Happy Living Organ Donation Day - Three Days Late

17 Years as of May 14.

17 years since I donated one of my kidneys to my Sister at age 60. I am still in a bit of wonderment as I pee at a rather prodigious rate these days which would indicate that my remaining kidney is working just fine. 

Every year at this time I reread the narrative I posted on this blog 17 years ago. It was a major life event and I don't ever want to forget what all it entailed. If you'd like to vicariously experience the living donor process, here is the first post of the series.  

To this day, I don't regret my decision. And knowing all I know now, I would do it again.

Happy 15th Year Kidney Donation Anniversary!

Yup. 15 years ago (not exactly today, four days ago on the 14th of May 2008), I learned that I had a great future in supplying human body parts. Then I found out that since I was 60 at the time, the window of opportunity for selling of parts of me had closed. I could see doing liver donations, bone marrow donations...the profit-making possibilities were endless. But alas, with the kidney, it was one and done. 

It is so interesting how what at the time was this super intense experience has now faded deeply into memory. Thankfully, I had already started blogging then and wrote an extensive, detailed history of my experience. As I usually do on the anniversary, I go through those posts because I really don't want to forget how deep an experience it was. 

For those of you who have nothing better to do OR who might have someone in your life who is thinking of doing the Living Organ Donor thing, here is the initial post of the series I wrote on the experience. There are some 20+ posts covering April, May and June of 2008.

Happy KIdney Day!

Yes it is that special day of the year when I hold my mass celebration with all my multiple personas attending where we acknowledge the day I donated my beloved left kidney to my Sister. It is 11 years now and like the Timex watch of a past era, it keeps on ticking...or I should say cleaning.

I think 11 years of user lifespan on a kidney that was already 60 years old when it was donated speaks very well to the quality of my body parts. It has driven me crazy these many years as I realize that the quality of my parts is quite likely better than the quality of the assembly of them. Surely my Ferengi loving mind says there must be a way to monetize on this hidden value and still be here to enjoy it. And yet I have not thought of a single way to do so. So sad.

But seriously, the whole process was one of the major rites of passage of my life. For those who are interested, I wrote a chronicle about here on the blog starting with this post. Or you can just search on the label, Living Organ Donation, and go to the oldest post.

Tomorrow I will finish up Eurasia Adventure with the final 'navel gazing post'

An Interlude To Mark An Important Anniversary!!!!!!

In all the consuming excitement of our trip to the Eastern Mediterranean an anniversary, a very, very important anniversary took place and I totally forgot!!!

Bad me😒

May 14 marked the TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF MY DONATING MY KIDNEY TO MY SISTER!

Amazing enough that (at the time) 60 year old kidney is still going strong and has given my sister an additional decade of health. Damn good organ I'd say. I am still incredibly grateful to Wife for supporting me and God for having carried me through the whole thing.

If you'd like to relive as I am the events of that experience the first post of my chronicle starts here

HAPPY KIDNEY DAY! NINE YEARS AND COUNTING!

It was nine years ago and one day that I was  sitting in a hospital operating room waiting to go under the knife to donate a kidney to my sister. I was at the same time incredibly calm and fearful though probably nowhere as fearful as Wife was.

Later that day, I woke up (sort of) in the recovery room and realized I was still alive.

Yet later that day I realized that I had TOTALLY underestimated what this procedure was going to do to me and was in the most excruciating physical pain I have ever endured until then and since.

Nine years later my left kidney (the one I donated) is working like a champ...A Champ I tell you. If I had just realized how good my component parts were (compared to the mediocre whole), I would have thought of some way to monetize me!

Seriously, thank you Lord/Lady for looking over me, allowing me to provide this blessing, and to have survived and prospered.

If you'd like to read about the great journey of organ donation, my dissertation starts here.

Celebrating Eight Years

It is 8 years to the day that I said a fond farewell to my left kidney and sent it off to find its destiny as the sole operating kidney for my sister whose two kidneys she'd been born with had decided to take early retirement.

It was a major life event. For those who might want all the gory details (not physically gory...more emotionally gory), here's the link to the long series of posts I wrote starting 18 days before the event.

Amazingly enough both the kidney I gave my sister and the one remaining in me have been working like Timex watches (they take a licking and keep on ticking). That is not always the case with these donations.

