I Donated a Kidney to my Tinder Match (part 3)
[continued from part 2]
“Did it work?”
A passing nurse notices my stirring and comes into the recovery bay, a corner unit with a great view of the operating wing doors and only one curtained wall of neighboring machines to disturb my drug-induced slumber. She takes in the numbers on the methodically beeping screens behind me while I focus on wiggling my toes and fingers, suddenly aware that I can check on my biggest surgical fear: Unexpectedly winding up paralyzed. She turns away from the green lights to smile at me, puts a hand on the blanket over my fidgeting arm. My fingers continue to dance like there’s a keyboard under there with me.
“You did great. Everything went really well.”
I shift my focus to wiggling my toes. The movement at the end of the bed curls my lips into a grin, which fades quickly as the slow creep of discomfort mounts with my consciousness. “What about Ross?” I mumble, my mouth sluggish from the meds and my tongue partly asleep. I’m equally curious about the state of my friend and eager to hear how my kidney’s doing at its new job, like a student waiting to get their grade on a test they studied really hard for. I fight to stay awake until she comes back, deciding I need both answers before I can safely go back to sleep. A minute later the beeps lull me back to dreamland.
When I wake again, parched beyond belief and substantially more aware than the post-anesthesia fog I’d crawled out of last time, I ask again about Ross. The nurse leaves in search of an update, and a minute later returns with a cup of ice water and my sister.
Even through my sedated haze I can see relief physically wash over her as she comes through the curtained wall. After the break up and tailgate talk with Anna I realized this whole process would affect people other than just Ross and me, but seeing that worry melt away from someone who had been just as unemotional about the process as I was hit me in a soft spot. She does a little “thank god you didn’t die” jazz hands move and then compliments my sleeping skills. She’d rushed back from the hotel when she got the call that I was out of surgery, and I’d spent the time since then — approximately 97% of an iPhone battery worth — snoozing away, unaware of a world outside of my medicated cubicle.
“Ross is done, I talked to his mom. She said it went well!” They wheel me towards the elevator bank, Mel walking with a hand on the bed rail, a bit of a skip in her step.
The hard part is over, and my other biggest fear is curbed: Ross didn’t die while accepting my gift.
A couple hours later a Facetime call comes in from a few floors below. It’s Ross, and he looks like shit.
Seemingly on the verge of falling asleep, he says he has the results from his first post-op blood work and wanted to deliver the news as close to in-person as possible. He pauses, letting the beeps of the machines behind him take the mic, and leans against the upright bed. A grimace falls on his face just as the connection falters, freezing my screen with hospital gown print and a very unflattering under-chin angle. I give my phone a light shake, as if it might help bring Phone Ross back to life, as the anticipation builds. Aside from both surviving surgery, which I now have visual proof is the case, this feels like the big marker, the final exam that decides whether or not you’ll pass or fail a class. The call drops and after a minute or two I start to worry if I should send a nurse down to his room, to check on him of course but also to retrieve my grade. When the phone finally buzzes in my hand I hit accept before the screen even lights up. His creatinine — one of the key kidney function metrics — is down almost a full point already.
It’s working.
I hang up beaming and then pick up the old school receiver of my room phone to call for food. The nurse gave the ok on liquids first, with a stern order to see how that went before trying anything solid. Another test! Despite not actually feeling hungry, the idea of eating after 20 hours of fasting sounds embarrassingly exciting, and I order a sampling of the Mayo Clinic kitchen’s most appealing drinkable options. Mel rolls my bed cart over so the tray is hovering above my lap, prepping for my first meal since the sodium citrate I drank the night before Draino’d my guts clean. Wild that you can just grab a laxative of that strength off a grocery store shelf — I hope it proves to be useless information for the rest of my life.
