“Please, Moonface,” Charlie said, looking at me as if I had said something in poor taste.
“What do you want, Charlie? A medal?”
“Hardy-har,” he said, listlessly.
I knew the piece of paper was indeed ridiculous, trivializing not just what Charlie did but also what the transplant meant for us. But the document was inaccurate. It was not just my life he had saved, but also our lives together. He was committing to our partnership. To me, this was more like a marriage certificate.
To hear Charlie say that he wouldn’t do it again was like hearing him change his mind about the whole procedure, like him taking back what he had already entrusted with me. And though that wasn’t possible, it felt like something—something heavier, more substantial than a mere kidney—was being ripped from me.
Once, while sitting at dialysis in a center, i remember an old woman in the treatment chair next to me talking about another patient who used to come to dialysis regularly before she got a kidney from her daughter.
“I would never do that,” my neighbor said, running a hand through her thick afro. “Ask my daughter for a kidney.”
“Why not?” asked a nurse, who was hooking her up to the machine.
“I’d be too worried that she would need that kidney later. And it’s just not fair to put someone through a surgery like that. What a waste it would be if it didn’t work! I wouldn’t be able to take it.”
At the time, I heard her words, but I couldn’t look past what Charlie was willing to do for us. I couldn’t look past what his offer meant to our relationship. But if I believed that something magical had happened that morning in August—not transplant but transcendence—then I had to believe that something could be undone when or if something went wrong, if I did reject him. That this was our bodies telling us that maybe we weren’t meant for each other, or that this wasn’t meant to be.
Charlie’s words play in my head, and in the early morning hours, I still can’t get to bed. Lying here, I silently vow to keep this kidney, whatever it takes, to show Charlie what it means to me, that “The Gift of Life” was not given in vain.
And just then . . .
My body begins to shiver. It’s a crisp night in October, and I’m woken up from a vague dream in which I’m riding a rickety roller coaster and feeling the old wooden track tossing me around in the small metal car. I wake up to realize that my body is shaking outside this dream, too. Tensing up my arms and legs, I try to make the tremors stop. I pull up the wooly blankets from the foot of the bed and try to lie still.
“What’s wrong with you, Moonface?” Charlie asks, squinting through the darkness to look at me.
“I’m co-o-o-ld.”
“You’re always so cold. You don’t wear enough layers.” In the haze of the dimly lit room, he gets up, his hair pointing in all directions, and brings me my pink bathrobe from the bathroom. I sit up in bed, and he pulls the robe over my arms and around my back, and almost all in a one-shot camera move, he glides over to the closet in the other room and pulls out our old, green, zero-degree sleeping bag, the one we camped out on in Big Sur and snuggled up in along the rim of the Grand Canyon. He puts the bag over me and pushes its edges under my legs and under my arms.
The shivering is not normal, but I don’t tell him this. If something is wrong with the kidney, I want to take care of it first, before he can possibly know. I will call the doctor’s office in the morning.
“You’re that cold?” he asks, in disbelief.
“It’s just the change in seasons, I guess.” I try to keep my teeth from chattering.
“Here,” he says, more annoyed than suspicious, and he holds the layers over me, so tight, until I can’t shake anymore, until he is practically lying on top of me with all his weight, pushing down my body and suppressing all that’s going wrong with it. He eventually falls asleep like this, and I lift one shoulder until he slides off the slick sleeping bag and back to his side of the bed.
I get some sleep in little sparks between my worry and the actual trembling, but in the morning I cannot control the chills at all despite how much I focus on a sight in the room—the lamp, the window blind. I get up and retch in the bathroom, over the toilet. I crawl through the apartment, clinging to the walls with my hands.
Charlie already left for work, leaving while I was still asleep. My heart is beating in my head, which is never a good sign. I look in the mirror, and there is sweat on my forehead and on my nose. I pull the thermometer from a cup in the bathroom and put it in my mouth. But before it goes in, I already know what the temperature will be. I sit on the couch and call the transplant clinic.
“Well, sweetie. You taking care of our patient? How’s he doin”?” LuAnn, our nurse, answers. She loves Charlie. He charmed her the first day they met by looking at her beehive of a head and telling her she looked just like Tammy Wynette, but so much more independent! She blushed.
“He’s fine. He started work today.” I hear my voice quivering.
“Oh, good. He’s not lifting anything, is he? We don’t need him lifting anything. He doesn’t have to be a He-Man. But I think he knows that,” she laughs to herself. She speaks so brightly that for a minute, I think that this drain I’m falling into is a dream, that the reality is that things are as delightful as her voice sounds. But I tell her about the uncontrollable shaking and the sweats this morning.
“Back pain?” she asks, and though I think it is unrelated, last week, I remember asking Charlie to rub my back, which was sore from what I thought was hunching over my desk too long. I had asked him to go to the store and buy me heating pads.
“Uh, huh.” LuAnn thinks for a while. “Temp?”
“A hundred and one point eight,” I read from the digital thermometer.
She pauses. Her silence gives me more reason to worry.
