When we first met some fifteen years ago, I was shopping at the local thrift shop operated by the Salvation Army and she was working there. I guess there was something about each of us that drew the other. I thought I could see deep-seated sorrow in her eyes and perhaps she saw something in mine that reminded her of a heritage and history she had left to migrate to Canada from her country of origin. One of the first questions she put to me was -- where was I from?

Canada, I responded, born here. My father, picked up at age 13, an orphan on the streets of Warsaw in the 1920s by a philanthropic society, had been put to work as a labourer on a farm near Toronto where some of his schtatel peers also worked until they paid off their passage and were free to move on. My mother migrated with her two sisters from the Pale of Russia, their passage a loan from wealthy relatives who lived in the States; when I was around ten my mother was still slowly paying off her share of that loan; that must have been around 1946.

As for her, she told me in low tones about the difficulties she had suffered, in broad strokes of description, and the miseries and danger her extended family still live in. She mentioned back then where she had come from, but memory doesn't serve me well; perhaps Ethiopia. Each time we'd see one another she would tell me about her husband's failing health; he had a serious heart condition. They both needed to work to keep body and soul together and he had recently lost a full-time job and hadn't much luck looking for another.

Away back then when we first met, although we were both fairly age-advanced, she not so much as I, I politely asked her due date. She was visibly pregnant and looked about ready to give birth. She turned her gaze on me and quietly said she wasn't pregnant. Neither of us said anything after that relating to my query. Through all the years following, this woman, far from robust, but of clear robust character, still looks as though she is in her ninth month of pregnancy.

Now, I know why. A little-known disease obviously afflicts her, one that many doctors don't even know how to diagnose with certainty. It is known as PKD, Polycystic kidney disease, a progressive, potentially life-threatening genetic disorder where fluid-filled non-cancerous cysts develop and grow within and on the surface of the kidney. They start out small but invariably grow in number and size. The kidney becomes enlarged and eventually its ability to function will be destroyed.

Some people afflicted by PKD are fortunate enough to have mild symptoms, experience no pain, and just endure while others have far more serious variants of the disease and eventually require organ transplants. It is a disease that affects a surprisingly high number of people; the most serious types are typically children, diagnosed at an early age. Yet another of those orphan diseases that puzzle medical science, which has only lately been able to treat it effectively with a new, disease-specific protocol.