left) with Vice-President Joe Biden on Air Force 1.

Michael R. Gaudet was diagnosed with end-stage renal failure only fourteen years after his father, Robert, died of kidney disease in Michael’s childhood. After his initial diagnosis, Michael was determined to achieve a measure of immortality. He received a wildly successful kidney transplant which sustained him for over 34 years, but returned to dialysis therapy in mid-May of 2014. He now awaits a second "Gift of Life".

He designed and painted the seminal mural "Recovery 1", which he donated to the Toronto hospital that saved his life. This singular act cast the mold for the rest of his life, in which he battled chronic kidney disease and forged a career as one of Canada’s best-known mural painters. 

Michael has since designed and painted over 60 large murals across Canada. Today, he lives with his wife Sharon in the resort village of Manitou Beach in central Saskatchewan, where they own and operate a seasonal art gallery called “G-G’s Gallery & Gifts.” 

Michael is in the final stages of releasing Book 1 of the trilogy "Dancing with Rejection: A Beginner's Guide to Immortality". Please steer your search engine here to visit the Facebook page that was created to usher in the launch. Curious? Could this be the book for you? Come on over, we'll see you there.

A "Visual Prayer" for Every Kidney Patient

About two years ago, my wife Sharon and I started a Facebook group called "Kidney Transplant Donors and Recipients" (aka "KTDR") . She and I were the first two members. Within a year, the membership had swelled to over one-thousand members! The purpose of this group was to create a community that would hopefully share encouragement and moral support. It was working. There was a palpable spirit of sharing and caring that we all enjoyed in those early days. At the beginning, I decided to use the seminal "Recovery" mural as our masthead. I'm referring to the notorious mural that I designed and painted at age 21, that was donated to the Toronto hospital that plucked me back from the abyss of an early grave with a life-saving intervention: dialysis.

Seminal mural "Recovery" was designed and painted at age 21, and donated to the Toronto hospital that saved my life.

When the group was first founded, I still had bragging rights to over thirty-four years with my wildly successful kidney transplant from my brother Steve, which took place on that glorious day of October 17th, 1979. It felt good to be able to say that I held the "kidney transplant longevity record" for Saskatchewan at that time. A year later, our ranks mushroomed to in excess of twelve-thousand worldwide members!

As kidney patients and their caregivers are constantly saying to anyone that will listen, a kidney transplant is NOT a cure, but it is damn good treatment, when all goes well! Flash forward to mid-May of 2014...this was the time when I finally admitted, after about two final years of kicking and screaming in protest, that the life of my transplanted kidney had reached its "best before date". Certain lethal substances were above and beyond acceptable levels in my bloodstream. I was dangerously close to a heart attack, or stroking out. Dialysis was once again imperative!

Once the dust settled after I went back on dialysis, I decided that the "generic" image of the "recovery" figures needed to be more specific, so I revisited the image to tweak it with a certain attribute. After all, I reasoned, the image was in its own way a kind of "invocation" for health in much the same way that my ancient forefathers painted "game" on their cave walls as a sort of visual prayer for a successful hunt. I decided, bearing this progeny in mind, to strategically place a "kidney" in the abdomen of the figure on the far right, to plant that seed in the cosmos...to invoke a SECOND TRANSPLANT from a LIVING DONOR.

There is a subtle but powerful change in the 2015 version of my "Recovery" image. 

Now this revised version of the "Recovery" motif graces the masthead of KTDR, as a visual prayer for ALL the members and for every kidney patient worldwide, that we may ALL attract a living donor, and having done so, sustain glowing, vibrant health for many many year! That is my prayer that I offer up to the universe.

Michael R. Gaudet was diagnosed with end-stage renal failure only fourteen years after his father, Robert, died of kidney disease in Michael’s childhood. After his initial diagnosis, Michael was determined to achieve a measure of immortality. 

He designed and painted the seminal mural "Recovery 1", which he donated to the Toronto hospital that saved his life. This singular act cast the mold for the rest of his life, in which he battled chronic kidney disease and forged a career as one of Canada’s best-known mural painters. 

Michael has since designed and painted over 60 large murals across Canada. Today, he lives with his wife Sharon in the resort village of Manitou Beach in central Saskatchewan, where they own and operate a seasonal art gallery called “G-G’s Gallery & Gifts.” 

Michael is in the final stages of releasing Book 1 of the trilogy "Dancing with Rejection: A Beginner's Guide to Immortality". Please steer your search engine here to visit the Facebook page that was created to usher in the launch. Curious? Could this be the book for you? Come on over, we'll see you there.

Short Film Coming: Your Preview

Over the past several weeks, Saskatoon-based Bamboo Shoots Inc.  have been industriously working on the creation of a "short film" based on my story of living with a life-long chronic health issue and its impact on my life and art. Sasktel MaxTV commissions Bamboo Shoots to romp across the countryside here in Saskatchewan to make short films on worthy subjects, events, etc.

We started off filming in my studio, with an interview and a look at some of my easel paintings.

We started off with some "show and tell" at my studio.

After the studio segment was filmed, I requested an interview from my dialysis pod. I guess you could say I am a "man on a mission" when it comes to raising awareness of kidney health and all that implies. I figured that. even though it might make some people squeamish and uncomfortable, that is just too damn bad. It's my thrice weekly reality, along with millions of other dialysis patients world-wide.

Thrice weekly dialysis treatments will (hopefully) sustain  me until my second kidney transplant.

Just a brief overview, in case you are new here... I was first diagnosed with End Stage Kidney Failure at age 20, while living and working in Toronto. This was in 1979. After about seven months on dialysis, which saved my life at the time, I received the "Gift of Life" aka a kidney transplant, donated in a singular act of love and courage by my brother Steven. His incredible act of generosity sustained me in excellent health until mid-May of 2014, at which time I returned to dialysis. Once again, this is a life-saving measure, as the toxins slowly built up in my system to dangerous levels.