It has made me wonder if my parts all work better independently than they do together as a system. I feel there was some great economic opportunity lost being so old when I did the donation and missing out on the opportunity to go to India or some where and auctioning off other parts of me. Oh well I guess we'll just have to putter along with the ensemble as it is.

Happy Kidney Donoation Day

Tomorrow, May 14 will mark exactly one year since I donated my kidney to my sister.

Sitting and looking back it seems almost as if it were a dream. It is amazing how we put certain experiences behind us. But this was not an experience that I ever want to fall into the depths of memory and I'm very happy that I was blogging and have my record of my experience starting from the earliest decision making process, through the frustrations of dealing with the system, the last crisis, the surgery, dealing with the aftermath, and understanding. (The complete posts dealing with the history are titled Organ Donor Chronicles and labeled Living Organ Donor for anyone interested in the full story).

It took much much longer for me to bounce back from this than I thought. Physically it seemed that I came back in reasonable time but emotionally it was much tougher. I had the hardest time getting my enthusiasm to work. And it wasn't like I could afford to not be working. It was almost 5 months afterward when our personal financial situation was reaching a crisis point that I finally seemed to get over that hump and it wasn't until around nine months later that I felt that I was fully back. I had some lingering strength issues that I finally figured out a few months ago and was able to resolve some exercises.

So after a year how do I feel about having undergone this whole endeavor?

• Incredible gratitude to have had the opportunity with all the years of stress and strain that were a part of it. It changed my life - my whole inner being and attitude toward life, my relationship with my family and among my family, and with those that I am close with.

• A sense of incredulity - I mean I was 60 years old when I did this. Who in their right mind does this kind of thing at that age?

• A deeper sense of appreciation of everything that I have been given and have each day, each moment.

• And a feeling of completeness.

A Helping Hand

A little over a week ago I posted about a young lady, Cristy, who had the very bad misfortune of having her wonderful gift of donating her body part, fail. It is so hard to commune with a person in pain when you haven't had the experience yourself. As I related then, this was particularly haunting to me because her reality had been one of my big fears prior to my own donation.

I am happy to say that someone showed up to leave Cristy something really meaningful. Go to the comments on this post of Cristy's and read Frannie's comment. It's really something special.

Life is Not a Fairy Tale

Sorry but this is not going to be a light hearted post.

Things come up again and again that remind me the importance of being grateful for what we have - that may of the things we bitch about really aren't that important - that we are so, so, so lucky to be where we are and have what we have - and most of all that none of this we are entitled to. We are just lucky.

Life isn't fair. Never has been. Never will be.

Since my kidney donation operation, I have followed a number of people who also have been going down the donation path and are blogging about their experiences. Just trying to repay some of the long-distance support that I received from so many people.

One of my greatest fears going into the operation was that there was going to be failure. I would be disqualified at the last minute from giving or I was going to be disabled or that the kidney wasn't going to work in my sister.

One of the young ladies I have been following is living my fear. The kidney she donated last week to her sister didn't work. Now she is dealing with all the effects on her life (inability to get insurance for example), the reality that her sister is no better off than before, and the emotional impact on her own self-worth.

Was she somehow less worthy of being a donor than me? Of course not. I lucked out. She threw snake eyes. Is this fair? No it isn't. It's life.

Enjoy your life. Appreciate what you have. Don't take it for granted. It's not a given.

Organ Donation Chronicle - D plus Six Weeks

This last Wednesday marked the six week mark since the operation. I was in Chicago most of this week on my first business trip since the operation. I was talking to Lakeview Coffee in the car on my way to Motherrocker, John the Armenian, Miss Dukes, and Wife and he chided me for not giving an update on my sister. I hate to admit when he's right.

Sister Judy is doing pretty well. It was a rough go for her right after the operation. She was pretty weak from the kidneys malfunctioning. Plus which she's probably a bit less stoic than I am about dealing with pain (I think she was hitting the brown narcotics button pretty good at the hospital). Then she got one of these nasty hospital staph infections and had to go on an intravenous anti-biotic. It ended up taking her a week longer than me to get out of the hospital. Everyone should remember that Judy and I aren't exactly spring chickens either (60 and 57 respectively). We were definitely on the upper end of the spectrum of the age that they will do this.

