My sister only smiled during my third rendition of “Old McDonald”. That it took so long for her to react, was the same reason I was even singing. Nerves. I remember thinking of a Vietnam War movie that starts with a soldier lying in bed sweating, staring at a wobbly ceiling fan above, which becomes helicopter rotors in his mind. Well I wasn’t in Vietnam; there were no ceiling fans and no breasty nurse heroines for me to fall in love with. Nonetheless, I lay flat on my back on a gurney…or perhaps, a journey…and the ceiling was moving. I guess the pre-med did help with the nerves but I know that my bravado was more a façade to convince my sister that there was nothing to worry about, than bravado itself. She may have agreed - if she were not at the time also on a gurney alongside mine, and soon to part with a kidney.
We reached a point in the corridor where we had to part. The moment of truth and the final move against fate, despair and fear on the checker-board of life’s trials. Seeing tears in Jo’s eyes nearly broke my resolve and I could only resort to humour in the hope of avoiding either one of us from losing it.
“Hope we aren’t in the YOU magazine tomorrow.” Another attempt at humour. I still hope I said something like ‘I love you Sis’, but I can’t remember. The ceiling dissolved into one big bunch of lights as I was wheeled through another set of double doors.
“Wow…am I dead?”
“No Terence, you’re fine,” smiled a theatre nurse from the outer periphery of light.
I remember my first day at Addington State Hospital in Durban. It was a cold drizzly autumn morning and I was lost and alone in the crowds. I stood in a queue for an hour before I got to the front.
“No luvvy, new patients to counter six. Next!”
That set the scene for the next couple of years. Counter Six stamped Terence Clarke out of existence and replaced him with file 747899.
“You must go to the Poly-clinic tomorrow at 6.00am.”
“Sorry...where?”
“Poly-clinic…around the corner. Next!”
My second day was worse. Arriving at the hospital on the prescribed hour, it took another thirty-five minutes to discover that the Polyclinic was indeed ‘around the corner’. In fact it was a separate building altogether, around the corner and down the road. Inevitably, this delay put me near the back of an already bloated and distorted queue. We sat en masse, on the grass, the concrete corridors, the windowsills and dustbins, waiting. Always waiting. The morning passed. The mass of coughing, snorting and sniffing bodies around me murmured and stirred but never seemed to thin out. By mid-afternoon I was indoors, and could see the final zigzagged home ‘straight’.
In turn, the person sitting on the end of the front bench was called to one of the curtained cubicles. 747899 got there at about 4.00pm. A nurse shoved a thermometer down my throat and wrapped a blood pressure bandage around my arm. I almost turned instinctively to receive my branding on my rump. She asked some questions, made some notes and told me to join the queue outside to see ‘Dokota’.
The lucky ones leave at this point. If you need anything more than a Panado, you join the queue to see ‘Dokota’.
At 6.00pm ‘Dokota’ deduced that I had bigger problems than just a headache. He was the guy who determined whether you had a quick-fix ailment, or whether you took your chronic illness back to the main hospital. A sort of thinning and elimination process, much like any cattle ranch would conduct prior to the next auctions. His analysis condemned me to further diagnosis, assessments and medical tests. File number 747899 now had an appointment with the Medical Registrar of the main hospital, at 6.00am the following day.
Day three and I felt like a veteran already. I breezed through the security frisking at the door, found the correct registration line straight away and within three hours was looking for the Medical Registrar’s office. It was closed when I found it, temporarily moved due to a viral contamination. I found the new rooms and joined the queue. I had reached a level where intern doctors saw to us, and mine was a rather pleasant fellow with not so pleasant news.
“Indications do seem to point to kidney problems. Your creatinine is exceptionally high, your blood pressure is also…..” His words drifted into the void that reality opens in the mind so as to deny the information coming in. “….your next appointment is with the Renal Clinic.”
Doctor Madala was a tall woman. She was pleasant, friendly and sympathetic. She even called me ‘Terence’. But, she was also a professional; she had a job to do and news to share. This combination of professionalism and sympathy allowed her to break it to me gently.
“You have chronic renal failure. Your kidneys are barely functioning. It is not curable. A transplant buys you a chance at a second chance…dialysis keeps you alive until then.”
What to say?
“How long do I have before they go completely?”
“A week, maybe six months. We just monitor your bloods and see.”
