In the year 2011, my two kidneys gave out from taking the medicine lithium for 16 years. I had two choices - go on life-saving dialysis or get a transplant.
Dialysis was not for me.
Fortunately, my daughter, Sarah Lynn, was a match. Now 48, she is doing great. She has written a couple of novels and has her own Pilates studio in her home town of Brooklyn. Robert Pilates discovered a new technique of exercise based on breathing methods and acquiring strong core muscles.
I continue to take my antirejection meds - tac ro lim us - pronounced tacroLYEmus - as I have done faithfully for the past eleven years.
I visit my kidney doctor, the kindly Dr. Victor G., from Lebanon. I take blood tests at Quest Diagnostics in Jenkintown. I watch as the phlebotomist takes several vials of blood.
Boyfriend Scott is with me.
I ask her name.
"Cheri," she says.
"Cheri, Baby?"
We laugh.
Several days later, the doctor's office calls me.
"Your tacrolimus is low," says Eva, one of the nurses.
She tells me how much I need to take.
"Three in the morning, and two at night."
Righto!!!
The office will call it into CVS.
They never called it in.
At night I lay in bed imagining I lose my kidney.
I lie in bed wearing my CPAP machine, which blows air into my nostrils. This is to help me sleep, and allegedly improve my memory, but like a chained convict, say, HUD, played by Paul Newman, I cannot move.
I distract myself by watching terrible TV shows and reading our monthly book for my reading group at Upper Moreland Public Library: "Killers of the Flower Moon: "The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI."
Wearing warm pajamas, I place my hand on my kidney, and think, Stay well, stay well.
One, two, three days pass.
Why doesn't the doctor call in my Tacky?
This is disgraceful.
On the second of October, 2022, one of the doctors calls me. Khan is his name. No, not Kubla Khan "did a stately pleasure dome decree," but Joseph.
"Ruth Deming," I answer.
I give the man the phone number of CVS, which I have never memorized. 215-658-1465.
"I call it in right now," he says.
"Thank you," I say emphatically and quickly hang up, so he can call it in.
215-658-1465
Scott and I will pick it up.
Meantime I have written a Letter to the Editor of The Times Chronicle, a weekly paper, which offers awesome suggestions. While reading it, I took notes. One of the sections was How to Care for your Plants in Winter.
Scott okayed The Letter as did my sister Lynn. My friend Freda Samuels, who I always called, is stone cold dead.
Out we will go in the br-r-r- cold, with the wipers flashing.
Oh, Tacky, my love, my savior, I await swallowing your tiny yellow capsule.
And staying alive.
The saga is not quite over. About half an hour ago Kubla Khan calls me. He wants my DOB to give to the CVS.
Oh, I say, I already picked up the tacrolimus this morning.
And, btw, I ask, what is the 9-something area code.
New York, he says. I think.
So did the philosopher, Rene Descartes, who said, I THINK, THEREFORE I AM.
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