Nevertheless, I still felt nervous anticipation around him, especially on our fifth date when he still hadn’t kissed me. He called me on it.
“Why you seem so sheepish?” he asked at the end of our date as we sat together in his car in the parking lot where mine was parked.
“I don’t know . . . I mean . . . I don’t know.” I blushed.
He smiled knowingly.
“Just lean toward me,” he said softly but confidently in his baritone voice. Instinctively I did as I was told. He leaned toward me.
“And kiss me,” he said.
My heart pounded hard in my chest, but his lips were soft and he gently tickled my tongue with his between our just slightly more than church wedding–appropriate openmouthed lip motions. I tingled.
“We had a moment,” he said with a smile after our faces separated. A new flourish of tingles swept through me. I was thinking the same thing.
I exhaled, feeling like I was in a romantic movie. We said our goodnights and I tried not to twirl back to my car.
But not too many more dates later he said something that I thought might make the desire to twirl stop forever: “It ain’t like it’s kidney failure.”
It was a refrain Robert would often repeat to himself and others to remind them there were worse things in life—like what he dealt with in the day-to-day—compared to whatever it was that was upsetting them in the moment. Those words sparked our first fight.
I forget what I was fretting over that prompted him to say it. I said nothing in the moment because I am one of those unfortunate souls who are slow to snap back. I wish I were one of those people who can go toe-to-toe with anyone. I want to be able to freestyle rap or play the dozens effectively. Yo mama so . . . Wait, I need time to think.
My brain needed to decipher why it was that my heart thumped, my face heated, and that wave of prickly tingles washed over me when he spoke those words. So taken by surprise, my brain needed hours to accept and apply meaning to this intrusion.
My opportunity to speak my hurt came just hours later, when Robert asked me how I was feeling about something that was bothering me. We were on the phone and I was driving, Bluetooth earpiece curled around my right ear. Hands gripping the steering wheel at ten and two and leaning forward, like a little old lady trying to see over the wheel. Robert was at dialysis.
“Doesn’t really matter,” I said flatly, “it’s not like it’s kidney failure.” Take that, I thought.
Now he was the one to pause, but just for a beat because he is a toe-to-toer. “What is that supposed to mean?”
By then I could articulate my thoughts. But so could he. Our voices raised. Mine about how hurtful it felt for him to dismiss what I was going through because it didn’t hang me in the balance between life and death as did his kidney failure. His about how what I was so worried about was small compared to being in a dialysis chair.
I could picture him where he always sat for dialysis since the incessant work calls he would take when he dialyzed in the large open space of the dialysis unit disturbed the more than two dozen others who just wanted to sleep through their three or so hours on the machine, which won him a permanent assignment to the room off to the side of the dialysis unit like some sort of a posh private suite, when really it is where patients with diseases like hepatitis and tuberculosis typically would be sent so they could be isolated from the other patients. Still, his voice was so loud that Glen, the technician monitoring him, peeked in to ask, “Who you talking to like that?”
I imagined a flock of birds, sensing a devastating storm was on its way, flying off in a wave.
Instead, a peculiar thing happened. He heard me. I listened to him. We both had had our share of experiences in which a disagreement so small nobody remembers the details days later had devolved into name-calling and phone slamming. This was different. This was good. This was how it was supposed to be. It was then that I knew that Robert and I were good for each other. That we were good together.
And so we began to intertwine ourselves like grown folks. Grown folks have been through enough to know not to waste time looking for perfection because we can see our own flaws clearly. The goal was finding a partner who was as crazy as we were and willing to put up with our crazy. We knew not to waste time waiting at least three days before calling or pretending to be busy on a Friday night. Or even being afraid to say I love you first. Robert and I were on the phone when he said it that first time.
“It’s kind of hard to say”—his voice began to tremble—“but I am starting to feel love for you.”
“Why is that so hard to say?” I said.
“Uh . . . I don’t know,” he stammered and changed the subject.
It was some time after we hung up before I realized that feeling love for me was Robert’s roundabout way of telling me he loved me for the very first time and, without meaning to, I had essentially responded with “That’s nice. Thank you” in return.
Idiot! I thought of myself, because, oh, how I did love him back.
Robert was like no other. Quickly he won me over, no doubt in part because he was the opposite of what I was used to. He had volunteered the not-so-pretty details of his life on the first date. I was impressed. He would drive the thirty-six miles through traffic from his home in Richmond to see me in suburbia often and without hesitation. I was wooed. He could rattle off a brief history of labor unions and politics in America. I was titillated.
It wasn’t long before Robert invited me to visit with him while he dialyzed. Having seen patients on dialysis during my training, the yards of tubing filled with blood and the faint disinfectant smell of the dialysis unit did not faze me. But during training, visits to patients were quick assessments of dialysis orders and vital signs in a small hospital room with a capacity of only four patients. At that time, I was the internal medicine resident physician two years out of medical school and just one year away from being able to become a medical board–certified internist. I was usually sleep-deprived and always eager to get on to the next patient. The clipboard of a patient’s vital signs and doctor’s orders was the only detail I really recall.
