The Cycle of Life

I was leaving for work this morning, and just caught a glimpse of something on the roadway behind me. A well-fed, cared for gray cat lay dead in the middle of the road.

I ran back to Mechanic Man and said - "There's a gray cat in the road - I think it's Chowder." Chowder is the kitty next door that stands in our yard and stares at us, never letting us get too close, just close enough to almost pet him, and he darts away. I've been trying for years to coax him into letting me pet him - but he's convinced that I will only maul him instead. Probably this is true.

We went back and looked, not closely, but enough. I turned away towards my car and started bawling! Chowder - who never let me pet him. It broke my heart.

About a mile down the road, Mechanic Man called and said the neighbors had both their cats: Chowder and Jasmine, alive and healthy and sleeping on the couch.

"O, good!" I said, still crying. "So I cried for some strange cat." (sob)

Mechanic Man paused and finally said, "Well, yeah - that was a kind thing for you to do, for the cat whose owner doesn't know."

So I cried some more for a pet that someone has lost, like once happened to me - and I always wondered what happened to her. Maybe somebody cried for her, in my place.
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I'm Coming Back

I’m coming back around – slowly. Now that I have made the step to actually go on dialysis, the fear and dread has gone away. It’s really not a big deal! I get up, brush my teeth, get dressed, go to work, head out to dialysis, get hooked up, sit still for three and a half hours (and THAT is the hardest thing I have to do), go home, fix dinner, watch tv with Mechanic Man, and feel better than I have in months. I’m not up to snuff yet – and have had a couple set backs, because I was seriously being poisoned by toxins. It will take a while to get that all out.

In the mean time, my dialysis clinic is setting up dialysis for me in Orlando next week. By then I should feel much more perky and will enjoy the sights and sounds of Disney World and Epcot.

The gals I am traveling with have been watching over me like hawks. I get sporadic telephone calls from one or all four of them, asking me how I’m feeling today, if I’ve packed for our trip, if the dialysis is working. Just now received the second call from Kathy. We have a mutual friend who lives outside of Orlando – Art is close to all the other gals having met them at Alcoholics Anonymous for Spouses. They bonded, started skiing together, becoming deep confidants of all things weird with being single parents, dating, marrying, divorcing – Art and the girls stuck with each other through thick and thin. He will drive me to my dialysis appointments. Hallelujah! One less detail to worry about.

So – see – this just isn’t a bad thing at all.

Going down the drain

Welcome to DialysisLand, best described as a room full of people needing to have their blood washed and toxins removed, all in a sterile setting with the humming of machines, swooshing of nurses (who call themselves techs), and the background sound of water whirling down the drains, washing those bad toxins into the sewer system.

We patients are simply required to sit still for three and a half hours or longer, while all this scientific wonderland of activity drills past us, ticking, ticking the time down to when we get “unplugged”.

It starts with us getting “plugged in.” The tech and her co-workers go through a flurry of sanitation procedures, putting on gloves for one thing, whipping them off, putting on a new set for the next step of exposing my “access site” (direct line to my heart for all my frenemies’ handy knowledge), masks go on (on me too), something is fiddled with, gloves go off, new set goes on, more fiddling, as I divert my gaze to something benign, like the ceiling lights (because if I take my gaze anywhere else, I see other people, other machines, other techs, gloves going off, going on). So I look at the ceiling lights, while Heparin is flushed in my two access sites, then blood is drawn for lab work (first time EVER that I’m not poked), and finally my lines protruding from my access site are snapped onto lines going into the dialysis machine and the wheels start turning, my blood effortlessly leaves my body to go on its own little cruise, taking with it excess fluids, nasty toxins, and anything else I could do without.

After your “run time” is done, the tech does a reverse of the sanitation process, not as many gloves, but still the flurry of fingers, clicking through different tubes and connections, until finally you are officially unplugged. And after all that medically miraculous activity, you simply walk out the door to your car, stop at the store for groceries, and go home, as if you just spent the afternoon sitting at a spa getting your nails done.

