I Have a New Birthday
I lost my best friend, Aaron, in a motorcycle accident two days before Christmas in 2000.
Heck of a way to start an inspirational story, huh? Trust me...read on...
This was the first time I had ever lost anyone so close. It undermined my bulletproof outlook on life. I began to take a closer look at my life and started to get back in touch with people I alienated for stupid reasons. I started with Noelle, my ex girlfriend of 7 years.
So...One night she gets this call and doesn't know what to think of it. Seven years of ostracizing and no amicable contact and now call from me to say "Hi"? She was receptive to this and over the next few weeks we talked, went to the movies, had many dinners and got re-acquainted. We agreed that having our friendship was a good thing, but NO No no...we weren't dating...who were we kidding?
Everything that Noelle and I had gone through seven years prior reinforced our friendship. She invited me to a Barenaked Ladies concert. When they started playing "Call and Answer" Noelle leaned over on the packing blanket I brought to spread out on the grass, took my hand, squeezed it and said, "This is us".
Key Lyrics -> "...and if you should court this disaster, I'll point you home"
And -> "I'm warning you, Don't ever do
Those crazy messed up things that you do
If you ever do I promise you, I'll be the first to crucify you
Now it's time to prove That you've come back here to rebuild"
These lyrics typify the both of us up to that point and let's face it, I DID come back to rebuild. All our trials, mistakes, foibles, heartaches, victories, mundane acts, all combined with the string of events that lead the two of us inexorably back together ...we honestly thought the fates were telling us something that night and if we didn't listen... well... On October 14th 2000, we picked up where we left off seven years earlier on that fateful Halloween night; only this time, we were 7 years wiser. You'd think this is where a story like this ends, but this is where it begins.
The year was 2001 -- I was working in the game industry making more money that anyone should make playing games for a living. No really. By today's standards, I was getting "stupid-rich" and doing it 126 miles from my house, which was a five-hour round trip commute. I loved everything about my life at that point in time.
Great job, renewed love and we were both financially stable!
Noelle lived close to my job and we decided to move me into her place.
It was about this time that I
stopped peeing. Period.
At the hospital the doctor found my blood pressure to be 215 over 195. These are freeway designators
not Systolic and Diastolic stats! He told me to never mind packing a bag, but to check into the nearest hospital
NOW.
The next morning, at the hospital, I was diagnosed with ESRD and my kidneys were at 13% functionality. Noelle didn't know anything about this as she was in Maui for Christmas. Must be rough, right? Not as rough as getting this message;
"Lewis called, something about him being in the hospital and kidney failure..."
"Rough" was her flight back which was, wrought with worry, stress, sorrow, and panic. I went on CAPD dialysis and had the "shunt" operation. I had a section of tubing placed through my gut and into my peritoneum. In ten days I could use it. On day 8, at 2:14 AM, my kidneys just plain gave up.
One of the paramedics who carted my incoherent self out of my apartment looked like my deceased friend Aaron mentioned earlier -- I thought I was a goner, seeing recently deceased friends and all.
Laying in the ambulance the only thing I could hear was the white noise of blood rushing through my ears...and pain. The raw fact of the matter was that I was about to die. Then the ironically-appropo-Aaron-look-alike-Paramedic wrestled my arm to stillness and administered an I.V. and uttered the only words I can remember during that whole 600-dollar ambulance ride;
"...do you want Morphine?"
Duh.
Noelle was right there through it all, (well, driving madly behind the ambulance at first, anyway), but she kept watch over me in the emergency ward where an orderly casually strolled up to the wall-basket by my door and flipped the first page on my chart only to exclaim "...wow, you trying to set a record or something?" My creatinine level was 24.6 -- yep -- the kidneys were finished striking at this point...they just dropped the picket signs, burned them and disappeared into oblivion.
That night, each time I started to fall asleep, my body would convulse violently, stirring me to a painful consciousness each time, and right when I thought it was over, the uncontrollable hiccups -- these hurt more than the spasms. This went on for hours into the morning and Noelle didn't get any sleep until my blood stabilized enough and I drifted off to sleep. She eventually had to head home for sleep herself, but one of the tires on her car went flat in the parking lot. Not a good end to a bad day -- well at this point not a good start to a new day.
The following day, I woke to the sound of a bag of corn chips being eaten. I smelled it first. Cool Ranch Doritos. I weakly managed to say, "Awwww... I can smell that..."
For Noelle these words of longing for chips were a godsend. It meant two things,
-
I had an appetite again, for which I got three chips -- the best tasting things in the world at that point...
and
- I was past the blood poisoning.
I was released from the hospital and when I returned to my office the following Monday I was expecting to tell everyone about my weekend, knowing for SURE that I'd trump EVERYONE! But instead, I was promptly laid off along with 287 other poor souls. Oh, did I mention that my apartment was packed and almost ready to move This was a challenging prospect when my body was assigned a 15-pound lifting limit.
Two months later, after getting mostly settled-in with all the Baxter Supplies for my CAPD, Noelle promptly got laid off too...perfect, just perfect.
With both of us out of work we were barely squeaking by in the twist of irony that placed, of all people,
ME -- the medically disabled worker -- squarely into the role of "
breadwinner" tapping from a stipend of "life insurance" and state disability checks. To make matters worse, the "life insurance" company retroactively denied my claim, attempting to claim that diagnosis does not equal disability. They terminated my payments and demanded all their money back...
We won that lawsuit and lived off that settlement for one year.
"If we can get through this we can get through
ANY-thing". This is something Noelle would say on those occasions when; I got cruddy news from the Dialysis clinic or on those occasions where everyone got to eat cheese, potatoes and chocolate but me, (I was a habitual snacker), or when we'd find ourselves shouting at each other for very stupid reasons, (like "why did you hide the batteries?") because of the stress of the situation -- usually we'd wind up in tears holding each other for dear life...literally...and then that phrase invariably turned into "Everything's going to be alright" and "We'll get through this".
Noelle is truly my better half and I don't' know what I'd do without her...Die I suppose. There is no question in my mind as to what real love is. It's having a woman in your life that without hesitation makes the decision to be a living tissue donor. She unhesitatingly did this after my first "serious" stay in the hospital, and then selflessly committed to take all the tests that involved needles. Noelle has an inherent fear of hospitals, needles and surgery making her gift of life even that more meaningful.
May the 9th, 2002, Noelle and I, (together with our teddy bears "Kirby" and "Winston"), were wheeled down the same hallway to go under the knife.
Most people exchange rings for an engagement. We have matching scars. We were married on June 21st, 2003 in a ceremony that reunited her Kidney back to her by legal proxy!
Noelle is my living donor -- my lifeline -- my anchor -- and my rock and we take every chance we can to appreciate the little things, take walks, and laugh at each other and ourselves for having "courted this disaster". In January we are taking a cruise to celebrate our life together -- kind of a honeymoon because the one we took in Vegas was just too freaky-hot.
I shall remain forever grateful for meeting her on the street in front of our old dance club on Halloween night, 1993. "What's that?" you say? A Night Club?
Click here to see the rest of the story.