“Yes, you should probably come into the clinic today, just so the doctors can take a look at you. Just come on down as soon as you can. You don’t need an appointment. I’ll be here.”
I tell myself to hold it together, that the fever could be nothing. Something they could treat with an aspirin. Just get to the clinic. Just don’t worry yet, just get to the clinic. I’m in the bathroom pulling my hair up in a ponytail when the phone rings again. I pick it up in the bedroom, and on the line LuAnn says, “Okay, sweetie, you know what? Come to think of it, I know what the doctor’s going to say. I might as well get you ready for it. With a temp like that, they’re probably going to admit you. So you might as well bring a bag of clothes and come straight to Admissions.”
It’s not LuAnn who meets me in the lobby of the hospital, but a nurse who whisks me upstairs back to the transplant ward where I have been before and tells me to get out of my clothes and into the standard hospital gear. She swings the door of a room wide open and shuffles me inside. There is one bed.
“A single?” I turn to her.
“Yes,” she says, a smile escaping her lips, because she knows a single is what you want in the hospital when you’re not feeling your best. Another person with just a paper-thin curtain next to you is probably the least of your worries, but it’s appreciated when you are crying, half-naked, out of frustration. I get myself up on the bed and put my head down on the pillow, and as I lie down, I see that the nurse puts an isolation sign on the front of the open door.
“I’m contagious?” I ask her.
“Maybe. I don’t have any reports yet,” she says, before shutting the door and making me feel like she’s locking me in a cage.
Contagious? Shivering? What can it be now? They are just being cautious, I think, with the isolation sign, worrying more about what can come into the room than what is going out. The anti-rejection drugs that suppress my immune system make me susceptible to more than the average folk, especially in a hospital. So maybe that sign is there to protect me, not to protect others from me. I don’t know. I pull off my clothes quickly and try to settle into bed so as to distract myself from the myriad possibilities.
Charlie’s been working with special-ed students at the local high school, and when I call for him, the school secretary pulls him out of class so he can use the phone in the main office.
“Is this my mail-order bride?” he says when he picks up.
I don’t tell him much, just that I have a fever and that the chills from the last few nights were probably something more that my just being cold.
“I knew it!” he says, practically spitting into the phone. “Damn it. I’ll be right there.”
Chapter Nine
The Celebrated and Adored Royal Filipino Mind Reader
In walks this attractive blonde wearing a shiny navy and red sweatsuit. She’s not sweating, though, and I think she has wandered into the wrong room when she takes a seat on my bed and looks me square in the eyes. I’m ready to press the call button and tell the nurse that a nutcase has gotten past security and is now threatening my safety. She sounds authentic, but doctors are never this pretty or this stylish, and they certainly never have time to work out. I take my hand off the call button, and when I reach out to shake her hand, it is surprisingly warm.
“Pardon the outfit,” she says. “I just got a page about you when I was coming back from an aerobics class.” She doesn’t smell like sweat. She smells like raspberries. I’ll state right now that she was the best-smelling doctor I’ve ever met. Warm hands, fruit-scented. Again suspicious.
She introduces herself as an infectious-disease doctor, and I say, “I’m infected?”
“We’re just covering our bases,” she says, not committing to any diagnoses at first. She briefly reviews my medical history. “But what’s been going on lately?”
“Well, a couple weeks ago, I had a pretty bad headache. I thought it was my sinuses. This weekend, I had a terrible back pain.” I lean forward and point to the back of my hips where my native kidneys still are. I tell her about the fever this morning and the cold sweats of the last few weeks. I tell her everything. I want to know if I get to keep Charlie’s kidney. So I don’t leave anything out. I tell her about how I’ve been forgetting things, how I can’t keep my head straight. I don’t leave out the night sweats. Or the shivers. Or my fears. “I can’t lose this kidney.”
“We don’t know that yet,” she says. In my highest hopes, I don’t think you call in an infectious-disease doctor if it’s a problem with your transplanted kidney. Right? “We’ll figure out what’s going on,” she says, with the raspberry smell trailing behind her as she leaves the room.
If it’s not parental instinct, then it’s my mother’s Filipino superpowers, or maybe God speaking through the GPS system in my father’s car. Whatever it is, my parents have found a way to detect when I am sick and how they can find me. It’s their own little honing device. Sometimes it takes only an unanswered phone call, or a crack in my voice, or a cough, but the minute they sense something is wrong, they get in their SUV and they start driving toward me, wherever I am.
Once, in college, my father called my roommate on a random Tuesday night and she told him an ambulance had just left and taken me to the emergency room with stomach cramps. I was planning on calling them when I knew what was happening, if it was indeed something serious, but there my father went, my mother in the car with him, in his Acura down Interstate 70, ninety miles an hour from Pittsburgh to Baltimore.
“My baby!” my mother must’ve yelled from the passenger seat, as they raced at breakneck speeds toward me.
