Close to Me

This is the last of the entries I made during the period of time from when I first learned that I had become eligible to be placed onto the kidney transplant list to receiving the actual transplant on October 18, 2004.  I do not know why I stopped adding to the journal what turned out to be well over a year before the waiting ended.  It could've been that nothing was progressing and the waiting continued unabated.  It could be because I worked with my transplant doctor to aggressively pursue any effort to change my body in order to be a better fit for a donor kidney match.  This means that I was placed on immune suppressants and given bi-weekly treatments of IVIG to cleanse my blood of antibodies that could prevent matches.  The net result was that my health deteriorated quickly as did my level of hope.  In the end, I will never know if this attempt to push the matching process along was a factor for the kidney I did finally receive, but I wouldn't change a thing.

Monday, August 25, 2003.


Over the last weekend, I had a dream. I was in Forest Grove (or the Frosty Grave) with my friends Jeff and Steph. Jeff and I went to college at Pacific University (or P-U) in the Grave years and years ago. We were roommates at one time. Now, somehow we are still friends and he has since married Stephanie and the three of us found ourselves in a bar that in the dream was apparently located in FG. My beeper started to go off. I began to hyperventilate. It was finally my chance! The beeper meant that a kidney was waiting for me and all I had to do was go claim it. I ran out of the dark bar into the daylight on the sidewalk. There was a phone booth handy, but it was missing the phone. I looked at the number to call on the beeper’s tiny display. I kept looking at it. The people at the transplant clinic have told me that I would have about an hour to respond to the page, or else lose the kidney to the next person on the list. Steph ran after me outside. She was nearly as excited and bewildered as I was. I began to sweat bullets trying to figure out what to do next. My mind was a complete scramble. Steph was trying to help me calm down. She explained to me that she had a cell phone I could use. I looked into the open front door of the bar, where Jeff was standing. He was at the bar trying to pay our tab. He kept pulling losing lottery scratch-its out of his needlessly overstuffed wallet instead of money and the bartender was looking perturbed. I glanced back to the cell phone that Steph had handed me. I attempted to dial the number, but couldn’t punch it in properly. If the number was 2-9-3, I would tap in 2-4-3, and have to begin again. Serious panic set in and I began screaming my frustration as I fucked up the numbers again and again. I could hear Jeff getting lectured about ordering food and beer knowing full well that scratch-its aren’t currency. Jeff’s voice sounded confused and despondent as he tried to explain that his wallet did have money before, but is now filled with used losing tickets. Steph snatched the phone from my hand and punched in the correct number. The beeper began to beep anew. This was it!

I awoke to my alarm. That beeper in the dream was my alarm, and presumably my alarm again, after hitting the snooze bar in my sleep.

Today I purchased a cell phone. I hate cell phones. I have never wanted a cell phone – until now. My paranoia led me to it. The beeper is not enough. I need to be able to be able to speak directly with whoever may wind up calling for me, when (or if) a matching kidney becomes available. The notion of calling a number that appears on my pager, never knowing who they will be, bothers me, especially since my experience has always traced its way to a wrong number. At least wrong numbers or prank calls can be dealt with immediately. I will still have dreams of missing this most important call. I was even startled during dialysis today with a startling ring shortly after giving the transplant coordinator my new cell number. As I should’ve expected it was some chick looking for a Ted, or some such dude that I am not. I wonder how many wrong number calls people normally receive on their phones, because this feels ridiculous.

I wonder how I will actually feel if I actually do receive a call for a kidney. It will mean that someone has just died. The reality of this strikes me often and it fills me with guilt and sadness. Somehow I have placed myself in a position to hope for some stranger’s death. It makes me feel sick to my stomach, or maybe that’s the stomach ache I’ve had for the last two years. Either way, I don’t like what I’m facing.

Masquerade

When did this all go wrong? The thin waxy paper crackles underneath my rear end, as I shift my weight from one ass cheek to the other. My toes dangle off the end of the table and kick around like they used to when I was a restless little kid. Occasionally, they bump the no-skid tread on the foot stool below creating loud bangs – the volume of which seems extraordinarily amplified by the off-white tile floor and the general hollowness of this place.

I glance up from my book towards the sink across from me, catching a twisted reflection of my face on the stainless steel canisters atop the counter. I wonder if I really do look that terrible. I quickly shift my gaze to the remaining accoutrements on the countertop. There are oddly shaped scissors surrounded by rolls of different makes of white tape. There are red, white and blue packaged gauze pads and giant-sized Q-Tips for who knows what. I wonder how long those items have been there.

