Gerald Slept Here!

[Gerald Lively]

NYT - Transplant News.

As it happened, Mr. Ruzzamenti experienced an unusual level of pain during his recuperation at Riverside. It sometimes left him balled up in agony, and the Demerol only made him hallucinate. He did not really want company. But when the pain stirred him awake at night, he could see Lucy sleeping in the hospital bed beside his.
Acts of Devotion
There were other love stories along the way.
Gregory Person and Zenovia Duke, both now 38, had been junior high prom dates in 1987 in Astoria, Queens. They lost touch and then reconnected on Facebook after each had divorced. They saw each other occasionally, but he lived in Queens and she near Albany, so the relationship never got serious.
Not long after they reconnected, Mr. Person’s half-sister died of kidney failure and he pledged to help someone else beat the disease if ever given the chance. Then Ms. Duke learned she needed a transplant.
On Aug. 31, Ms. Duke received a kidney from a woman in California and Mr. Person sent his to Ohio. As they recuperated at NewYork-Presbyterian , Mr. Person found himself regularly hobbling down to her room. Once they were both back on their feet, they started dating more regularly.
“I’ve never had any person in my life actually do what they say they’re going to do,” Ms. Duke said, “especially men. It spoke volumes that he was a man of his word.”
It was a different kind of devotion that led David Madosh, 47, to donate a kidney for Brooke Kitzman, 30. Their four-year relationship, which had produced a 2-year-old daughter, soured just as he was getting tested as a potential donor. The breakup, caused partly by the strains of her illness, was ugly enough that when Ms. Kitzman later matched to become part of the chain, she put the odds at no better than 50-50 that Mr. Madosh would still donate.
But Mr. Madosh, who lost his mother when he was 5, did not want his daughter, Elsie, to lose hers.
The youngest of 12 children, he said he had been passed from one foster home to the next, eight in all, some that he described as little more than labor camps. “I don’t want my daughter to have to experience that,” said Mr. Madosh, a tree cutter by trade. “No matter what it takes, a daughter needs her mother.”
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Ms. Kitzman said she was grateful for Mr. Madosh’s kidney, and had told him so when they visited in a hospital corridor. But both made it clear that his act of charity had barely eased the tension between them.
Mr. Madosh said he took satisfaction enough from seeing Elsie at play with her re-energized mother. “When her mama comes to get her, and she gives her hugs and kisses, that’s it right there,” he said.
A Wish Come True
On Dec. 19, Chain 124 hurtled toward its conclusion with a final flurry of procedures at Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center in Los Angeles. Between dawn and dusk, three kidneys were removed and three were transplanted in neighboring operating rooms. One flew in from San Francisco. The last took off for O’Hare.
At the end of the cluster were Keith Zimmerman, 53, a bearish, good-humored man with a billy-goat’s beard, and his older sister, Sherry Gluchowski, 59. She had recently moved from California to Texas but returned to donate her kidney.
The siblings had always been close, although family members marveled at their ability to bicker for 15 minutes over the proper way to construct a peanut butter sandwich. Their mother, Elsa Rickards, remembered teaching them as children “that they might not have their mommy and daddy all the time, but they will always have each other.”
Mr. Zimmerman, who runs a repossession firm with his wife in Santa Clarita, had been given a diagnosis of kidney disease 25 years ago. With the help of a nutritionist, he had managed to avoid dialysis until the very last day before his transplant, when his doctor said the procedure was needed to clear his body of excess fluid.
In his hospital room before surgery, with seven family members shoehorned into every nook, Mr. Zimmerman calmed his nerves by listening to Aaron Neville on his iPod. He said he considered himself “the lottery winner” in the chain because his kidney would be coming from a healthy 28-year-old, Conor Bidelspach of Bend, Ore.
