When my kidney transplant failed this past March, I went into
the hospital for an eight-day stay. During that time, surgeons
implanted two catheters, one for home peritoneal dialysis in my
abdomen, and one near my right shoulder in a vein for hemodialysis,
the commonly referred-to “kidney machine.” I would have to use
hemodialysis for at least a month while the PD catheter healed.
After several dialysis treatments in the hospital, I was
discharged, and sent to a dialysis unit in Brookline for
thrice-weekly treatments.
As I sat in the dialysis unit waiting room for the first time,
it all came back to me. I had spent almost six years on dialysis
from 1975 to 1981 in California. There were the patients of every
age, of every ethnic background, from every walk of life — kidney
disease is very democratic. There was the ready good will among
patients, a willingness to acknowledge that we were all in this
together. There was the griping about schedules. There were the
very ill, in wheelchairs, or using walkers. There were the blind
and the amputees, victims of diabetes, which can cause kidney
failure. There was the raucous, busy, no-nonsense staff.
But things are different nowadays, too.
Medical privacy legislation and the fear of lawsuits have raised
barriers between patients and staff, barriers that were almost
non-existent back in the 1970s. I made friends with my dialysis
nurses. When torrential rains flooded Pacific Coast Highway, where
I lived, I stayed in Santa Monica nearer the dialysis unit with one
of the nurses. I didn’t realize he was gay till I got there and
encountered his live-in partner. It didn’t make any difference. I
dated one of the nurses, who I told unabashedly on her first day of
work, “You’re my kind of girl.” One of my fellow patients, who
became a friend, carried on a months-long affair with the head
nurse, who was married.
We smoked on treatment. We ate. There were no television sets,
so we talked with one another. When I finally got a transplant, one
of my fellow patients, a black man from Louisiana, brought me back
a country ham to celebrate the occasion.
WE HAD PARTIES, AND we had fun. The unit sponsored Christmas and
Thanksgiving dinners, lovingly cooked to conform to our dietary
requirements, with rock and roll bands and thimbles of champagne.
On Halloween, Carl, one of the gay nurses, came to work wearing a
nurse’s tight white dress, with a name placard declaring him “Nurse
Diesel.” The Fedex man came, mumbling and dozing through his
rounds, made a delivery, and held out a clipboard for Carl to sign.
Only then did he notice that this tight-bodied nurse had a black
beard. He fled while we all howled.
It was so much more casual in so many ways. I sold a rifle to
the husband of one of my nurses. I brought the rifle in and leaned
it against my chair while I got plugged in. The husband came in to
see it, measured its comb and drop against his arm, worked the
bolt, checked the trigger pull, and paid me for it.
We took casualties like an infantry platoon. Julie, who sat
across from me during treatment, went in for a transplant. It
didn’t work. She returned to the unit with some kind of sepsis. She
could no longer walk. She died. We had a terrible accident one day
on the shift opposite mine. Instead of dialysate running through
all the machines from a shared reservoir, someone threw a valve
wrong and pumped water in. The water, in the kidney machine
filters, burst blood cells in a series of patients, the worst
nearest the reservoir. Burst blood cells release potassium, a
poison. The three patients nearest the reservoir died. The next
three had to be hospitalized with convulsions.
Maria, a dignified old Russian woman, died, not unexpectedly. I
put on a yarmulke and went to her funeral. I still see her gorgeous
twin daughters in television commercials.
Kathy, my kind of girl, had problems, I knew that. But I didn’t
know how bad they were. Shortly after my successful transplant, I
came back for a visit and found out she had committed suicide.
Joanne, the new head nurse, who was Kathy’s friend, told me,
“She had apparently been planning it for months. She bought tickets
for a tennis match in Las Vegas, because she wanted to see John
McEnroe play tennis. As soon as she came home, she injected herself
with insulin. Covered her face up with a towel.”
THESE PEOPLE WERE kind to me. Two tough nurses browbeat me out of
an addiction to prescription painkillers. Three of my pals among
the staff, young women from Chile, used to take European trips
together, and they would bring me presents. I am still friends with
one of my former fellow patients. We shared bylines on a dozen or
more stories together; he’s a writer, too.
All these memories make me think. I dialyze at home now, and no
longer have that social connection with treatment. But last week,
while I was running an errand at the hospital, I met a fellow
peritoneal dialysis patient who lives in the town next door. I
really should get in touch. We bonded instantly, and he likes to
play golf too.
Lawrence Henry writes every week from North Andover,
Massachusetts.