When a cop pulled my father over somewhere in Hancock, Maryland, my father looked squarely at the cop and gave it to him straight: “My baby’s in the emergency room. You can call the hospital yourself if you’d like.” My father is neither an annoying nor intimidating man, but when he is serious about something, he will most likely get it. He handed the cop his big chunky cell phone with his finger ready to dial the number, but the officer, seeing that there was no stopping this man from getting to Baltimore as quickly as he could, said, “It’s okay, sir, but you’ll have to drive more carefully than that. I’m sure she wants to see you, but she’ll probably prefer to see you alive.”
“Yes. Thank you, officer,” was all my gracious father said, before pushing his foot back down on the pedal.
It is no surprise when my parents walk into my hospital room one night out of breath. I can smell my mother’s perfume from down the hall. When they walk into the room, my mother is the one who seems exhausted, even though I know it was my father who was driving, pulling through the night traffic all by himself while she slept in the passenger seat.
I complain when they arrive because I don’t want to feel like I need them. When I see them storming through the door, I feel once again like that scared eighteen-year-old who is uncertain about what’s happening to her.
“Could you please leave?” I ask them.
“You shouldn’t talk to us like that,” my mother says.
The phone rings and my mother answers; it’s my brother calling from New York. I’m too tired to lift the receiver or to talk. I push away everything she puts near my pillow—her rosary, the phone—all in dramatic fashion.
“She’s got a high fever. She’s delirious!” my mother vents to my brother. I roll my eyes and hold my tongue. “No, I don’t think she’s crazy . . . but we’re just trying to find out what’s wrong with her.”
I am still shivering. My fever has yet to be controlled, and it still makes me tremble, making the bed rock, all its little parts—the rails, the up-and-down mechanisms, the frame underneath. They all shake. I press the call button for the nurse, and when over the small speaker they ask me what I need, I tell them that I’m shivering. It sounds like this: “I’m sh-sh-sh-hivering. My fever.”
“We’ll call the doctor to see what you can do,” the nurse says. “How do you feel?”
“Like I’m in a scene from The Exorcist,” I say. “I’m trying to keep my head from spinning off.”
But when she puts the needle into the IV, I can feel my body suddenly relax and I can feel all my muscles slowly ease. My body loosens and the shaking miraculously stops.
Days pass. Seven, to be exact. Longer than when I was in the hospital with the surgery. The tests are unending, as is the parade of student doctors who duck in at all hours of the day and ask me questions I have definitely answered before.
There are days that feel normal. There has been a revolving door of guests all wearing the smocks that are provided for the isolation room. My mother and father cover the days when Charlie is busy at work, then Charlie comes in the evenings after work and, sometimes, stays long after visiting hours are over. The nurses, who find him charming and sweet, pretend not to see him once the intercom asks all the guests to leave.
“I don’t want you to ever feel alone,” he says, in all seriousness. And he sits on the vinyl chair beside me and we watch an old rerun of M*A*S*H on the TV hanging from the wall. He stays as long as he can before he starts nodding off to sleep and I have to send him home.
Someone is usually with me, but sometimes there are gaps, like when my parents have to go to church, as they have been going daily, and when Charlie is still at work. He’s made new friends at his new job, and I tell him to go out with them once in a while to get to know them.
“I don’t want them to think that you spend all your free time in a hospital caring for your sick girlfriend,” I tell him.
“But I do,” he says.
“If only you knew what you were getting into,” I say. “If only . . .” he says with false regret. Or regret.
During one of those gap moments, a radiology technician comes up to my room to take yet another chest x-ray. I don’t ask what for anymore. I just assume they like sending radi
ation through my body, that there’s a collection of my entire skeletal structure in a file somewhere and they need just one more photo to complete it. There have been so many tests in the past few days that I just assume they are still collecting data. I just want them to tell me that it is definitely not my kidney, and they don’t do that. They don’t say anything about that.
The tech has a thick mustache and a brown mullet, and he rolls in a giant machine. His muscles bulge through his lab coat.
“Ugh,” I grunt.
“I know, sorry,” he says, in a high voice that is incongruent with his build.
I am too weak these days to make it down to the radiology department myself. They’ve been coming to me. Charlie says I should feel special by the room service, but I don’t. The tech uses his big muscles to lift me to the side of the bed so my scrawny, dry legs hang off the edge of the railing. He lines up the bulky side of the machine against my chest and asks me to breathe in and hold it. When I do, my lungs fill with air and my bladder suddenly feels heavy.
“Just one more time,” he yells from behind the curtain. And when I inhale again, my bladder feels heavier. I think I can make it to the bathroom, but I’ll have to drag the long IV pole that’s attached to my arm. I’ll have to unplug the IV machine from the wall, sling it around the other side of the bed, and take a few steps to the bathroom. In my head, I’m mapping out the steps and the time it will take me to accomplish them. Come on, man.
“Okay, that’s all we need,” he says.
“Good.” I say that I’ve got to use the restroom. The bladder presses down heavier.
“Uh, hold on there, dear.” He pushes his x-ray machine, but its cord gets caught under my bed. The IV pole is trapped back in the corner. I’m up, and I try to tug the pole loose.
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