So with that in mind, Judy is out and walking again getting in 30 to 40 minutes a day. She started driving. They have reduced to almost nothing the drugs they were giving here when her kidneys were malfunctioning meaning my kidney is doing what it's supposed to (better damn well! We don't traffic in no shit body parts!). They have greatly reduced the amount of immunosupressive drugs they are giving her. She complained to me that she was getting bored - that's a good sign. Finally, I've noticed a change in her communication. She's always had severe ADD and has trouble staying in a conversation before bouncing to another subject. Now she is stopping herself when she does it and allowing the other person to keep talking - a big change. We're definitely a lot closer than we were.

On my part, I'm feeling good. It was a little scary the first time on Monday when we went to the airport and I was feeling twinges with the various lifting - limited as it was. I was really glad Mrs. de-I insisted on coming on this trip. Fighter Pilot Girl emailed me and asked how Wife liked being the sherpa! You can bet that I didn't pass that one on.

By the end of the trip I was feeling much more confident and lifting quite a bit more but still trying to stay in the range of control. I can definitely still feel the incisions and definitely am not ready to go back to my sumo wrestling classes.

Finally the spiritual changes keep deepening. It's like the lessons are being absorbed deeper and deeper into my being. It is having a particular influence on my business.

So overall I'm super glad for my sister, I'm super grateful for having had the experience and I'm super ready to heal completely :)

Organ Donation Chronicle - Clarity

Sacrifice and Purification

(Please note that this post is unabashedly spiritual in content. If spirituality is not your thing or turns you off feel free to take a pass.)

Well I spoke too soon when I titled the next to the last entry the conclusion. As a number of people noted, that post offered more in the way of question than answers. Now that I have returned home I have had time to reflect - what is the significance to me having made this decision and having gone through with it?

To understand what this has meant, requires an understanding of the spiritual concept of purification. If you know how they make metal, you know that we start with an ore subject it to great heat (smelting) until it melts (think blast furnaces). If we want to great an even purer form, we raise the heat even more (think making steel from iron) which removes the impurities. Most spiritual paths have a similar concept – that to achieve a higher level of spirituality requires purification – and the path of purification requires some kind of sacrifice. An example of this would be the monastic paths of renunciation in many traditions where the renunciate or monk sacrifices worldly pleasure for the discipline of a spiritual path.

The tradition that I follow emphasizes that the spiritual path is about purifying ourselves of a lifetime (actually lifetimes) of crap. If we are fortunate, this process can be short circuited slightly. This is through a process called Tapasya. Tapasya is a spiritual fire. It is sort of a spiritual blast furnace that gets rid of a whole lot of crap in a short amount of time. It is the fire of purification. You have to have reached a certain level of development in order to be able to withstand a Tapasya event just as an ore has to be processed and smelted before it can be refined. Tapasya is never ‘fun’. After all we are burning away unpleasant stuff.

Prior to the going to off to CT, I had had a number of experiences during meditation where I was getting the message that ‘I was ready’ that ‘I was strong enough to accept’. What I didn’t know was what was I in fact ready for and what was I strong enough to accept? Now I do.

There are a number of things in my past involving how I handled my relationships with loved ones that I have had lots of problems with. On the surface I have dealt with just about all of them. On the surface, the people that were affected by them have long since gone on and shown that in fact I did deal with the issues. But inside me, I have never been able to forgive myself for those pasts in spite of all the assurances through word and action from those involved.

When I got home and meditated in my own place on Sunday morning, I was suddenly aware that those guilts, those attachments were gone. They were cleanly and completely gone. Now it became clear what the meaning of this experience was. I had been given the opportunity to, of my own free will, make a sacrifice, a sacrifice of myself. And by making that sacrifice and because of my previous spiritual efforts, I was rewarded with the gift of Tapasya and had been able to remove the things that had been eating at me for decades. And on top of all this, this wave of Tapasya seems to have cleansed and healed the issues among my siblings and parent that have extended for decades as well.

I can tell you without embarrassment that the tears of gratitude were flowing that Sunday morning.

Now I think I really can conclude this Chronicle. I still need to heal. This whole long, long process has taken a lot out of me. But I see signs that gradually my energies are returning and my wounds are healing. Hopefully my Sister gets out of the hospital Tuesday morning. That will take a load off my mind.

I want to give my deepest thanks and gratitude to everyone who has assisted over these last few weeks. My Wife has been an unbelievable tower of strength and calmness. My brothers and father totally have stepped up to the plate and supported both my Sister and I. And all of the people all over the country and the world that have been thinking of us, praying, sending us their thoughts, calling, I cannot tell you how much it was appreciated.

