The American Spectator

Sally and I played golf for the first time this season as a Mother’s Day treat for her. I could manage only 7 of 9 holes. I was shocked at how weak I had gotten. As it happened, that weekend marked the anniversary of the start of my most serious decline. On the Tuesday of Players’ Championship week last year, I woke up at four in the morning with my legs paralyzed.

I crawled into the kitchen — no hope trying to waken either of my two hard-sleeping sons upstairs; Sally was in Montenegro — and called our ever-faithful housekeeper on my cell phone.

“I’m having a low blood pressure episode,” I told Jennifer. “Bring some crackers.”

Jennifer showed up with the crackers, but the salt did no good, and she sensibly told me we needed to call an ambulance. Off I went with the EMTs for the first, and the worst, of that year’s trips to the hospital.

They kept me for a week. My initial problem was an ulcerated esophagus, from taking over-the-counter pain relievers. I remember the docs trying to place a nasogastric tube and the blood burbling out of my mouth. I was garbling, “Take it out! Take it out!” And that’s the last image I knew for many days.

They tell me I had a heart attack. I didn’t know. The first thing I saw when I came out of a kind of coma was our minister’s smiling face as he sat in a chair waiting for me to wake up. I will never forget that kindness.

LONG TERM DIALYSIS takes the strength right out of you. I had been on dialysis for two years at that point. When a disaster like that hospitalization happens, you go straight downhill. The hospital stay put on 30 pounds of fluid and gave me peritonitis. I lost the weight. I cured the peritonitis. But the trials had only just begun.

I will not go into those trials in any detail. I had to go to the hospital five or six times for gastrointestinal bleeds throughout last fall and winter. At times now I am so weak I can scarcely walk.

What sustained me was the hope of an imminent kidney transplant. Now, I find that my “recalculated PRA” — or protein reactive antibody rating — is 90 percent. Nine out of ten people carry antigens — proteins — to which I have developed antibodies.

The transplant could happen tomorrow. I am, at least, being tested against every available O positive kidney, because I’m now at the top of the list. But I could be in for a wait. A long wait.

SO HERE’S MY RESOLUTION for the summer, and for the foreseeable time beyond. I must fight back and try to get stronger. I have made a list of a dozen exercise routines. Most take ten minutes or so. I’m aiming to do between four and eight of those routines a day.

I’ve got to dig in and work out against the awful lassitude and the pain in which I find myself. I have to engage in the battle. I have to fight. I know what will happen if I don’t, because it has already started to happen in the last year. My muscles will shrink. I can no longer touch my toes. It is a struggle to climb stairs. A long walk around a supermarket exhausts me.

Can I get stronger? I don’t know. Without kidneys, the body weakens, and weakens horribly. I’ve been through this before, before my first transplant. Then, with my mother as a donor, I knew the transplant would happen,

p>This time, I’ve just got to build up strength on guts, and prayer, and with no finishing line in sight. And, most important, not even knowing if it’s possible. br>