I’m a young mom, an entrepreneur, an educator … and a kidney patient.

When I was four years old, I was diagnosed with Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome, which caused my kidneys to function at only 50%. For the next 20 years, I did my best to live as normal a life as possible. But as time went on, my kidney function started to decrease. And then I became pregnant.

It was a tough, scary pregnancy. My kidneys simply couldn’t keep up for both me and the baby. My daughter was born 10 weeks early and weighed just under four pounds. By the time she was born, my kidney function was down to 12%. Less than a year later, it was only 5%.

I can’t tell you how nerve-wracking those days were. I started dialysis, and my dad put his name on the Canada-wide paired exchange list. Ten months later, we found a match. I finally received what I’d been waiting for since I was four years old: a new kidney.

Unfortunately, my story doesn’t end there. Over the next year and a half, for reasons we still don’t understand, my new kidney slowly stopped functioning. I was heartbroken. I’d started to believe I could live a normal life with my new daughter … and now that dream is entangled with challenges.

Now I spend nine hours every night on dialysis and am waiting for a match for my second transplant.

It hasn’t been easy, and there have been plenty of hard days. But eventually I found my positive mindset again— thanks to the support of my family, friends, and The Kidney Foundation. When I had to stop working, the Foundation stepped in with grocery gift cards to help me make ends meet. And they’ve been an invaluable support and resource to me and my family my whole life.

I’m excited about the kind of research Dr. De Serres is doing, as well as all the other researchers funded by your donations. Hopefully, by the time I receive my second kidney, we’ll have more answers about why kidneys fail and how we can stop that from happening.

In the meantime, I’m going to make every day count and live my best life possible—for my daughter’s sake, and for my own.