The surgery to remove a kidney, known as a nephrectomy, is remarkably bloodless these days. With Mr. Bidelspach on the table, Dr. Peter G. Schulam cut four dime-sized incisions on the left side of the abdomen. Through tubes inserted in the openings, the surgeon and his team maneuvered their cauterizing scalpels and a laparoscopic camera, which relayed images of Mr. Bidelspach’s insides to monitors overhead.
The scalpel’s super-heated pincers clamped down like crab claws, searing the kidney from surrounding tissue. There was no need to cut any muscle.
Once the kidney was free of connective tissue, Dr. Schulam clamped and snipped the renal artery and vein and ureter. He captured the kidney in a plastic bag, cinched it shut, and withdrew it quickly through a finger-length incision along the pelvic line.
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The doctor poured the kidney into a bowl of ice and drained it of remaining blood. The slush in the blue bowl turned fruit-punch pink.
As others stitched up Mr. Bidelspach, Dr. Schulam wheeled the kidney on a cart into an adjoining operating room, where Mr. Zimmerman was already anesthetized. After stretching a hole in Mr. Zimmerman’s midsection with a metal retractor, Dr. Jeffrey L. Veale lowered the kidney into place and sewed in the renal artery and vein. As soon as he unclamped them, the kidney pinked up with blood flow. Before attaching the ureter to the bladder, he gently massaged the tip of the narrow tube between two fingers and watched it spurt a few drops of urine.
“No more dialysis for Mr. Zimmerman,” Dr. Veale declared. “This total stranger’s kidney is making him pee.” He left Mr. Zimmerman’s own kidneys to shrivel harmlessly in place (removing them would add to surgical risk).
Meanwhile, Dr. Schulam was in yet another operating room removing Ms. Gluchowski’s kidney. He placed it in a plastic bag filled with a preservative solution and knotted it shut, like a goldfish brought home from the pet store. It was packed in a plastic tub, topped with ice, and loaded into a cardboard box marked “Left Kidney — Donated Human Organ/Tissue for Transplant — Keep Upright.”
A courier in one of Quick International’s big red vans drove Sherry Gluchowski’s kidney through stop-and-go traffic on Interstate 405 to the Los Angeles airport. Cynthia Goff, an operations supervisor for the courier company who had volunteered to accompany the kidney to Chicago, rolled the box into the terminal strapped atop her carry-on with a bungee cord. A pit bull, waiting to be placed in its travel kennel, strolled by and sniffed.
After security agents checked the box with a desktop scanner, Ms. Goff rolled the kidney down the concourse, past a currency exchange and a store selling Elmo dolls for Christmas. Escorted onto United 564, an overnight flight that would land in Chicago at 5 a.m., she stowed the box in the business-class closet, next to a flight attendant’s overcoat.
Airplanes carrying donor organs are granted special status, allowing them to move to the front of takeoff lines and ahead of air traffic. Mr. Hil, who tries to avoid routing kidneys on connecting flights and always schedules backups, said none of his registry’s transplants had been held up by transportation problems.
By the time Ms. Gluchowski’s kidney made it to Loyola and was transplanted into Mr. Terry, it had been cold for almost 12 hours. Early studies have found no evidence that shipping live kidneys such distances affects their immediate function.
Chain 124 ended at Loyola because Mr. Hil had arranged for the final kidney to go to a hospital that had produced a Good Samaritan donor to start a chain in the past, thus closing a loop. Dr. John Milner, a transplant surgeon at Loyola, said he then selected Mr. Terry to receive the kidney because he was the best immunological match on the hospital’s wait list.
When Dr. Milner called with the news in early December, Mr. Terry was floored at his remarkable good fortune. Having felt unfairly condemned when he was first placed on dialysis, he now wondered what he had done to deserve a gift that 90,000 others needed just as much.
As it sank in that his would be the last of 30 interconnected transplants, Mr. Terry began to feel guilty that he would be ending the chain. “Is it going to continue?” he asked Dr. Milner. “I don’t want to be the reason to stop anything.”
“No, no, no,” the doctor reassured him. “This chain ends, but another one begins.”