A surprise bout of tiredness hits, apparently taxed from the arduous task of lifting a paper menu and dialing the kitchen line, and I fight to stay awake while we wait for the food to be delivered. When the cafeteria tray lands in front of me, Mel watches as I unearth my dinner, smiling like you might at a baby with their first birthday cake. The vegetable broth is salty and lukewarm, served in a hard plastic mug like the ones from the Tupperware party my mom hosted that one time. I sip it slowly, heeding the nurse’s instruction, and am immediately overcome with fullness. A foil-sealed container of apple juice and a small, clear cup filled with bright purple smoothie still wait on the tray, and I feel ashamed for over-ordering. Not wanting it to go to waste, I take a few small sips of smoothie and beg my sister to finish it. “Mmm, protein powder,” she says sarcastically and returns the half-empty glass to my bedside cart before wheeling it off of me. She’s a personal trainer and I think about the time off work and her own workouts that she’s missing to take care of me this week. I wonder if I can somehow get her an actual protein shake, or if there’s a gym in the hospital she can use. I’ll find some way to make it up to her, once I’m fully operational again.
I lean back in my upright bed, with nothing to do but wait to see how my recently manhandled intestines feel about having something inside them again. Mel flips through the t.v. catalog for a movie while I attempt to track the ounce of berry puree through my digestive track. I’m too tired to follow the plot of Dr Strange, but not tired enough to sleep, so I just lay there waiting for my grade on this latest test.
A while after dark I page the nurse, my first time needing someone outside of their routine check-ins. The lights of downtown Jacksonville glow through the huge south-facing picture window from the eighth floor while I wait, desperate not to cause a fuss but unable to tolerate the excessive beeping from one of the machines behind me any longer.
“The alarm on my heart rate monitor keeps ringing. Can it be shut off?” It’s set to sound whenever the bandage-like sticker on my middle finger detects a rate lower than 50 bpm, perhaps the only place on Earth where you’re punished instead of praised for being athletic with a low resting heart rate.
I wiggle around in my bed to keep it elevated enough until the nurse comes in. She sets its lower limit far enough so I can hopefully sleep uninterrupted, and doles out my every-six-hour Extra Strength Tylenol while she’s there. As I swallow the over-the-counter pill, shocked that it’s enough to manage the pain after being cut open and having a full-sized organ pulled from my body, she checks the hose of my catheter and the color of the contents in the plastic bin below my bed.
“Keep drinking and get some sleep. Everything looks great.” I doze off again with a pleased smile on my face.
A few hours later I wake to a sliver of light coming in from the hallway, a new nurse quietly walking in. She erases the name of the past crew from the white board across from my bed with one swipe, then very neatly writes her own name on the line. She turns too quickly for me to close my eyes again and pretend to be sleeping. I greet her by her name, the ink on the board still wet and glimmering in the fluorescent beam.
She asks if I’ve gotten up to walk yet, the latest test I’d been looking forward to. All of the first hand reports I found said the very worst part of the procedure was the gas leftover from them ballooning the abdominal cavity to create more room for working. That trapped gas needs to be absorbed so it can eventually make its way out — yes, as in farting — and moving, sitting up, and walking are the best ways to make it happen. Which are also, they say, intolerably painful. I can’t imagine it’ll be that bad if they’re feeding me Tylenol as my only pain killer, so I excitedly accept the challenge.
As the nurse preps a high top walker, lifting the padded forearm supports to the appropriate level for the height listed on my chart, I try to get up to prepare for the task. My thighs barely lift off the mattress before I yelp in pain.
“Easy, easy,” she abandons the walker and has her arm on my shoulder in an instant. With some coaching, I painstakingly maneuver to the edge of the mattress, inch by inch in an upright fetal position, my left shoulder digging into the raised bed back and my right hand pushing from behind my butt. I dig in for another big scooch and feel the back of my gown completely open, the first fresh air my back has felt since before the anesthesia half a day ago.
Finally I feel the railing under my thigh indicating the edge of the bed. I nudge my feet and my legs fall in a pendulum towards the floor, my upper body slouched in exhaustion.
“Good! Great job! Seriously, even just sitting up on your own is a big step.”
I look up to check her face for signs of sarcasm and see Mel at the foot of the bed with her phone pointing at me. She gives me a thumbs up and says she can see my butt. I cough out a small laugh and a searing pain fires from under my collarbone, the gas is on the move.