So it isn’t all that traumatic and awful, really. I’ve dreaded this day, the official first dialysis. It does have a major impact in my life – for the rest of my life. There is a loss I can’t quite explain. And I have these two tubes hanging from my chest, making me feel very much like a Borg. And the image is only reinforced when I get hooked up. I half expected the 16 of us in the room to universally commune as one. But there is also the feeling that it is us, the Nouveau Borgs, who are being assimilated.

For days now, I have been, you know, sitting back, trying to mind my own business and not dwell on this dialysis thing. Trying to just make my life as normal as possible, cleaning the house, going to work, reading a book, watching a favorite TV show. When something innocuous will happen – the plot will turn just a bit to something sad – just a little – and I’ll sit there and tears will well up and I think, o boy, if I start crying right now, I will not ever stop. Today, at lunch, I went home and scrounged around for cold weather clothes for our bi-annual trek to Monroe, Washington and car parts heaven for Mechanic Man. I’d turned on the TV to a movie I love – Little Women – and it was right at that moment when Beth discovers that the Hummel baby just died of Scarlet Fever and she thinks she has it. WAAAAAAAAA, the tears flowed, I couldn’t stop, I cried and cried and cried.

Ok, I feel better now.
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Contained or Uncontained

As I idle my time, these days, I tend to live by the Scanner Report, a report that spawns infinite “stories” out of real life situations. Soon, the report will change, like the seasons – our unique population of contained or uncontained animals will go into hibernation. I am assuming that is what contained or uncontained species do when it is too cold to wander about garnering reports from citizens of their uncontained locations. (So I always wonder about the “uncontained” whatever INSIDE a fenced yard.) I don’t know if it is indicative of the Pacific Northwest, to have so many uncontained reports. But it’s entertaining nonetheless.

There are uncontained goats – by far my favorite. Uncontained horses. Uncontained dogs. Uncontained chickens. Even uncontained cows – which makes you wonder if being uncontained has anything to do with being contented or not – you know how cows are. They are contented cows. Always. So – if you are an uncontented cow, then do you wander out the gate in search of your aspirations and dreams and then you unwittingly become lost in some strangers’ backyard and are now adjudged uncontained? An uncontained uncontent cow. How utterly sad.

You actually don’t read about “contained” animals much. Why would that make the news. And you never ever read about uncontained cats. That would be a fete of insurmountable proportions, don’t you think? Or rather, can you contain a cat? I don’t think so. Those cats you see in windows peering out at the life running by their view – they aren’t being held prisoner on that ledge behind the curtain. They are supreme beings who snicker at those poor lost animals wandering the avenues until some neighborhood nosey old lady calls the police to report they are uncontained in her yard. One day it’s a goat. Another day it’s a dog. Another day it’s a cow. And the contained cat just flicks his paw and changes direction of his contemplative musings.

Soon, as all the various uncontained animals find their secret hiding places for winter, I’ll have to focus on other aspects of the Scanner Report. Like “unwanted woman in short skirt in parking lot.” And then I wonder how pertinent is the short skirt as a factor in being unwanted. Would you want the woman if she wore long slacks?
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The Kidneys Lost

Just to let you all know. I am officially going on dialysis tomorrow. Woo Hoo! Let’s Party – meet me on the 5th floor and we can all watch the set up.

I have chosen peritoneal dialysis as my choice – which can be done at home. For about two months, though, I will have hemo dialysis until my new little appendage is healed and in place.

The good news for me – well of course feeling tons better is that they are arranging for dialysis for me at Disneyworld in the middle of October. My four friends and I have saved for five years for this trip. I was beginning to think that I would lose out on a great trip. (The dialysis center there caters to Mickey maniacs like me.)

Thanks for all your prayers and hugs and good thoughts!!!!

Jeanie

Must be Love

I was so ticked at my brother-in-law when he announced he was getting counseling because of my sister’s kidney disease, subsequent surgeries, and her transplant. I was flabbergasted that he would need counseling for something not happening to him. I wanted to scream at him, “but it’s US, it’s US that have this disease. Not you! How dare you!” That was ten years ago.