[okarol]

Hey Gerald,
This is posted in news stories, just FYI.
Take care,
okarol

[Gerald Lively]

The good news is;  my blood work numbers are good enough to undergo further testing to see if I need dialysis at all.  The bad news is;  I start chemotherapy next week.

[boswife]

I hope that (no dialysis)  works out for you GL.  What a wonderful thing it would be     And for the other treatment,,, How do you do with it? as in, do you dread it because of how it makes you feel type thing.  From here, it makes me feel ill 'for' you as i wish this wasnt something you had to endure, but hopfully you take it better than how i feel for ya...   All the best wishes for you.

[big777bill]

 Wishing that all goes well for you GL. It will be great to be able to stop D but chemotherapy is a beast of a different color. I hope you get the desired results, you deserve it. Keep fighting     God Bless, Bill

[Joe]

Hope all goes well with your treatment GL. Kind of think it's out of the frying pan and into the fire, but we're pulling for you.

[willowtreewren]

It would be lovely if you could give up one of these psychic drains. 

Aleta

[Gerald Lively]

BosMom:

I single you out just because.

Last July I was carried into the hospital, out of my head and having hallucinations.  The things I saw in that state of mind were as real as the keyboard in front of me now.  I believed them to be true. It would require a book to tell you in detail the things I saw and did, yet, my wife tells me that most of this was not true.  I invented them.  I have a substantial amount of confusion about all of this.  My creatinine at the time was around 17.0, now it is about 2.8. 

I saw drug transactions between nurses and street people who met in my room.  I asked for and was given unprescribed drugs to help me sleep although I know I had been awake for more than four days in a row and nothing seemed to help.  I witnessed two janitors beating another and went to help, but no one recalls that incident but me.  A nurse came in one day to check my “vitals” at one AM at night and I thought she was there for sex, so I tossed her out, physically – and today I saw her again at chemotherapy and I discovered that one hallucination was not a hallucination at all.

I talked briefly with her and she remembers.  I remember a male nurse pimping her to me and me saying no way.  I recall her dancing a suggestive dance in the background when I was having trouble with another group of nurses (confirmed) who tried to get me to change my cancer protocol without my doctor’s consent.  With that, I put on my clothes and left the hospital among threats to me and my Oncologist.  They sent to cops to get me at my home.  That was about midnight or later.  A couple hours later I checked back in voluntarily.  All true.

Fast forward to now.  I am on dialysis three days per week and one day for chemotherapy.  My Vascular Surgeon wants to do the seventh surgery for my fistula but I haven’t the time.  He wants to do a one foot long cut to “raise the vein”.  But today I saw that nurse.  I asked her where I had seen her before and she told me. I was mortified.  Words would not persuade her that my motives where otherwise.

That isn’t all!  I haven’t anytime to live.  All of my waking hours are at some healthcare institution, except weekends.  I am 73 and I have wasted away to hanging flesh and bones.  In early 2008 I was competing for a World’s Record lift in the squat for seniors 65 and above.  I had the World’s Record in practice, I was just waiting for a competition to come along when a forest fire burnt our home to the ground.

Well, this all came at the end of a period where I was taking inventory about my life and what was left of it.  I am now going to dialysis and chemo everyday for one or the other, have a surgery scheduled for April and no time for me or anyone else.  So, I insisted on a re-evaluation of my kidney function based upon previous conversations with my Nephrologists; that my kidney function was on the “cusp”, and now that my numbers are better, I want out.  Resistance.  Was that Doctor lying to me?  Does anyone give a shit?  I need to clear out some time for myself.

They will do the testing for my kidneys only because they know I can be hell on wheels.  But I do not like the flavor of what I sense.

So, I am in a very deep black hole.  I am angry.  I do not wish to spread the ill will, so I have been silent for a while.  I will work it out, maybe.  Right now I feeling very negative about life – as in, what’s left of life.  To quote Peggy Lee; “Is that all there is?”

gerald

[MooseMom]

gl, there is no such thing as "spreading ill will" on IHD.  It's important that you feel like you can vent your anger here without risk.  People don't have to read it if they don't want to, but this is no time for you to go silent. 

It's not always easy to know what to do to make yourself feel better.  Sometimes I find it helpful to just keep my mind/body occupied.  But many times, I just have to unload.  It's like having a boil that needs to be lanced.  So I have, on many occasions, come onto IHD and have spilled my guts and ranted and raved, not because I thought anyone could really say anything to make the pain go away, but, rather, because the weight of keeping silent became too much.  I think it is unfair to put the burden or responsibility to remain silent onto the shoulders of anyone who is fighting something like ESRD.

I'm angry, too.  I've been angry for years, and I am not sure the anger will ever pass.  If venting on IHD helps you cope with the anger, then use the board for that purpose.  That's what it is here for.  Does it help you to keep silent, or is silence your enemy?

[Whamo]

Gerald,  I'm sorry to hear you're down in the dumps.  I spent three weeks in the hospital myself this summer without eating and a hose in my mouth.  I tripped pretty hard on the drugs they gave me,too.  But being an old hippie I was able to handle it.  I saw Jesus on the cross, ghosts of black people in mourning, and all kinds of crazy things.  But, after getting on dialysis, I'm feeling pretty good, walking three miles a day.  But this is after four months of adjusting to dialysis, surgery after surgery, test after test, and going through  quarter-million dollars worth of healthcare.  I know my health won't last though, because I've had Hep C for over twenty years.   Today, for example, my off dialysis day, I go in for a C-Scan of my pelvis at 8AM.  But when death comes I don't mind.  It's the way of things.  I'm actually looking forward to traveling to the next dimension. 

[willowtreewren]

Hi, Gerald.