Now the only problem is:

What the heck am I going to post on my blog that can hold a candle to this?

Organ Donation Chronicle - Going Home

We couldn't just get a nice relaxing flight home. We had to have a bit of drama.

We were visiting my sister in the hospital one last time before we left, when I received an automated message from my good friends at United Airlines.

“Hello. This is an automated flight update message from United Airlines. Flight 1196…from Hartford to…Washington, Dulles will now be departing at…4:30 PM…”

I quick mental check – I remembered that there was a 2 hour wait in Washington for our flight on to Albuquerque. And our flight was originally scheduled to leave at 2:30 PM. That meant no making our connection. We said goodbye to Sister and we hightailed it to the airport. There was about an hour of agonizing while I worked our options on the phone but ultimately we decided to get in line at the airport. We were fortunate to get a flight the goes through Chicago and still have our first class seats. I was wiped out on the plane ride.

Tim de Buffalo picked us up at the airport. I had him stop so I could give Pulisha a quick hug. Then on to our home where I promptly collapsed and had the best sleep I’ve had since I headed out on May 9.

Organ Donation Chronicle - D plus 8

Conclusion

It has been over a week since the operation. I am clearly on the mend with the swelling around the incision decreasing and a continuous but diminishing level of pain. You definitely know you’ve been through something. Physically it’s like they took your high performance V-6 out and replaced it with a 2-cylinder self-propelled lawnmower engine. My brain seems to have traded in it’s top of the line MAC for a 1980’s PC.

Emotionally and psychologically, it’s another story. How does one process and understand the consequences of doing something like this? The first few days after I was out of the hospital, I couldn’t even talk about the event without breaking into tears. Why?

I had made such a huge investment into doing this. I did not want to fail –did not want to fail. It has to have been the greatest personal test I have ever faced. I did not want to face myself and say that when the chips were down and someone else’s life was at risk, that I was to afraid to pull the trigger because of my own fear of dying.

What if it had been some outside influence that had prevented it like the scare with the heart stress test? That brought on another set of fears. When you publicly announce you are going to do this and you receive as much public support back, how do you go and tell everyone that you were rejected? That may seem like a petty emotion, but it was right up their on my fear list.

And there was the fear of what if something went wrong. What if the worse happened and I died or came out a vegetable?

During those first few days out of the hospital, there was this realization that none of these fears had actualized. I had done it. I had followed through, put my life on the line, given my sister a chance to live again. I had taken the risk in order to balance my karmic accounts for all the good that I had received. Nothing had jumped up to disqualify me. I would not be a person who talked a good game but never actually did it. I was healthy, recovering; my wife and her future lifestyle were safe. I don’t know if it was relief, joy, incredulity, or what but I was overwhelmed.

Then there is the influence that all of this has had on my family that I eluded to earlier. Just after I got out of the hospital my oldest brother arrived to assist in the transition. My Dad and two brothers were together to discuss how we would help my sister in the complicated process of establishing her new regimen. This is the first time all of us had been together since my Mother’s death four years ago. In the interim there had been fallouts between one of my brothers and I and one of them and my Dad. And none of us had been close to my sister. I can honestly say that I had thought all of us getting together was never going to happen again…but here it was…a reality.

I also have an unbelievable wellspring of gratitude fill my heart. Gratitude to my Wife who put her own wellbeing at risk because she knew that this was something that I felt so strongly about. Gratitude to God for having given me the opportunity to show what I was really made of. Gratitude to all the medical staff who in the clutch took care of my Sister and I. Gratitude to my family who all rose to the occasion to help even though I never asked or even thought about the consequences of my actions to them. Gratitude for all those who gave us support in whatever form from thoughts and prayers to the hotel people in Manchester. Gratitude that whatever the magnitude of this decision it was a small small sacrifice compared to that made by many, many millions and millions of others around the world all the time.

So what does one make of having gone through such an experience? I can’t say yet. It’s going to have to rattle around in my being for a while longer. I know I’ve changed. I’m not sure just how, but I’ve changed.