I try to refocus my attention to my book. I'm on page 107 in a book I started this morning. I am not one of those super speed readers. Normally, it will take me three, maybe four sittings to reach this point, and yet, here I am. The base of my neck aches from slouching over for so long, therefore I return to examining the examining room.

There are a few failed touches of comfort that they have attempted in the design of this room and no successful ones, unless you're a connoisseur of mid-80s airport hotel lobby design. The "art" on the wall opposite the window is uniformly faded from year upon year of staring down soullessly at their daily visitors. Muted mauve mountain silhouettes traverse from one frame to the next, to the next, on a beige sky forming a trilogy of stylized prints possibly stolen from a low-end furniture store display 25 years ago. They are all framed in with fingerprinted and scratched plexi-glass and a plastic approximation of brass around their edges. The middle frame is coming apart at a corner, and crooked in relation to the others in the series, possibly revealing an angry customer of yore.

Disturbed by this idea of decoration, I slide off the giant strip of cheap, industrial, one-ply, non-sheeted toilet paper protecting the cold vinyl of the examination table (classily clad in mountain matching mauve) from my germs. I limp over to the window, because my legs and feet are numb from sitting far too long. The afternoon sun illuminates the parking lot below like the overhead light of a kitchen. The shadows it creates are tiny and situated almost directly underneath the handful of cars scattered randomly around the immense blacktop parking lot. Within the tight shade of the building I'm standing in, is a row of the semi-trucks holding portable MRI machines, a booming business! I have never figured out how to find this parking lot behind the building. It sure would make life easier if I could park back there, as opposed to circling endlessly through the oblong PATIENT Parkade out front, hoping for the fat-chance of some reverse lights to flash on, like I did this morning. Not that I should ever be concerned about running late. I think I saw my doctor heading out to lunch when they brought me back to this little room that has become my new home.

The best result I can hope for in this scenario is to have one of my doc's flunkies to charge in within moments and take a full 15 seconds to tell me that there are no changes according to the scans, but that I should do it all over again in six months HAVE A NICE DAY.

Can't wait.

Where did I go wrong? How did I end up entangled in this medical web? Why do I feel sick? I felt fine when I arrived this morning, despite the despicable morning traffic. During all of these hours of waiting in different waiting rooms; of enduring three botched attempts at starting an IV in my right arm; of having my bruised veins pumped full of some radioactive elixir that leaves a terrible taste in my mouth and nausea in my gut; of being shoved in a tube that makes jackhammer noises for an hour; I have emerged needing medical attention. Yet, here I sit, alone in a small room that smells of pine sol and recycled air. In a room that wavers uncomfortably between too cold and too warm. Good thing I'm at a doctor's office in a hospital.
Maybe they forgot that they put me in here. Maybe I should dial 9-1-1, or make a break for it.

Unfortunately, this place has become like home to me. It has become a huge part of my social life – like a second family. Most of the women I meet are here. I try and charm the nurses who butcher my arms with needles. I survive on pills, blood tests, scans, and more pills. Why would I want to run from this?

"Hope I never see this place again.
Hope I never need this place again.
The world goes 'round me every day,
As I sit and waste away.
Hope I never see this place again."
- Dina D'Alessandro, 2005

accident prone

sitting in the waiting room again. it's busy today. i am the youngest one here by at least 3 decades. today is to be my 75th abdominal CT scan. i am reading "Golf: for Women" while i drink down some tasty white barium, which has the consistency of paint. the magazine is telling me what women don't like about men on the golf course. riveting.

an old woman a few chairs down from me is telling her husband, who just arrived to the waiting room after parking the car, that "they" will make her drink the drink and how the test will take at least 2 hours and how she hasn't eaten since 7 and all of the other ways she will be mistreated. as she lists these things off, a technician calls her name and helps her off to whatever scan she is scheduled for. turns out she'll only be there for a few minutes. i toss the magazine onto the table and take a sip of Gesso and stare my hollow stare across the room.

i bring my knees up toward my chest and hold them there by grabbing them with my hands. it feels good to stretch. my knees feel hollow. i imagine sticking my fingers through the skin and crumbling my kneecaps to a fine chalky dust. i begin to visualize tearing my legs apart as if they are made of sheet rock.

hearing my name shoots me out of my thoughts. the tech is there to lead me back to the scan. she tells me all about it, though i've been through it so many times with her over the past 4 years. she keeps using my brother's name instead of mine. our medical records are most likely mixed up. maybe now i have children. maybe now he is fat. who knows?

after dressing into the gown (open rear), i think about how i should grab a few of these, so i can just show up for the scans every time ready to go. do away with the hassle of changing clothes each time. i start to think about the entire ordeal. why do i put up with the hassle? why am i here? what if they find more bad news? i wonder if they can see my soul with that machine - see that it's no longer there.