Cheryl and I were together for our usual Friday night get-together; we watch EastEnders or put in an old movie and work on various projects: knitting, sewing, and so forth.
We were left alone as Randy ran home to get his computer. By this point, it was April, 2009 and I was down under 15 percent function. I thought I should warn her that I was going to be going on dialysis, maybe even within the coming year. "This is all happening that fast?" she said, shocked.
On Monday, it was my turn to be shocked. I got an e-mail at work from Cheryl offering me one of her kidneys. "It's something I've wanted to do ever since you were first diagnosed," she said. "I had a co-worker who gave a kidney to her cousin years ago and she's doing fine." I told her no, thank you -- I had reason to know how important kidneys are. I couldn't believe she'd be that courageous and generous. . . well, yes, I could.
Then I started thinking. Cheryl's kidney wouldn't be taking a kidney away from a child or parent -- she wouldn't be offering it to anyone but me. I looked up living-donor survival and quality of life online. At the time, it didn't look like there was much difference for a person with one kidney vs. a person with two. (This good news came out about a year later: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=kidney-donor-mortality)
So, I told her we might as well get tested and try. If nothing else, perhaps we could do "paired donation," where she'd donate to someone else in need and I'd receive from another caring donor. In typical pragmatic Cheryl fashion, she said, "Yeah, I thought you'd come around. I figured we'd just have to wait until things got really ugly."
I called my kidney specialist, fully expecting he'd direct me to a certain hospital. Wrong: "People generally just pick whatever transplant program they want," the receptionist told me. So, I sat down and looked through transplant success rates in Twin Cities hospitals. The University of Minnesota was a percentage point or two ahead of the others.
It felt like the end of a long, hard winter -- years long. At work I went into the former darkroom -- the publisher was converting it into a lunchroom. We'd never quite gotten used to the sun glaring through that window. It was still a nice, private place to make calls.
I balanced my notebook on a chunk of 2 x 4 on the windowsill and called my insurer to check on my coverage. I called the U to set up an initial day of tests. The whole time, the sun beamed through the dusty window onto a room that was a work in progress.
Like me.
