and why has it taken me this long to write about her?
Well, how do you do justice in words to someone who's saving your life? All the surgeons, specialists, knowledge and medication involved in kidney-disease treatments -- none of them can do for me what one accountant with a talent for music can.
I first met Cheryl when we both lived on fourth-floor Bodien as freshmen at Bethel College. We both had an 8 a.m. class Tuesdays and Thursdays that first semester and started going to breakfast together. I still remember the first story she ever told me -- about an 80-year-old guy up in Ely, where her family took a winter vacation each year, who skiied back and forth from his cabin to town to get groceries and mail. My family's big on stories, and so this was an attention-getter for me.
Evenings, you could find me in her room; she'd be working on music notation or accounting while I edited my news assignments. By spring, when we were signing up with a group for a townhouse, everybody else was figuring out who they wanted as a roommate. They'd already decided for us, though. "You and Cheryl will be roommates, of course. We just assumed that." And we were -- for the three years at Bethel and 4 1/2 years afterward, until I married Randy.
We have the same sense of humor -- a delight in quirky personalities and telling anecdotes -- a love for dogs, affection and admiration for our parents and a prediliction for evenings at home with our feet up. You'll see we look somewhat alike too. At Bethel, people asked "Are you two sisters?" constantly. One girl was so insistent about it she started theorizing "Well, if your father had met her mother. . ." I assured her she could stop there.
But, thankfully, Cheryl's not too like me. She's patient, gentle, tolerant and somehow put up with me all those years. When I think of all the blessings I've had from being her friend, I wonder what on earth she's gotten from knowing me -- practice in forbearance?
The only people I told when I found I had kidney disease in 1994 were Randy, my parents, and Cheryl and her parents. Little did I know she'd planned -- since then -- to offer me her kidney when the time came I needed intervention. "I figure I'd miss you a lot more than I'd miss a kidney," she said last March.
I said no at first -- I didn't want her to put herself at risk for me. But after reading the studies and recommendations, it looked to me like the vast majority of donors have no setbacks at all after donating. And, as Cheryl put it "I knew you'd say no at first. I figured I'd just wait until things got really ugly."
Well, thanks to her, they didn't. I realized after living with a new life plan for only a few days that I'd been waiting and watching for disintegration for years. It's not a good place to be. My friend Cheryl saved me from that, and I can't say enough about her.
Brave? Keep in mind this is the person I regularly have to help with ailing birds in her yard and dead mice in traps. And blood? We used to watch "Rescue 911" together -- well, I used to watch it. She got brief glimpses of William Shatner and those placid family scenes with the foreboding soundtrack during the times she didn't have her hands over her eyes.
For her to do this for me, I'll say she's brave.
Did you know the Bible mentions kidneys? God is said to know a person by their kidneys.
With one of Cheryl's, I'll consider myself that much further ahead.