Organ Donation Chronicle - D plus 4 (3)

From Recovery to Exit

I’m up from the recovery room. Wife’s gone. And I’m in a lot of pain – more pain than I can remember ever. You’d think they’d cut me open and pulled something out? Oh yah they did. What a change. One moment I’m totally focused on composing myself for the operation. In a blink I’m in la-la fuzz land of the recovery, and in a couple of longer blinks I’m in the hell of the four pains. I’m using my brown pain button but the narcotic feeling isn’t helping things. I’m trying to figure out this whole bizarre world of the hospital with its noise and interruptions. My roommate, an older person in for a kidney crisis, watches Spanish language TV all night.

You keep getting different people, nurses and care assistants, as shift changes. You’re getting a handle on what to expect and what not to – all while dealing with intense pain and discomfort. In the morning the doctors come by and let you know things are fine. I had my best caregiver that morning. She gave me a sponge bath that was a total act of gentility and kindness. I later learned she had come from Peru where she had a degree in psychology, had come to the US seven years ago, had started as a cleaner in the hospital until she got here certificate to be a patient care assistant.

Slowly through that Thursday, it seemed that I was stabilizing. I was told that the key to showing the doctors that I was healthy enough to get out of the hospital would be when my digestive track showed proper elimination processes – meaning the passing gas and solid waste. As we entered the second evening, the gas was getting worse and worse. The pain was picking up again as the gas build up put pressure on the internal bruising. I was spiraling downhill in my spirits. My brother, the doctor, stopped by in the evening and reminded me that this was a natural process, that I needed to stop fighting things and that I should remember there were lots of people thinking about me and supporting me. I grabbed on to that. I wasn’t alone. I needed to let go and have confidence that I was supported.

Thursday night was a bad night. I was pushing myself to get up and get around because they old me that was a key getting the internal processes going again. There is just no way of simply falling asleep for any length of time. With great effort and pain, I would finally get myself into a position where my body was temporarily feeling comfortable (understanding that each movement, each shift brought some sort of sharp pain and required the negotiation one’s various tubes) and I would sleep for an hour or an hour and half. Then the body part arthritic body part (shoulder or hip) that was my main support would start crying out and I’d wake up or one of the many hospital disruptions would wake me up and I’d be aware of the pain all over again. I’d decide it was a good time get my ass up and move around. I was able to do this with help the first night and on my own thereafter. Then I’d get back into bed (painfully), use a breathing exercise tool (to encourage deep breathing to avoid pneumonia), try to sit up semi-lucid for a while, get tired, try to find a comfortable position. Doze off for an hour or so. Etc. Etc.

That night I also had a set back when a nurse put an IV tube in incorrectly and one of my left hand and wrist got all swollen. It took a day for that to go down and the hand could not only be barely used but I could no longer put pressure on it without pain that further restricted my ability to shift my position.

I started Friday still in lots of pain with the gas building up. But throughout the day my walking was paying efforts as gas started coming out the front. We needed help from a suppository to get things going the other direction but I finally got my breakthrough that night. My roommate was sent to a nursing home early that night and they moved me to the window side of the room – a bit cheerier. Big event in the late afternoon – they took out my catheter. I’d figured out how to unplug the IV machine, so I could move around on my own. With only me in the room, things were definitely more peaceful and I rested significantly better that night.

Very early Saturday morning, I got a new roommate, Dave. He was a really cool guy with a serious prostate infection that had sent him into a super high temperature. A bus driver for the Hartford transit system, he was a divorced father of two, still friendly with his ex and a love outdoor activities and food…and a frustration with the hospital system.

When my doctors came in during the morning they gave us unexpected news; we could be released – right then! One problem, we had nowhere to go. Based on what we’d been told, we’d made our reservations for the residence hotel in Manchester starting Sunday. Wife went to work (she’s become a master at playing the ‘he’s an organ donor’ card. The hotel said they could get us into a smoking room for one night and then put us in our non-smoking room starting Sunday. Somehow she got this upgraded to a non-smoking two room suite that we were able to stay in until Thursday for the same price as we originally quoted.

Getting out was another exercise in frustration. When we finally got the room committed, we told them we were going to discharge, but the doctor had already left the hospital. 45 minutes later I went to the nurse who had still not made the phone call. It took 3 hours until the final paper work was done. I had gotten myself changed and ready to go in the beginning. By the time we were leaving it was 5 in the evening and much colder than when we thought we were actually going to live. By the time we got to the hotel, I was incredibly cold. I jumped immediately into bed. Wife needed to go out and get my pain meds and some food. I could not get warm. Wife was gone for so long. I thought the pharmacy was across the street? I started to think that I was going into shock and that I was going to be sent back to the hospital with tubes put back in both ends and that Wife was in some parking lot lying bleeding. I was in as bad a state as I have ever been.

