“You’re welcome,” she replied before an awkward silence filled the vehicle. She tried to strike up a conversation a few minutes later, but I was even more uncommunicative than usual. I was less than a year away from aging out of the system and didn’t know what would happen to me if I was really sick.
Although it was only half an hour later, I felt like I’d waited hours before I was sitting across from the doctor and he was doing the physical examination. “I’ll need to run some tests to make sure, but I think it’s post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis,” he said when he was finished. “It’s a kidney disorder that sometimes occurs after infection with certain strains of Streptococcus bacteria.”
“Like the strep throat I had a couple of weeks ago?” I asked.
Instead of answering right away, he clicked the mouse on his laptop a couple times and peered at the monitor. “I don’t see anything in your chart about strep. Were you treated for it here?”
Sneaking a glance at Miss Stevens, I knew she was going to be angry I hadn’t talked to her about this sooner. “No, my foster mom took me to the urgent care clinic, along with a couple of the other kids who had it too.”
“I’ll give them a call to get your records transferred over here. It’s pretty rare for a case of strep that’s been treated in someone your age to cause post-strep GM.”
“Maybe we should have the other kids brought in to be checked over too,” Miss Stevens suggested. “Since all of you caught it at the same time, they might be at risk too.”
“I had it longer than everyone else,” I whispered.
“How much longer?” the doctor asked.
Miss Stevens leaned over and took my hand in hers when I hesitated. “Faith, when did you get sick?”
“Maybe a week and a half before we went to the clinic,” I answered softly.
She gasped at my response and turned to the doctor. “Could the delay in her care be responsible for her being ill now?”
“Yes,” he confirmed. “Letting strep go untreated can lead to further complications.”
“Oh, Faith,” she sighed. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I reassured her. “You didn’t know.”
“But your foster mom did, didn’t she?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I admitted. “I got sick before Adam did.”
“Did she get medical care for him right away?”
I looked down at my hands as I twisted them together in my lap. “Yes.”
“Oh my goodness,” she breathed. “Are you telling me your foster mother knew you were sick with the same symptoms as her son, ignored your illness even though she took him to the doctor, and then bothered to get you treatment only when the other kids came down with it too?”
In the face of her mounting anger, I just nodded my head. At my confirmation, she jumped out of her chair and began to pace the room. The doctor and I watched her for a moment before he interrupted her as she mumbled under her breath.
“I know there’s a lot going on here, but we need to discuss Faith’s medical needs sooner rather than later.”
“What kind of medical needs?” I asked as Miss Stevens came to sit beside me again.
“I’d like to run some blood work to look for the antibodies to a substance produced by the bacterium that caused your bout of strep throat, check some of your levels, and do a urinalysis,” he explained.
“Okay,” I replied since that didn’t sound too bad even though I didn’t understand it all.
“You’ll also need a couple of medications. An antibiotic to make sure we get all the infection out of your system, and I want to put you on a diuretic to help with the edema as well as a blood pressure medication since yours is high,” he continued.
“Oh,” I sighed. That sounded like a lot of different pills for me to keep track of.
“I’ll make sure she gets the prescriptions filled and we have a plan in place to make sure she gets anything else she needs,” Miss Stevens said. “Is there anything else we need to do?”
“Limit her salt intake and call me immediately if she has decreased urine output or any new symptoms develop.”
Although my head was spinning, I didn’t miss the mention of new symptoms. “Like what?”
“At this point, I want you to call me with anything unusual,” he answered vaguely. “And I have to admit that I’m leaning towards hospitalizing her.”
“Hospitalizing me?” I repeated.
“Usually post-strep GM can be cleared up in several weeks to a few months,” he clarified. “But that’s only if you receive the proper care for it. Considering the circumstances that brought you here today, I have some serious concerns about the type of support you’ll receive at home.”
“I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time, Doc,” I joked weakly.
“I don’t want to scare you any more than you already are, but you need to fully understand your condition,” he said, taking a deep breath before looking at me with resignation in his eyes. “In a small number of patients, post-strep GM may get worse and lead to chronic kidney failure. Sometimes it can progress to end-stage kidney disease, which would require dialysis and a kidney transplant.”
I’d spent years convinced I lived without hope. It took hearing those words to understand I wasn’t as hopeless as I thought I had been. Or at least I hadn’t been. Until that very moment, I was more similar to other teenagers than I ever would have admitted in that I thought I would have a long and fairly healthy life. I didn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs—not after the way I had watched my mom destroy herself. Apparently, none of that mattered because a common childhood illness that could be easily treated with antibiotics had managed to become a possible death sentence for me.
In the following weeks, I discovered how low I could fall as my condition didn’t improve. It didn’t matter that Miss Stevens had all the kids pulled from the foster home where I had been staying or that she finally found one of the few nice ones for me to go to with a foster mother who really acted like a mom and treated me as though I was her own. She cared for me as the swelling got worse, my blood pressure shot through the roof, and my appetite disappeared.