When I’m finally upright, grippy socks on the cold tile floor and forearms firmly planted on the padded supports of the walker, I think about the text I just sent my family. The one proudly claiming the pain was no worse than period cramps and bad Mexican food gas, that so far everything has been a breeze. Horizontal Sarah had no idea what was in store.
It takes me 15 minutes to wheel myself just past the threshold of my room, out into the quiet night shift hallway. I stand there for a second, collecting my breath, and nod at a passing janitor. My nurse initiates our turn back to the room by wheeling my IV cart around me, carefully maneuvering my catheter hose with it as I make my 180º turn. I glance down at the plastic bin connected to that hose, attached to my walker and sloshing full of my own urine. A touch of helpless embarrassment passes over me just as a light breeze passes over my partially exposed bum.
By the time I’m back in bed I’m exhausted, and I sleep until sunrise.
I wake to the news that Ross’s creatinine is down another full point, marking almost two since they plugged in his new kidney. This feels worth celebrating, so Mel and I call down for pancakes.
After breakfast a new nurse introduces herself, a young black woman with impossibly clear skin and kind eyes that take the time to meet yours while she efficiently buzzes through tasks. She says once my catheter is out and we see how I handle the solid food I should be free to go. As she examines the contents of my pee bin under the bed, the one attached to the hose she’s about to pull out of me, I become acutely aware of what’s about to happen.
She reassures me that it’ll be quick and hurt no more than removing a tampon too early. I brace myself, and she’s right. With the catheter out, and one more test closer to leaving, I practice getting out of bed on my own, to show her how mobile and ready for the real world I am.
“I thought I heard one of the other nurses say something about shower wipes?” I ask as she clicks around on the computer, and a few minutes later she returns with an armful of toiletries. A desperately needed toothbrush, the kind of comb they give you at grade school photos to smooth down your bangs, and a pillowy pack of medical grade shower wipes. Imagine a baby wipe but ten times bigger, thick like a washcloth, and textured to pull off all the grime that somehow accumulates while simply laying in a bed for a full day.
Released from all the hoses and cords that had me chained to the bed all these hours, I waddle to the in-room bathroom for my first flushable pee. I ditch the gown and return to the oversized joggers and sweatshirt I showed up in, carefully cinching the waist band above my bandaged incisions. The two small ones near my ribs, used for the camera and tools, are glued shut, only about an inch wide. There’s a larger one that runs from below my belly button to the top of my pubic bone, also glued shut, showing some signs of bruising. That’s where the surgeon reached into my body and pulled out my detached kidney. I gently touch it, the only sensation coming from my finger on the smooth and lightly tacky glue. Wild.
I apply some deodorant and shove the rest of the shower wipes in my bag, not certain whether I’m allowed to take them or not, already dreaming of wiping dirty ankles after trail runs and scrubbing stubbly pits at a campground on a summer day. Mel looks as ecstatic as someone who’d tossed and turned on a pullout sofa next to a beeping vitals machine all night could be about leaving. Her backpack is on her shoulders before I even page the nurse.
Just about 30 hours after my dual-kidneyed self walked through the surgery center’s doors I get discharged to go “home.” Home for the week is the house of two of Ross’s friends who are out of town for Christmas, the best pseudo AirBnB situation possible. My mom and grandma will be flying in the next day to help with recovery and celebrate the holidays, something we don’t normally get to do during regular Decembers.
We stop at Ross’s room on our way out, who is already down to creatinine and filtration levels he hasn’t seen since his mid-20’s. He’s upright and eating too, and should get to go home in another day or two. His mom hugs me hard, not bothering to hold back her tears, and I look over as Ross mouths “thank you” behind her.
Slowly we make our way outside, where the sun is shining and the bright blue sky makes me squint. I look back at the gilded towers housing all the rooms and people and beeping machines, ready to move on to the next phase. To lean into the meat of recovery and start working my way back to my new old self.