Wife came back after an hour and a half. I had started to warm up by then. As soon as I heard her come back, one fear was gone. She had bought some wonton soup for me and as soon as the warm soup hit with us together, I felt an almost instant transformation. We sat together in the living room type area of the suite, I with a heating pad. I was transformed and relaxed. I was out of the hospital and felt like I was back in the world.

Organ Donation Chronicle - Current Status

Since a couple of readers asked, I will give you the current status.

Generally, I feel pretty good - in fact amazingly good considering how horrible I felt only 5 days ago.

My mental processes are back. I don't feel I need to focus 100% of my energy on getting myself through the pain. This means it's easy for me to talk to people, read, listen to music, do some work on the computer - which also means that I feel like a human again.

Physically, I'm substantially better. The main pain issue is the healing taking place where they made the incision right at the center of the gut. It feels like there is a porcupine inside of me and when I try to bend down or move to awkwardly, I really feel it. This is going to be around for a while.

I definitely am over doing it and based on Wife's adamant and correct advice, I'm going to honker back the next couple of days and try and just stick around the hotel. This is difficult because my sister is still in the hospital and her support needs are great in order for us to make sure that she does what she needs in order to have this be successful. However, my older brother is here now and Wife is fully committed to helping in this area as well so I can focus on healing.

Psychologically, I'm still dealing with the magnitude of what has occurred and what it means. That's going to take a while to figure out.

We are scheduled for our check out interview on Thursday and have changed our reservations to return to Albuquerque on Saturday afternoon arriving in the evening. It should be quite a feeling, walking back into our house.

Organ Donation Chronicle - D plus 4 (2)

Through The Looking Glass – Life In The Hospital

My very limited and unscientific sample of hospitals has led me to believe that an awful lot of them are big bureaucratic machines. But my negative feelings about Hartford Hospital during all the months prior to the surgery were confirmed in spades when I was placed in its bowels for recovery following the surgery.

I briefly posted on Friday about the pain once surgery was complete. I can’t say that I wasn’t warned by a number of people. But as I’ve commented when you willing yourself through such an experience, you are putting your mental energies into visualizing your fully successful outcome, you just don’t focus on the negative. And you are focusing on getting to the finish line (the operation) so detailed thoughts of what exactly was implied by having gone through this act were not fully on the agenda either.

So starting Wed night in my hospital room the full implications of my decision in terms of my person were hitting me like a ton of bricks. I can honestly say that I’ve never been in such a constant level of pain for such an extended period. Of course I’ve lived a charmed life and there millions maybe billions of people who daily are going through incredible levels of pain. I can describe the pain as fitting into four categories:

➢ Pain from the operation – this includes the incision and the resulting trauma to tissue in the body and around the area where work was done

➢ Pain from gas – the gas the system generates from working out the anesthesia they put into you

➢ Pain from being in bed – Being bedridden causes it own set of problems with aching and soreness and is exacerbated by whatever you bring along such as my arthritic hips and shoulders

➢ Pain from the hospital system – I include in this all the physical stuff such as tubes sticking in you and out of you, blood being taken, etc. plus the psychological aspects of the hospital routine that seems to an outsider as specifically designed to keep one disjointed, frustrated and as discombobulated as possible.

I may be being very unfair to the people who were working in the unit I was at. There may have been some extenuating situations. And there were some really wonderful people who really did their jobs with caring. But the majority were just going through the motions; doing as little as they could to get through the day.

There are these horribly annoying IV dispensing machines. You are given a metal pole on set of wheels. On this goes your IV bags (you could have several for hydration/nutrition, medicines, other drugs), the dispensing machines, and your urine collection bag (you are almost certainly have a catheter in you. In fact the cognoscenti quickly figure out that urine production and the optical clarity of your urine are very, very important. One of my roommates and I would give each other pats on our back about the volume and good looking nature of our urine).