When the time came for me to be admitted to the hospital, she visited almost daily for the first few weeks until there was another foster child who needed her to be home so she could properly care for them. Saying goodbye to her was one of the hardest things I had ever done because I’d come to care for her. It was impossible not to when she’d shown me such compassion, but I knew there were others who needed her more than I did since I had nurses and personal care attendants watching over me around the clock.
Kids came and went through the pediatric unit. Some of them even tried to befriend me before I got a reputation for being a loner. But with everything going on, I was even more closed off than usual. Trying to focus on anything but how sick I had gotten, I threw myself into my online courses in the hope that I’d be able to keep up with my studies so that I wouldn’t have to repeat my senior year. As my condition continued to worsen, I worked even harder on my classes because I was suddenly obsessed with the idea that I wanted to at least graduate high school before I died.
They monitored everything about me on a regular basis, and I felt like studying was the only thing over which I had control right now. I couldn’t eat what or how much I wanted because the doctors wanted to reduce the buildup of toxins that my kidneys would normally remove. My fluid intake was closely monitored so that I only drank the same amount I could pee. They brought me pills and took my vitals around the clock. But study time? That was all me. I could even turn on the laptop they’d provided and read to my heart’s content. Nobody ever tried to tell me I couldn’t...probably because they all knew I was on my way towards death’s door.
When they first put me on dialysis, I felt better and started to think I could beat this thing. It was only supposed to be used for the short-term, but I was one of the unlucky ones because my kidney damage was so great that they thought
dialysis may be permanently needed. That’s when they started talking about a transplant. If I had any family who gave a damn, they would have tried to do a live donation. My rare blood type made me a difficult match, and being a foster kid only complicated it further.
I became obsessed with making the UNOS waiting list, even though there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to influence their decision to list me. Or to put me high enough up that I even had a remote chance of getting the kidney I so desperately needed. When the day finally came and I was told I made the list, it hit me. In order for me to live, someone else must first die.
Although a part of me celebrated the fact that my chances of survival had at least slightly improved that day, I felt morbid. It was like I was wishing death upon another person. As though I was hoping to swap fates with them, even though I’d never want anyone else to have the crap luck I’d lived with all my life.
Then it was just a waiting game, watching my place on the list rise and fall depending on the results of my newest labs. Each of us were ranked by UNOS using a point system. It also took a number of other factors into consideration, including the degree of match between us and the donor and the length of time we had been on the waiting list. My place never went high enough for me to get my hopes up, though. The doctors knew I was a bad bet since I had no support system in place to help me after the transplant, and so did I.
The dialysis continued, but I knew I was getting worse and the day was drawing closer when I was going to run out of options. It was painfully obvious to everyone that I was starting to accept my fate, starting to believe the call would never come. Not for me. That’s when the nurses started up the faith jokes—to try and raise my spirits and get me focused on staying as healthy as I could while I waited. And waited. And waited some more.
During all that time, I knuckled down and plowed through my school work like it was the one thing that could save my life. Although I knew I wasn’t going to be able to return to school to finish my senior year, I wasn’t willing to completely give up until I finished all my courses and knew I had accomplished something my mother had not. I worked towards my graduation with a desperation that meant I finished months before the school year ended. When I clicked the mouse to shut out the program, all my tests finished and papers completed, I finally felt like I could let go.
That was the day my luck changed. Somehow, a miracle happened. I was given a second chance. One I promised myself I wouldn’t waste.
2
Faith
Since I was already at the hospital, I didn’t have much to do to prepare for the surgery. They transferred me from the pediatric unit where I’d been staying to the transplant one a couple of floors down so they could get me prepped. The nurses told me it was going to be a few hours before the kidney would be available for transplant. They also warned me that if the kidney didn’t meet their standards once it was harvested, then the transplant would be called off. Up until that point, I hadn’t thought about the possibility that it would be my turn and I still wouldn’t get my kidney.
I spent the next few hours reading, trying with all my might not to focus on the chance that this was a false alarm. That fate would be so cruel as to finally hand me a second chance only to take it away again. The nurses checked back in with me often and when one of them walked in with a huge smile on her face, I knew the news was going to be good. The kidney was healthy and a perfect match so it wouldn’t be long before I’d have the transplant.
It had been years since I’d allowed myself to cry. Not since the day I had found my mother dead in our apartment and the rug had been pulled out from under me. I cried tears of joy for the first time in my life. There was no controlling them as they flowed from my eyes and down my cheeks as I sat alone in a hospital bed and learned my prayers had been answered.
But as happy as I was for myself, my thoughts turned to my donor and I hoped when they had passed away that they were surrounded by a family who loved them. Although nobody could hear me, I whispered my gratitude to them softly and promised to honor their sacrifice as best I could. By the time they came and took me to the operating room, I was ready to face my future—whatever might come next.