It sounds like a really rotten patch you are going through. 

I wish it could be better. I take a friend to chemo treatments and she is also reeling from how much of her time it takes. I hope for you (and her) that the outcome is better and makes slogging through the days without any personal time worth it.

I understand your anger. It just sucks.

I'm sorry.

Aleta

[Gerald Lively]

It wasn’t the dark clouds that blotted out the Sun that made this a sad weekend; it wasn’t the dialysis that seems to go on hour after hour for no good purpose that made me grumble; no, it wasn’t the chemotherapy although I still have my hair;  it wasn’t that Joan was working on her quilting project and got lost in the sewing room for days leaving me to my lonesome self;  it wasn’t Auggie the Doggie who laid a big one in front of my closet on the floor that brought on this grim mood; no, it wasn’t any of those things at all.

No, something happened that was very much like a death in the family, someone bought my Harley.

[galvo]

Disaster!

[amanda100wilson]

Oh, Gerald.  I am so sorry to hear this.  I know how much it meant to you.  Xxx

[del]

So sad when you have to sell or get rid of something you love. Seems like you lose a part of yourself. 

[boswife]

{ picture of a broken heart here}     
 Im sorry GL...   more hurt
wish i was more upbeat and could say something to make it better
but i wish for something to come to your thoughts to lift ya up about the whole thing..   

[Joe]

Boy Gerald, do I know that feeling! When I sold my Road Glide it was like I'd lost a member of the family. Maybe sometime in the future...

[cariad]

Sorry to hear this, Gerald. I think my husband will feel the same way when he finally sells his little Triumph Spitfire. He has so many memories in that car - we rode all round Britain in it, then had it imported to the States. It is right-hand drive, don't know if that will be a selling point or a liability.

What model of Harley was it? Gwyn has a V-Rod. He will probably have to sell that, too, at a huge loss as well, though it has no where near the sentimental value of the car. It can take a remarkable amount of strength to recognize when it is time to let these objects go.

[plugger]

I've always wanted a Harley.  I haven't been able to talk my wife into being my motorcycle mama though.  I have found the threat of getting a Harley handy however.  In this mid-size Colorado town they do allow people to have chickens - I really don't want chickens, but my wife does.  I told her if she gets chickens, I get a Harley.

[big777bill]

  not the Harley!!

[Gerald Lively]

09 Heritage with 3,500 miles.  Short ape hangers, minimum mufflers , fuel injection to match the exhaust.  Gone. No more taking over small towns, no more terrorizing little old ladies, just Social Security.

[Grumpy-1]

Gl  - read in another post that you are off dialysis.  Why not celebrate and get another one.  I have an 04 soft tail (my first bike) and after doing a BUNCH of work on it, the engine blew up.  I can't stand to sell it, and hoping to fix it.  BUT I turned around and bought a 07 Ultra Classic from my good friend.  It has been said a number of times about Harleys "if you have to ask, you wouldn't understand any way."   Now that summer is just round the corner here in Virginia, I can't wait to get out in the wind again. 

GL - just go get another Harley..... 

[willowtreewren]

OH......

NOW I understand.....

 

Of course that feels heart-wrenching. 

But now on to other adventures perhaps? ? ? ?

 

Aleta

[Gerald Lively]

Growing old is tough business, especially if you have been active most of your life.  I’m not especially sociable; reading, computer and genealogy research can occupy my available time.  Yet, the strange people who inhabit our planet do come by and ask the same question, “How are you?”

How am I?  Yes, how am I?  Uh, sick.  Inveriably they will ask what sort of sick are you?  Tell ‘em you have cancer then sprinkle mythical germs on them with your fingers.  They will go away.

I managed to get off dialysis.  I have had that experience, now I am on a new adventure.  What does a 73 years old do in retirement?  I have either been sitting in a chair or laying in a bed.  All of that carefully crafted muscle tissue has wasted away.  Maybe it saved me.  Don’t know.  So, I do free standing squats at least once a day (20)  and 20 half pushup. 

Boring huh? 

[willowtreewren]

The reading, computer and genealogy research doesn't sound TOO boring. And you do some lovely writing.

I'm looking forward to retirement.... but I don't really know for sure what it will be like. We will be moving from warm Tennessee to cold Massachusetts, down-sizing into a living space half the size of what we now have. Hopefully we will be able to travel more.

But the wound of reading, and doing computer things sounds rather enticing.    To be honest, I feel somewhat tired of the long hours of work. Don't we earn the right to relax more?

 

Aleta