One morning, two and a half years ago, I woke up to a sight I had never seen before. It was one of those sights that people don’t tell you about. It never gets mentioned in movies or even on popular television shows. I’m not sure if it doesn’t get mentioned because it’s such an isolated situation, or becauses it has little possibility of gaining anyone’s attention. But I discovered it happens, so it must be important to some people.
Anyway, one morning, my feet were ridiculously bloated, kind of like something you see in a comedy about some crazy scientist who has enlarged his limbs at comedic proportions.
Rushing to the ER, I soon discovered that what I was experiencing was complete kidney failure. Considering the fact that humans have two kidneys, this meant that both of my kidneys had failed.
In the hospital for a week, I discovered the treatment was something called dialysis, where you spend a large time in a hospital bed as a huge machine sucks your blood through it and then filters it back into your body. This procedure can take quite a while.
During this first time with dialysis, I sat in this bed, not being told how long I was going to be here, staring at a young Asian nurse who made every effort to not make eye contact with me while she read her book. Keep in mind that I had nothing to read myself, my iPhone was in my hospital room four flights away, and I couldn’t even find someone to communicate with me. It’s hard to describe how horrible this situation was as I wasn’t being told what was happening (no one communicated with me to tell me I was even going to be undergoing dialysis, what it was, or how long it was going to last). I kept begging the nurse for some type of reading material, including a phone book if they still manufactured those, or anything, but she just shrugged her shoulders and didn’t even respond with words. It was such an awful experience. I probably would have handled it a lot better if she would have just said, “Don’t worry, this is only going to last four hours.” But not even knowing how long it would last made it that much worse, and no matter how many people I have shared this story with, they seem to not think it’s that horrible, mainly because they never had to undergo it themselves. Not knowing is probably one of the worse feelings one can experience. I can’t emphasize this enough.
After I left the hospital, I ended up having to visit a dialysis center three times a week where I would have to undergo treatment for four or so hours a day. I have to admit that I was lucky that I was working in a job that understood what I was going through and tried to support me during this period of massive transformation in my life. Other jobs would have probably gone through the paces and then worked to get rid of me as soon as possible. So, I was one of the few lucky ones.
But I did want to say one thing about these dialysis centers, or at least the one where I was required to go in the beginning. The people there are quite often very miserable. After all, they ended up in an establishment that is going to require them to go back to it every other day and leave them in a such a crappy state. Sitting in those machines sucks. You have no one around you to communicate; because of the immense size of these machines, you’re rarely close enough to any other person to communicate. Unlike hospitals, there are no visitors, and every other week or so, an emergency crew is rushed to the complex to take someone to the hospital because of some other organ failing or just some unfortunate circumstance happening. Keep in mind, most patients, once in this state, tend to give up on life and are just waiting for the inevitable, giving up but too scared to pull their own plug. I know this because in the very beginning, that was the state that I was in.
But I had to go three times a week for sessions that seriously weakened me for hours, and sometimes days afterwards.
But interestingly enough, in the first days of this ordeal, while in the hospital, one of the young nurses who was doing her rounds and was in my room, suddenly stopped and said: “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” I had interacted with so many people that I wasn’t sure if I knew her or not, and then she added: “Don’t you teach?” I said I did, that I taught both political science and public speaking. Then her face lit up: “You were my public speaking teacher.” I asked: “Are you sure?”
She nodded, “You made me laugh.” And then I knew it was true. So we spoke for a few minutes and then she went back to taking care of her rounds.
Right then and there, as I was thinking about how crappy my life was about to be going forward, I decided that if I had any control over anything, I was going to spend the rest of my time making people smile, and if possible, laugh.
So I decided then and there that any time I came in contact with someone, I was going to make them laugh. It was something I used to do in all of my classes. Teaching students and making them laugh while passing on knowledge always brightened my day. If I was going to be in a miserable situation, I could at least try to transform the experience into positive humor.
If you’re ever in a similar situation, one thing to keep in mind is that the only solution to kidney failure is a transplant. Someone has to give you their extra kidney, and to be honest, most people have no interest in donating a kidney to you or to a kidney foundation. For selfless reasons, people either don’t think about it, or they perceive that they’re going to always need both kidneys, even though most people never have a need for the second kidney. Honestly, they just don’t ever think about how their kidney could save someone else from years of having to live a horrible existence.
Because I’ve done everything the nurses tell me to do, including eating only specific foods and drinking miniscule amounts of fluid every day, I’ve become one of those “at home” dialysis people where I sacrifice having to go to a dialysis center every other day so that I can do it at home, EVERY day at night while I’m sleeping. Every other night, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with an alarm going off for any number of reaons, which include cords crinkling, my body not receiving the appropriate mixture for REASONS, power fluctuations, or just random loud alarms that don’t actually tell you why, which requires you to call an “on call” nursing service that serves most of the country, so you wait in a que until someone can speak to you.
And I can’t really go on vacation because to do so requires dragging a very large machine with me, including large bags of sugar solutions that are extremely heavy, and each night requires using at least four of them. And besides those, there is a lot of other equipment required each night so if trying to travel (which I’ve tried), it’s very uncomfortable to do so. Right before I lost the use of my kidneys, I was planning to travel to Warsaw, Poland. I will probably never be able to in my lifetime because do so, I would need a transplant, and I’ve been told that getting one might take ten years, if lucky. By that time, I will probably be taken off the last for any number of reasons, the least of which will be age.
But I really didn’t intend for this article to be about complaints. What I wanted to talk about was smiling and laughter. One thing I devoted myself to was making people laugh.
And that was something I did, and often. Every doctor’s visit I made was devoted to making everyone in my presence laugh. When I was sitting in a chair for four plus hours, everyone who came near me was subjected to my unique brand of humor. Over time, more and more dialysis staff would come over to my chair to communicate. And I would make them laugh. And sometimes, they would make me laugh because humor is contagious, and it can brighten so many people’s days.
One of my favorite subjects was a Vietnamese nurse who was always so gruff and angry-acting. I devoted my every session with her to making her laugh. And she would just growl at me most of the times.
But I kept up for the entire four hours I was there some days. She would stop by, do her required nursing duty, hear me making joke after joke, every one of those jokes being spontaneous and brand new from the previous ones. But I would continue, stretching my humor to lengths even I didn’t know was possible.
I kept this on for YEARS.
One late afternoon when she was there doing her duty, I was about to start a new routine with her, and then out of nowhere she made a joke to me. It was raw and very new-like, but it was funny, mainly because it came from her and was humor that only she could have come up with. I laughed.
From that point forward, she was constantly trying humor out on me. And then I also noticed that she was humorous with the other patients, something I’d never seen before. Somehow, she had transformed from a mean, gruff nurse to one who shared humor with her patients.
If anything in my life is seen as an accomplishment, I can relish in this. I had transformed someone into someone with a dispensation towards humor. Her future patients would benefit from this, even if they never, ever, came in contact with me.
When you hit this stage, you take the victories where you can, or give up and wait for the inevitable.