My confidence held up as we rolled down the corridor. It didn’t waver as they hooked me up to all the monitors. Or when the surgeon walked me through what he was going to do during the transplant. None of it was new information because my medical team had already walked me through all of it, insisting I be ready for the surgery when it happened...even though in my mind it had always been if and never when. But as the anesthesiologist got ready to put me under, my calmness fled in a rush of panic. I’d reached the point where I accepted my own mortality, but I wanted to live.
Desperately so.
Even though I was utterly alone in the world.
But I didn’t fully trust the miracle that had been granted to me. There was still a voice inside my head, screaming that things never went the right way. Not for me. That something was about to go horribly wrong with the surgery, and I’d never wake up again.
My distress didn’t go unnoticed by the doctors. The surgeon bent low, his gaze locked with mine. “Everything’s going to be okay, Faith. I’ve got you.” The confidence in his green eyes was the last thing I saw before the anesthesiologist pushed the drugs into my system and knocked me out.
When I woke up afterwards, I was told the transplant was successful, but that there was one complication. A month prior, I had developed an irregular heartbeat that the doctors had been treating with medication, an atrial fibrillation they’d called it. Apparently, my heart went haywire while I was under, and my blood pressure dropped dramatically. The only way to fix it was to do a procedure they had explained when my heart first started to act up. A procedure that had totally freaked me out.
While I was under, they used metal patches on my chest to pass an electric current to my heart. The current reset my heart's rhythm back to its regular pattern. In other words, they shocked my heart and stopped it to try and make it beat normally again. Luckily, I was knocked out when it happened and the procedure worked without me even knowing about it. They told me my heartbeat went back to regular again after a few minutes. I hoped like hell it stayed that way, and I never had to go through it again since just the thought of the procedure made my heart go haywire on its own.
Before I knew it, I had spent a week recovering at the hospital and they were ready to discharge me. It was hard to believe they had cut me open, put a part of someone else inside me, and were ready to kick me out so soon. To me, it seemed impossible to fathom, but to the medical team, it was just what they did every day.
I only had a few months to go before my eighteenth birthday, and I was petrified about being discharged. I had started to pester Sarah about where I was going to go a few days ago and she just kept telling me she was working on it. They couldn’t just discharge me to some random foster home since I still had a lot of recovering to do, so the hospital’s discharge planner talked to me about long-term care facilities. They’d be able to provide the around the clock help I needed for a little bit longer. Knowing what most foster homes were like, one of the facilities sounded pretty damn good to me.
The day before I was due to be discharged to the facility, Sarah came for another visit. Our relationship had changed since I had gotten sick. We were on a first name basis, something I’d never seen another caseworker allow with any of the kids under their watch. I knew it was partially because of the guilt she felt for what had happened to me. She had placed me in the home where I had gotten sick and was devastated by the idea that it was her fault for not keeping a closer eye on my foster mother. I had gone through a stage where I had blamed her too, but eventually, I realized it was the system that had failed me and not Sarah.
“Hey, kiddo,” she greeted me. “You ready to finally get out of here?”
“That depends on where I’m going.”
“Well,” she sighed. “I’ve looked into the facilities y
our discharge planner recommended, and I’ve got good news. One of them accepts Medicaid, and they’re willing to take you.”
“Then get me outta here!”
“Will do,” she laughed. “But before you go, I wanted to talk to you about something else.”
My body froze, and the smile slipped from my face. I braced myself, waiting for bad news. “About what?”
“Your future.”
It wasn’t going to be long before I aged out of the system and had to figure out what to do with the rest of my life now that I actually had one to live. But I hadn’t given much thought to my future beyond recovering from the transplant—probably because it was damn scary to think about being on my own with only a high school diploma and a strict prescription regimen that I needed to follow. But if Sarah had a plan of some kind, I trusted her enough—just barely, although I’d come to believe in her more than I had any other person before—to at least listen. I offered her a weak smile. “What about it?”
“Have you given any thought to college?” My stunned disbelief must have shown on my face because she hurried to explain, “I know you have a lot on your plate right now, but time is running out if you want to apply. I’d love to wait until you’re fully recovered and back on your feet, but you only have two weeks to get everything turned in if you want to start in the Fall with the rest of the freshman class.”
“Sarah,” I paused, trying to think of a nice way to word what needed to be said. “College just isn’t—I couldn’t—no, I haven’t given any thought to college because I didn’t think I was going to be alive long enough to worry about how I’d be able to afford it if I ever managed to get accepted anywhere.”
She sat down on the chair next to the bed and leaned forward with her forearms on her thighs. “Then now’s the time to start worrying because you are going to live long enough to think about it. And you’ll get accepted—you have a solid GPA, high test scores from when you took the SAT last year, and a compelling story to tell in your admission essays.”
The Fortuity Duet Page 2