The pole is your symbol that you are indeed a patient worthy of being in the hospital. Once your input and output tubes come out, the system will be looking to eject you as soon as it can (modified for maximum final frustration). The dispensing machines are very sensitive. If by rolling over your block one of your tubes (really easy to do when you’re drugged up and in pain), it sets off an alarm. It sets off an alarm when one of your bags is getting empty. If it is on battery there is an alarm for it getting low. When the alarm goes off, it goes beep beep, pause, beep beep, on and on and on and on until someone comes and fixes the problem and resets the machine. Until you become a cognoscenti like during the first 12 hours when you are racked with pain and in an anesthetic haze, you don’t even realize what is causing the beep. No orientation is given when they wheel you in the room. Your consciousness just becomes aware of the beeping that continue and continues and continues with ever deeper annoyance. You finally learn that you are supposed to call for help which almost never comes right away and can take as long as 40 minutes. Not only that, you can hear the beeping of other people’s machines. You can hear their calls into the central desk. You can hear the page for the appropriate Nurse or Care Assistant to go to the room. You can hear the beeping continuing and continuing. You can hear the second request. So if I can hear other people’s beeping from around floor, can’t the staff here it? If they do, there must be some sort of work rule that says you can’t initiate any action until the patient actually requests it because they never did with me or anyone else that I could determine.

It almost never mattered what you requested because it was going to take awhile to get. Sometimes you could hear that there was something critical going on in the floor – lot’s of calls for help at once, a critical patient being wheeled in, etc. – however other times I would see (as I was getting better and walking around a lot) that the staff was just chatting away while the calls for assistance came and went. The body language of a lot of the staff was so demonstrative – “I really don’t want to do any work and I’m going to do as little as I can get away with”.

Within a short period of time, a day or so, you can hear totally what’s happening. That’s a problem itself because trying to get any quiet or darkness to rest is really difficult. Then there are the routines that must, must, must happen. You must get your vital signs (temperature, pulse and blood pressure) three times a day and you must get your blood taken once a day. And all your urine must be measured. Most of these are scheduled for when you finally doze off to sleep.

You are encouraged to get your lazy ass out of bed and get walking around. This of course is a good thing because it is what you need to get out. However, there is that slight problem of getting anyone to actually help you during those first few times. I was lucky that my care assistant in the beginning was one of the best I had. Then you go through the learning curve of how to unplug your device so your pole was mobile and how to use the pole for support while navigating with the device plus input and output bags and tubing.

Then there is pain medication. The whole thing related to pain medication is very bizarre. Along with our device, they include a narcotic pain reliever. You get another button (brown to distinguish it from the red ‘pretend someone is going to respond to your call for help’ button. They want you to use your brown button - sort of. You can push it as much as you want. The device will regulate things so you can never overdose yourself. And the official posture is that they do not want you in pain. You should not be in pain. You should take your pain medication.

Now some of us are sensitive to narcotics and don’t react well. They send me into all kinds of dark dreams and I feel like I’m on the verge of asphyxiating. So after the first night, I’m saying to myself, “I may be in agony from the pain but I think the narcotic effect is worse so I’ll just deal with the pain.” The system doesn’t like this. When the doctors and nurses come in they ask how your pain is from 1 to 10 with 10 being the worse pain you’ve ever had. So you tell them and they say, “but you’re not using your pain meds; if you’re in pain you need to use your pain meds!). So you insist that you hate the pain meds and you’d rather just deal with the pain. Finally they relent and let you take a much smaller dose by mouth that dilutes the effects substantially.

Additionally the narcotics slow down the body’s digestive and elimination system. This is the second big rite of passage to getting out of the hospital…you have to poop. No going means not going. So the more you use the painkillers the more you’re slowing your system.

Since I’m pretty much a paranoid individual, I’m convinced they want everybody drugged up as much as possible. If they’re drugged they won’t ask for so much pesky help that interferes with standing around the nurses station, chatting, being in the break room and surfing the Internet.

Organ Donation Chronicle - D plus 4 (1)

I'm out! Out of the hospital and starting to feel the return to Terra Normale though I'm still weak and with a lot of pain. There is so much to write about covering the surgery day and the days in the hospital that I'm going to break them into two or three posts.

My Trip Through Surgery and Recovery

I didn’t sleep very well the night before the surgery. Wife and I decided that logistically it made sense to make use of some rooms that the hospital sets aside for family of patients - nice logistically but absolutely minimalist from a creature comfort standpoint. The bed was so small I ended up sleeping on the couch. Between that and the general excitement, it wasn’t much of a night’s sleep.