Then last night I saw through Mechanic Man’s eyes and I kind of got knocked in the head with the realization that what I am going through is impacting him as well. I get support from readers like you; friends in two groups – my diner’s group of friends, and the friends I have made in the Red Hats, and lately, especially, my friends through Huckleberries and Community Comment. But Mechanic Man has no support group, other than me.

Last night we were discussing my various options, all of which are the Lessor of another Evil, just can’t decide which is the least Evil. He’s petty mellow, Mechanic Man. But his eyes grew darker and more brooding. “I’m so mad!” he said. “It makes me so mad! I feel like someone is pinching my head till it pops!” And he wasn’t mad at me. He was mad at what was happening to me. He was mad because he couldn’t fix it.

And then I understood what my brother-in-law was going through.

So this is love.
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My Kidneys and Me

Big Bully Kidneys
or
Kidneys R Us
or
Kidneys Rule

You didn’t ask but after talking with friends, I thought it would be a good idea to give you a basic easy-to-understand synopsis of kidney dialysis. First, though, you should probably prop your head up on something in case you fall asleep or go unconscious or into a coma or something. Prepare to snooze.

I am having to research my plight and decide which is the lessor of several evils.

Did you know that people whose kidneys are failing are experiencing the medical term: End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD). Sounds innocuous enough, doesn’t it. But wait! It says “End Stage” as in - death is knocking at your door, big guy. When your kidneys fail, you need to find some alternative to just sitting back and letting nature take its course – because nature is done with you. Those two little organs (well, in my case not so little) have powers you wouldn’t imagine. Like creating red blood cells. Boosting your energy. Filtering waste. I’m very close to having no kidney function at all. I lay awake wondering what will be the tell tale sign that THIS is it; this is the big one; this is all she wrote, kid. Will I gradually just stop peeing??? Will my guts suddenly clench like a thirsty man in the middle of a desert with absolutely not a drop of water anywhere? Will I just not wake up? What??

So – I am researching the different methods of dialysis. First – you should know that there are two types of dialysis – hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis. One is through your blood – one is in your peritoneal cavity between the membrane surrounding all your organs and your skin.

There are pluses and minuses on both. So, here’s my take. With hemodialysis, you have to have a fistula prepared, which is a surgically constructed vein utilizing your own vein and it is permanent – usually in your arm. In my Dad’s case, his fistula always needed “roto rootering” or it was relocated entirely to a new site – and there are limited sites. Dad ran out of sites. Also, with hemodialysis, you get two needle sticks every time you have dialysis, three days a week. Plus, getting a shot of epogyn for your anemia (which requires a monthly blood draw). It’s just poke, poke, poke, poke.

Ummmm, that looked like a whole lot of negatives. The plus, if there is one, is that you don’t do a thing. You just go to the dialysis center and nurses and techs will be happy to poke you two or three times; ignore you if the alarms go off until your neighboring dialysis victims start really complaining; stick you AGAIN with something to deaden the pain, but not quite, and then stick you for the start of dialysis, and then for good measure repeat the whole process when you end dialysis.

With peritoneal dialysis – you have to have a tube surgically inserted in your belly, with two little bumps that act as stops so the tube will stay in place – and eventually scar tissue will form around the little bumps and seal the deal. Viola! Your newest body appendage. Yippee. The plus with peritoneal dialysis is that you can do it at home. You can take it with you and do it on trips. At work. Anywhere your little heart desires. The drawback is that you feel pregnant. You have all this dialycate (the solution used to filter your blood) and your peritoneal cavity stores it until you replace it. You feel “stretched.” The documentation also warns that you will have to deal with your “feelings about your body image.” You will look FAT. I’m short enough that I will look very round. Just give me a shove in the general direction, and I’ll just roll there. I already have issues with my body image. Sheesh. And while I’m filling up with dialycate, my kidneys are casually increasing in size all on their own. It’s like girl friends pointed out to me – wouldn’t it be nice if your kidneys were located in your boobs? Mechanic Man would probably think he died and went to Heaven.

