A mermaid angel in my DMs

A new kind of grief deep in the night.

It can be common to connect quite deeply with strangers across the internet, particularly when you have an illness. This is the story of one long-distance friendship written on my heart.

Hi lovely RDG Readers,

Many of you all don’t know me in person. Many of us are strangers to each other across the world. Quite a large amount of my community are people I know exclusively from the internet. But, despite the physical distance, many of those relationships can be quite profound.

We often don’t realize where a simple, friendly DM can lead us.

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Gem’s Journey

On June 27, 2022 I got a DM on Instagram:

“Hi Taylor, I just wanted to say hi from one new mumma to another, also on dialysis. I have a 3 month old and have just started on dialysis. It sucks to say the least as I’m sure you know. Anyway, thanks for putting your story out there for people like me to find. X Gemma”

I clicked on Gemma’s page. We had a lot in common.

Her page was titled Gem’s Journey. She was a new mom, the same age as me, and we were both being put through some of life’s scariest tests.

She’d had a congenital heart defect and a heart transplant, but complications left her with a stoma and failed kidneys. 

In her photos, she had a tired smile from a hospital bed. She was a tanned, blonde, Australian beauty currently going through a familiar hell to my own. Mama in the hospital and infant in her arms. 

I could see a similar yearning for her growing baby as I’d had. Wishing time could pause so we could have those early days back. Life we’d never get with our newborns. 

Gemma’s bright and chubby babe was born incredibly via surrogate by her sister. She went in for a heart transplant two months before the birth, but the baby made it home first. 

By the time she messaged me, she was settling into the dialysis routine about a month after getting home. 

She came across warm, friendly, and eager to connect. Gem had glamour and outstanding fashion-sense. Her social media page was very open with her struggles and so clearly full of love for her child.

And she had what can only be described as mermaid-energy. Lots of beautiful pictures of beaches and the ocean from Western Australia.

But her beautiful life looked also incredibly difficult.

We had the same complicated relationship with dialysis - it kept us alive for our babies and also, away from our babies every other day.

For the next year, we messaged back and forth periodically. Her sun-drenched face puffy from transplant meds, holding her healthy girl with notes of gratitude for each day, a longing for lost health, and an understanding for each other’s impossible challenges.

We’d commiserate about the difficulties in not being able to carry our own fast-growing infants and the discomfort of life immunocompromised. 

We seemed to be living parallel lives across the ocean from one another, until a shift began in the Autumn for us both.