My visits to Robert were as girlfriend. As girlfriend, just weeks into being in love, there was nowhere else I wanted to be.
The outpatient dialysis unit was huge compared to the hospital dialysis unit. Like bees dotting from flower to flower and bringing nectar back to the hive, dialysis nurses and technicians in pajama-like scrubs buzzed around the thirty recliners against the walls to a central nurses’ station. Each dialysis chair had a side arm that swung a TV in front of the patient’s face. Most of the patients were asleep. With diabetes and blood vessel disease and kidney failure running together as they often do, it was not surprising that some patients were missing a part of a leg or two.
“You’re six kilos up,” Glen, the technician, said to Robert. “You have to not drink so much between runs, man.”
Robert stepped off the scale, not bothering to respond this time. He felt thirsty all the time. He wished he could pee some of the extra fluid off his body. He no longer even felt an urge to pee. He missed that.
He sat in the burgundy recliner freshly wiped down with disinfectant after the last patient. He laid his left arm palm up on the armrest as he wished for nothing outside of the norm this day. His new normal. It had taken him three years to get here, to a point where he could dare wish for things to go smoothly. He’d learned who he could trust to stick him. He’d learned that when he traveled to never allow a nurse to stick him. The nurses had gone to school longer, but the techs stuck fistulas all day. He wanted a tech. He’d learned how to guide a new tech, what angle their needle should take. The wrong angle wouldn’t get inside the fistula, but rather between skin and fistula. It was a stick that hurt more, but he wouldn’t really know it was in the wrong place until the machine started to return his blood back to him and the arm swelled immediately, bringing with it a sudden sharp pain that gave way to throbbing. But what was worse was th
at a needle in the wrong place meant no dialysis that day. They would give him a dose of chalky Kayexalate to drink, and it would give him the diarrhea necessary to get his potassium down to a level where there was no worry that it would rise high enough to stop his heart. But he would still be left with the nausea and the heaviness and shortness of breath from too much waste and too much fluid left behind. All because some non-fistula-sticking nurse had messed up. He remembered how he had to resist the urge to punch with his right fist when it happened. Bitch! he once shouted instead.
Glen, he could trust. Needle setup in hand, Glen rolled over the short black cushioned stool and took a seat. He pulled up the recliner’s side table until it clicked in place and laid down his supplies. He tore off a strip of white tape and touched one end to the edge of the table. It hung there like a windless flag. He hung three more.
The needle looked like it could hold pieces of wood together. Instead it was attached to eight inches of clear tubing. Facing Robert, he held the needle at a forty-five-degree angle over the fistula traveling up Robert’s left forearm. He noted the two sets of marching dots from previous sticks. He aimed for a space a quarter inch above the last. First the arterial needle that would pull the blood from his body into the machine. He secured the needle in place with two strips of white tape. He repeated this for the venous needle that would return the blood to his body. Robert hardly flinched. He was used to this violation. After all, this was better than having the catheter like in the first couple of years. With the catheter, he was always in fear of sepsis, infection coursing through his blood. He remembered the shivering and sweating it produced.
Glen connected the machine tubing to the needle tubing. For four hours, Robert had to be careful not to tug at the clear tubing tether from the dialysis machine to the two large-bore needles spearing his fistula. Newspapers, books, cell phone, DVD player, and TV were close at hand to help pass the time. He remembered how once, on a work trip, when he had to go to a different dialysis center, he had an allergic reaction to the dialysis machine filter, the foot-long plastic cylinder filled with fibers that served as the artificial kidney. He recalled the immediate sneezing, eye watering, chest tightness, difficulty breathing—and then the extra forty-five minutes he had to sit after his dialysis treatment with the appropriate filter, waiting for the Benadryl he needed to treat the allergic reaction in the first place to wear off. He had learned to pack his own filters. One for every two days of travel.
He felt himself lightening as the extra fluid he had accumulated since his last run on the machine was being siphoned away. Too quickly? He worried that his punishment for drinking too much between runs would be light-headedness and cramping in his legs, his back, his jaw, his hands. His everywhere. Again. He ignored the hum of the blood pressure cuff tightening around his right arm every fifteen minutes until the end of his dialysis treatment, his “run,” when it had his full attention and he willed the device to display a reading high enough for him to be able to stand up and walk out of the place, only to start over again in two days. This was a good dialysis day. Only low blood pressure and fatigue. This was to be expected.
He learned a long time ago to ease back into those dialysis-free hours. Trying to do too much too quickly landed him on the floor with the panic-stricken faces of his colleagues hovering above him. His routine had become going to the movie theater right after dialysis, allowing the air-conditioned darkness and story unfolding on the screen to soothe and distract him long enough for the post-dialysis exhaustion to subside.
He supplemented the movies with a mani-pedi every other week. Few would have imagined Robert, who was a linebacker in college, to be in the nail shop with such regularity. I folded into his pattern, but even I had assumed that Robert would much rather have been outside hiking, running, and jumping under our sunny California sky; that this stillness was forced upon him by illness. But truth was, Robert refused camping trips because for him “roughing it” meant to stay at a hotel without a spa.