Thrice-weekly dialysis treatments are once again keeping me alive as I await the "Gift of Life".

The final segment of filming took place, again at my request, in the sanctuary of Sacred Heart Church in Saskatoon. This is where my huge mural soars to a height of almost fifty feet above the alter. I felt it was very important to emphasize that people living with a chronic disease are still capable of achieving their dreams with enough ambition and focus.

My mural at Sacred Heart soars to almost 50 feet in height in the sanctuary.

It is actually quite hard to imagine the visual force of this mural when your viewing experience is limited to a photograph. I hope you can appreciate the scale of this piece by seeing the figures in the image above.

I chose to discuss the distinctly "feminist" nature of the images in the mural.

My intention with the third segment of the film was to openly disclose the rather "radical" feminist leanings incorporated into the mural design. With such a high profile platform as this (for artistic expression), I worked strategically to embed evocative references to the "male and female" aspects of God/dess. After we (the parish priest and I) were chastised (and threatened) by the powers-brokers at the Vatican that our vision of the duality of God/dess was deemed a HERESY, I became doubly determined that my artwork would reflect my personal belief that a mature God would have no difficulty with the idea of the power and grace of His feminine nature.

The "Virgin Mary" is depicted apologetically as a full-blown "Goddess".

At present, I await the link to the short film. It is already on the public airwaves and I have heard from a few friends who subscribe to MaxTV that it is a great ten-minute film. For now, I have only seen the trailer, which lasts about one minute. You can view it here. 

Michael R. Gaudet was diagnosed with end-stage renal failure only fourteen years after his father, Robert, died of kidney disease in Michael’s childhood. After his initial diagnosis, Michael was determined to achieve a measure of immortality. 

He designed and painted the seminal mural "Recovery 1", which he donated to the Toronto hospital that saved his life. This singular act cast the mold for the rest of his life, in which he battled chronic kidney disease and forged a career as one of Canada’s best-known mural painters. 

Michael has since designed and painted over 60 large murals across Canada. Today, he lives with his wife Sharon in the resort village of Manitou Beach in central Saskatchewan, where they own and operate a seasonal art gallery called “G-G’s Gallery & Gifts.” 

Michael is in the final stages of releasing Book 1 of the trilogy "Dancing with Rejection: A Beginner's Guide to Immortality". Please steer your search engine here to visit the Facebook page that was created to usher in the launch. Curious? Could this be the book for you? Come on over, we'll see you there.

From One Human Bean to Another

At the age of 21, in 1979, I designed and painted the seminal mural Recovery 1 while receiving thrice weekly dialysis therapy at Sunnybrook Medical Center in "Toronto the Good".

Photo of  Recovery 1 in 1979.

I embraced the "Recovery" motif as the perfect masthead for the Facebook page that my wife Sharon and I founded a little over two years ago. Called "Kidney Transplant Donors and Recipients" (KTDR), the site garnered an impressive nine-hundred members within the first year. Little did we realize that within a couple of years, the site would explode to over eleven thousand worldwide members!

My best attempt to breathe some contemporary "life" into the fairly low-resolution, hazy, pixelated image.

Now that I was committed to pressing this image into service once again in a high-fidelity format...namely, as the cover art for my Book 1 of the soon-to-be-unleashed memoir "Dancing with Rejection..." my publishing consultant advised me that the (above) artwork appears so severely pixelated aka blurry that it would simply not suffice, should I desire to look professional. I took this as an immediate challenge and decided to respond by creating brand-new, crisp artwork for that purpose.

Getting very close to visualizing the Cover Art for "Dancing..."

An invocation for a successful hunt? It would appear so.

Now, I can say with confidence that the artwork for the cover of "Dancing..." is going to pass muster with nary a revision after this. As the careful observer will note, I have made two conspicuous changes to the design in the 2015 version. First, I have the last (vibrant red) figure on the right-hand side striding with purpose off the edge of the canvas. Second, I have included a "Kidney" motif in the guts of that figure. He is a successful kidney transplant recipient! 

Brand-new, crisp artwork is created in 2015 to dramatically upgrade the quality of the image.

Much as the artists of the Neanderthal Age would have meticulously painted iconic images of bison, deer and hunters deep inside their ceremonial caves, I paint the vibrant figure with his transplanted kidney. In my own way, I am emulating those cave paintings with an "invocation" or "visual prayer" for my own healing once again. Everything has come around full circle...I find myself once again facing down thrice weekly dialysis treatments as I wait and pray for my quest to yield the "Gift of Life". 

Michael R. Gaudet was diagnosed with end-stage renal failure only fourteen years after his father, Robert, died of kidney disease in Michael’s childhood. After his initial diagnosis, Michael was determined to achieve a measure of immortality. 

He designed and painted the seminal mural "Recovery 1", which he donated to the Toronto hospital that saved his life. This singular act cast the mold for the rest of his life, in which he battled chronic kidney disease and forged a career as one of Canada’s best-known mural painters. 

Michael has since designed and painted over 60 large murals across Canada. Today, he lives with his wife Sharon in the resort village of Manitou Beach in central Saskatchewan, where they own and operate a seasonal art gallery called “G-G’s Gallery & Gifts.” 

Michael is in the final stages of releasing Book 1 of the trilogy "Dancing with Rejection: A Beginner's Guide to Immortality". Please steer your search engine here to visit the Facebook page that was created to usher in the launch. Curious? Could this be the book for you? Come on over, we'll see you there.