Dialysis started in August 1999. Every Wednesday and Saturday from 6.00am to 10.00am spent on the machine. Twice a week, four hours at a time, for nine months, I watched my blood filtering through the life-support filters. I can write chapters on dialysis: diets, nausea, sub-clavian catheters, medication, monotony, family, Bold and the Beautiful re-runs, weakness… I never did complain, and I won’t. There were patients who had been on dialysis for years before me, and are still there now.
I was lucky. Tests were done on my family to assess donor potential. Live Related Donors, (L.R.D’s), offer the best compatibilities and thus improve chances of long-term success. Both parents were medically discounted by the strict conditions required, but my sister Leanne was given the green light. This light turned red when she ended up receiving treatment for a cancerous sarcoma that sprang up the same week! With that she opened the door for her twin, my other sister, Joanne. We got the “GO” for April 2000.
I have been prodded and probed in every fashion, manner and orifice. Some I didn’t even know I had. But this op, in theatre, was a first for me and add to this the fact that it was a government provincial hospital…I was scared. I raised myself to my elbows to look around. A smaller theatre than in the movies but with the standard array of lights and gadgets behind my head. There must have been about six nurses scurrying about, green cloaks, green booties and latex gloves, flicking this and tugging that but ignoring me.
“Hi, I’m Terence.” Probably my pre-med talking again but I let it speak.
“Yes we know, it’s on your wrist-band Terence.”
Right. Forget the names then. The important stuff first.
“So you also know then that I am here for a kidney transplant, not a hysterectomy or say…an amputation of sorts?” It was a serious question disguised as a joke. I mean how often do we read of these horror stories in reputable magazines?
A giggled reply came from the left, ”Don’t worry Terence, we have all the cards, you’ll be fine.”
“Ah, so then you will also know that in this case I am the recipient. My sister Jo is the donor and she’s the girl next door.”
Just a smile and a nod from one of the nurses that I could see. Still not convinced, I sat upright, a non-verbal demand for attention.
“Right! All of you stop what you are doing and repeat after me. Kidnee… traaansplaaant… recipieeent. Get it?”
With that I collapsed onto my back once more and continued to mumble lines from ‘Old McDonald’. By this time, they were already sawing off Jo’s rib to get to the kidney she was parting with. They always start with the donor first as there is more to taking a kidney out than putting one in, apparently. Jo was sliced from lower belly to middle-back, had a lower rib removed and accidentally had a lung punctured for good measure. I was to receive a simple 15cm lateral cut from mid-groin to just short of the hip-bone, where they drop the kidney in, redo the plumbing, and stitch it up. All in a days work for some!
I was still in my dreamy song mode when a pair of hairy sleeveless arms appeared above my head twisting their hands into a pair of surgical gloves.
“Hello Terence. I am Professor Naidoo..Dlamini..Smith..Fandango..Sanchez,” I never got the name really, “how are you doing?”
“Oh hi Doc, I’m just great thanks. Short back and sides please.”
“Ah nice and chirpy then, dat’s good,” he paused briefly to place a mask over my face, “just the anaesthetic, no worry, good.”
“You know that I am here for a renal transplant hey Doc? The recipient of a kidney from my sister who…”
Anaesthetic worked as fast then as it does now.
My wife’s contractions started as Jo and I lay anaesthetised in the Durban theatre. We put this ‘immaculate timing’ down to stress. My second son was born in Richards Bay in the early hours of the 12th as I lay in a morphine induced sleep. As unpleasant as it was for us to be apart at a time like this, the irony of two new beginnings was not lost on us, and we had so much to look forward to. Conversely, Jo who now lay painfully across the ward from me, could only ponder upon the year it would take before she was allowed to start her family. This sacrifice had indeed been a major upset for her but was something she bravely shelved for me.
A year after the operation, my wife and I met Jo and Daniel for dinner. She had announced her pregnancy some weeks before so it was a double celebration. As a thank-you to them both, for their emotional and physical scars, I thought it fitting that my sons ‘write’ a verse to their unborn cousin. Accompanied by a photo of the boys, we framed the following ode:
Dear Little Cousin
You may be a little bundle now,
A stranger to the land.
But, one day in years to come
You will read this and understand.
Your Mom and Dad gave up so much
To help my Dad get through,
They had to wait a little longer
Before they could have you.
Your Mom and Dad gave up so much
Never faltered, muttered nor moaned.
Even when, to help my Dad
They had their hopes and dreams postponed.
You may be a little bundle now
Wondering what could have been so bad,
Well memories fade and scars may heal
But in time, you will know the gift my family had.
To us your Mom and Dad are special too…
‘cause they gave us back our Dad.
End.
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