We were up at 5:15. You have to scrub yourself down with this special soap for five minutes prior to the surgery. Then it was walk the couple of blocks to the hospital and to the pre-op registration. Here begins the transformation from civilian to patient. I’m sure that many of you have had your hospital experiences but this is the first time that I have ever gone in for major surgery. I’ve commented previously on my frustrations with the hospital’s bureaucracy however, I have nothing but good things to say about the staff that prepared us for the operation. Quick, efficient, calming, caring, they had all the aspects one would hope for when entrusting your life into an organization’s hands. Wife was with me through out and was a rock of calmness.

On my own part I was amazingly calm. In fact I was almost buoyant. After getting rid of my clothes and getting in the hospital gown and having given all the facts and figures to the appropriate people you’re waiting in the hospital bed. I had my iPod and was listening to mantra chanting. Before long I was sitting in a meditation posture on the gurney and getting into a very solid state. My surgeon came in. He and I had talked about meditation at our visit on Friday. He is a very calming soul as well and told me he’d be seeing me in the operating room. The anesthesiologist came by to brief me. My sister was across the room and I had a chance to give her some upbeat words.

Then came two operating room nurses, one of whom I will call my operating room angel, Irene. Angel Irene asked me what I was listening to. When I did she asked if she could listen for a moment. Then she asked me about some other yogic mantras that she found very beautiful. We were ready to go. I was handing my iPod and headphones to Wife and Angel Irene told me not to, that I could keep them on until we got into surgery and that she would personally make sure that they stayed with me. I said goodbye to Wife and we rolled a very short way into operating room (I think unless they had a pre-operating room). They put the IV into my arm and that was the last thing that I remembered until I was in the recovery room.

In the recovery room my first contact was with another sweet soul, John, who let me know that the surgery had been successful for both my sister and I and that I would be taking awhile to be coming out of the anesthetic. When John talked to me I realized that I still had my headphones on and they were still playing the mantra chant as when I entered into the OR. This recording is only 45 minutes long and is not set for repetitive play. So I don’t know what my Angel did in turns of turning it off and turning it on when things were over but I can’t think of a kinder expression of caring.

The pain wasn’t too bad in the recovery room but we were there for quite some time. At one point John came by and told me that my blood oxygen level wasn’t coming up high enough and they were making adjustments. I was pretty fuzzy. What I didn’t know was that outside in the waiting area Wife and my Brother were in deep anxiety. The surgeon had come out right after the surgery and found them in the hospital lobby to let them know that the surgery was successful and that I should be up in another hour to hour and a half. Hours go by with out a word. My sister’s husband has been called into the recovery room to see her but all Wife and brother get is a word that I’m having trouble with my oxygen level. Brother the doctor knows that types of things that can go wrong and Wife knows that I’ve had this type of thing before. It is over 4 hours after the surgery before I’m wheeled up to the floor where I will be staying. I’m still very fuzzy at this point and don’t pick up at all on the anxiety level of Wife and brother. It’s almost 6 PM by this time and it has been a long, long day for Wife and she wants to let go of the stress and I’m out of it anyway.

Organ Donation Chronicle - D plus 2

Hah. Commandeered Wife's computer in between gas attacks to make this quick update.

Nobody told me it would hurt this much! Probably they did but somehow you don't register these things. I'm not terribly filled with energy so I won't go through the full events of D-Day. The hospital staff was terribly friendly. In fact one of the OR nurses was into yoga and meditation. She saw I was listening to a mantra tape and made sure that I could bring it in to the operating room and it seems she turned it on once the procedure was over.

I find that my energies are some what limited with my body focused on healing itself. I promise that I will give a much more detailed explanation in a few more days. BTW my sister seems to be doing very fine with here new kidney. The surgeon told Wife that he was surprised at how large it was. I told you Lakeview that my kidenys were working overtime!

But before I go I want to thank all the people who passed on all their well wished, thoughts a prayers. When I went into the surgery, I had such a feeling of wellbeing. Thanks All!

Report from the Hospital- Day 2

Hello All. Quick update for you.

De-I and sister seem to be doing well. Both are very tired from the ordeal. I did speak to De- I briefly. He said, "I'm tired, in pain" and laughed. :)

He sounded very normal and Mom says his color is good.

His room number is 1142 and his sister's is 1138. He is scheduled to be released on Sunday

Next Update

Dad is FINALLY in his room, although I neglected to get the room number. Apologies!

Both he and his sister are doin' fine.