Rachael Wong
By any measure Rachael S. Wong is an amazing human being! She is a Princeton graduate with a major in East Asian Studies and a certificate in Women’s Studies. She holds a Master’s in Public Health degree from the University of Hawaii specializing in Maternal and Children’s Health.
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When you learn that she accomplished this while living with Lupus (SLE) and kidney disease, you start to get the true measure of this woman. About her journey, she is typically direct. Rachael says, “If someone had told. me at any. point in the. 12 years I was sick that I would ever be this well, I wouldn’t have believed it! I couldn’t have envisioned it. All I wanted was to reach a point where there was no health crisis in my life. What I have been given is phenomenal. It is not merely life enhancing … it is truly the Gift of Life. I am now a healthy person who can be of service in our shared community.” She received a life-giving kidney from a deceased donor in April of 2002. |
Rachael has another message for us. She says, “it is easy to medicalize people … to say ‘a diabetic’ when you are really talking about a ‘person who lives with diabetes’. But it limits them and who they are. We all do this to each other. It is difficult to avoid … but language is so important. I am forever grateful for my health, but I am not only a transplant recipient. My illness and recovery to full health is only a part of who I am.”
Rachael has been involved with local and national work in organ and tissue donation since she received her transplant. She is also a past Pacific Century Fellow and The St. Francis International Center for Healthcare Ethics Fellow. Today she runs Kokua Mau, the statewide end-of-life and palliative care coalition.
Of her experience from health through the long, challenging years of illness and back to full health, she says, “I don’t regret any part of it … it makes my life spectrum much broader and the colors much more vivid.”
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