The Kidney Journals: Memoirs of a Desperate Lifesaver

Author/musician ANGELA CAROLE BROWN has spent the past three decades making a successful living in music, yet in 2007 found herself in crisis. On July 22nd of the following year, she successfully donated a kidney to HANS SAN JUAN, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, during quite possibly the most profound spell of depression she had ever experienced. The trilogy of journals that comprise THE KIDNEY JOURNALS: MEMOIRS OF A DESPERATE LIFESAVER is her meditation on an extraordinary and life-altering adventure that turned out to save not one life ... but two. The author has always courted the caves in her creative realm, and is a devout believer that dogged examination of the damaged nature, and facing it unflinchingly, can result in a deeper understanding, even healing, of the human condition. But prior to this book, her only writing had been fiction, where she never found courting the caves frightening. This endeavor, however, was a matter of her own caves, which she found profoundly difficult, yet it was a challenge that she welcomed, knowing full-well that the only true way to wellness and wholeness was a rigorously honest self-inquiry. THE KIDNEY JOURNALS takes on the author's own dark times and the surprising leaps of faith it sometimes takes to be delivered. It also speaks of an extraordinary young man, who, today is like a son to Angela; a fellow artist, a creative sort, her magical jester man/boy.