The petite Vietnamese ladies always flocked around him as if male energy was the one thing the shop had been craving.
“You want cut short?” the one at his toenails would ask. The one at his hand was sure to startle, pulling her hand back when she happened upon his buzzing fistula. “What happened to you?” she would ask.
“I’m sick,” he would reduce it down to, hoping that would be enough of an explanation. It still embarrassed him. He rarely wore a short-sleeved shirt because of it. It could be eighty degrees out, but T-shirts were only for home. People would stare. The bold few would ask. Their own embarrassment, or not wanting to seem nosy, or not wanting to make Robert even more uncomfortable, forced them to silence that inner four-year-old’s mantra: “But why?”
Because my kidneys stopped working.
But why?
Because. Because they said I have something called . . . because I don’t know why. He’d change course, not feeling like making his tongue roll out the strange combination of syllables that was his diagnosis.
But why?
Because they don’t know either.
Next was to fold Robert into my life. He would be the first man Avery would meet since I left his father. I invited him to meet us at Chuck E. Cheese’s, Avery’s favorite hangout. My tummy fluttered with anxiety. Just the week before, as Avery and I played on the monkey bars near our apartment, he had announced, “I don’t like boyfriend,” when I told him Mommy had one.
“Why not?” I responded at the time. “Daddy has girlfriends and you like them.”
“Daddy needs a girlfriend.”
“Mommy doesn’t need a boyfriend?”
“No.”
“What does Mommy need?”
“Me!” He grinned.
But by the end of the afternoon, after playing games and eating bad pizza, Avery said good-bye to Robert with a hug.
“You’re a nice man, Robert,” he said, with his head resting on Robert’s belly and his little arms stretched around.
Robert smiled with surprise and placed his left hand on Avery’s back while his right hand patted his head.
I smiled too. Robert had passed my test.
Which was why at the end of that summer when Robert and I were sitting at a little outdoor café table enjoying some frozen yogurt I asked, “So what you trying to do?” like some slang version of a father asking “And what are your intentions with our daughter?” Though my own father would have been much more likely to wait on the front porch with his shotgun barrel resting menacingly on his right shoulder if a boy hadn’t brought his daughter home by the expected time.
“I’m looking for a wife,” Robert announced, his right eyebrow twitching and lips quivering.
He was nervous. How endearing. I smiled to myself, but said, with a hint of attitude, “What does that mean? Just any woman will do? Just add Vanessa and stir?”
“No, not just any woman . . .” he pushed back. “It ain’t like you a prize.”
I inhaled sharply and looked at him with my eyebrows knitted. What the hell is that supposed to mean?
He read my face and quickly tried to clean up his words. “I mean, you have a child and a crazy ex-husband. . . . It’s about you.”
“Whatever, sucka. I am a prize,” I said, returning to my frozen yogurt and not hearing him ask me what it was I was trying to do with him.
4
The Other Robert Phillips
The following spring I lay in a Bay Area preoperative care unit hospital bed, though as a doctor I was used to standing nearby as someone else lay in one. My tummy somersaulted with so much nervous excitement that it bubbled out into my throat and wouldn’t allow me to take a deep breath. The sweatpants, sweatshirt, bra, panties, socks, and sneakers I wore there were tucked neatly into a large yellow plastic bag labeled patient belongings. In their place was only the hospital-issued light blue cotton gown with too few ties in the back to make my booty feel securely hidden and tan booties with the no-slip treads. My locks were
stuffed under a periwinkle bouffant bonnet that didn’t quite match the gown.
It was Thursday, April 14, 2005, and what I hoped was the day after the last day of dialysis that Robert would have to endure since his kidneys failed some six years prior. I was about to give him one of mine.
Although it had been months after we started dating before it ever crossed my mind that I could be the source of his new kidney, I always believed things would work out in his favor, that he would get a kidney transplant. I had to believe in order to allow my heart to soften for him in the first place. To let him in. But I knew things would work out from the moment I heard about The Other Robert Phillips.
It was My Robert, as I had become accustomed to referring to him, as there was often more than one Robert in the room or conversation, who first told me about The Other.
“People in the dialysis unit who had already had a transplant but ended up back on dialysis kept saying that having a kidney transplant was even worse than dialysis. That you go through all that surgery and all those pills and they only last a couple of years,” he told me. “Even the nephrologists gave me conflicting information, so I wanted to find out for myself,” he said, and he began to research. First kidney transplant. Average kidney transplant survival. Longest kidney transplant survival.
It wasn’t long before he found him in the archived profiles of the American Association of Kidney Patients: Robert Phillips—the longest surviving kidney transplant recipient. In 1963—a decade before My Robert was even born—The Other Robert Phillips, a truck driver from Virginia, received a kidney transplant from his sister. According to the article, the transplant had been thriving forty-one years and counting and they weren’t even compatible ABO blood types. He was type A, which can usually only receive from type Os and other type As. She was type B, which usually can only give to type ABs and other Bs. This was all the proof My Robert needed that a kidney transplant held the promise of a life much better than dialysis could ever offer.
Hundreds of Interlaced Fingers Page 3