So – either of these is a difficult choice to make. One, hemo, offers me every other day off. But at the cost of hours every other day on dialysis, plus working a full time job (because kidney patients are not considered disabled), so I go to work at 8:00, get off at 5:00, go to dialysis at 5:30, leave at 9:00 and somewhere in there I will have a normal life with Mechanic Man. Right?

Or – I can do peritoneal and have my very own recycler machine humming away at night, connected to me through my new little belly button appendage, and when I need to get up at 3:00 in the morning because I can’t sleep, I go through the 30 minute process of closing off my tube, shutting down the machine – all while sleeping romantically cuddled next to Mechanic Man.

Ugh. And all the while I am thinking – ok, now, this should be like brushing your teeth – just a mundane, routine, dull ritual. But – this is the kicker – this will be my way of life for the rest of my life or until I get a transplant.

I’m leaning toward the peritoneal dialysis. Less burden on Mechanic Man, more ME time. So, what do you think?

By the way – I have A negative blood type. Just saying.
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Kids - Life's Lessons

I noticed this on a recent scanner report at Huckleberries: 2:04 p.m. A 3-4YO is locked in a car in the Wal*Mart lot.

Now, I wonder how fully capable a three or four-year-old is in UNLOCKING a door. It reminded me of a time when my children were three and four years old, in my new apartment building, while I lived next door to my landlord, who happened to be a police officer who worked graveyards and it was his morning to sleep in. It started with me quietly going next door to the building’s laundry room and moving my clothes over to the dryer. I returned to my door, right next to Policeman Bill’s door, to find MY door locked. I didn’t lock it. My three-year-old locked it and then sat on the floor next to the locked door giggling that Mommy couldn’t get in. I whispered through the crack, “Timmy, let Mommy in.”

Nothing.

“Timmy, please unlock the door and let Mommy in.” I continued this low talking for about ten minutes. I so did not want to wake Policeman Bill next door.

Nothing.

I tried just a little bit louder. “Timmy, open the door.”

Nothing.

I hemmed and hawed and wondered if I should just go around back and break in to my own apartment, when the neighbor’s door opened and out stepped Bill, in his pj’s (I guess that was a good thing), and the master key. He opened my door and stepped in and looked at Timmy and said, “Next time you do this, it’s the jailhouse for you, kid.”

Well, it worked. I mean, my son never locked me out of the house again. Later when he was 6 and running his Big Wheel out into the road between cars, the same policeman (who became a good friend along with his wife), came over in uniform and made a dramatic little show about dropping an egg on the sidewalk and explaining that the egg was Tim on his Big Wheel getting squashed by a car.

That worked, too.

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Saturday Night at the Races!

Saturday night at the races. Yep, that’s what I did. I spent Saturday at the Spokane Racetrack and watched several drag races with lots of Mopars, funny cars, nitro cars, alcohol cars, and one jet car.

It’s totally exciting and heart thrumming. You can feel the engines all the way through the cement bleachers to the top row, which is where I sat from noon to midnight. Twelve hours of muscle cars! Hours of hearing-loss thundering engines, burning rubber, pungent smells of gas, nitro, fuel – smoke filling the air. What a day!

And you ain’t seen nothing until you see a jet car. It’s almost frightening in a kid-in-a-cemetery-on-Halloween-night kind of way. You can’t get enough and you want to hide and you want to get really close and you want to duck, all at the same time. It sounds like a jet is standing right in front of you, powering up. The whine is powerful and mesmerizing. And once it has your attention fully focused on it, it BANGS with flames spewing out. Even the ambulance that is waiting by, backs up 100 feet away from the jet car. It bangs and pops and whines and slowly inches to the lights and then, WHAM, it screams off in front of you and goes 290 miles an hour, RIGHT.NOW. Amazing!!!! It’s a wonder it doesn’t fly.

I think I’m addicted. It’s the most awesome, exciting thing I’ve seen in forever. Can you imagine 290 miles an hour – and it was mere seconds to go a quarter of a mile.

Then we went back to piddly little race cars that went a pokey 100 miles an hour. Kid’s stuff.

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Tea and Sympathy

I’ve had two occasions this week to partake in “high tea” at the same place. One was sweet and the other will be bittersweet.

I’m struggling here. I have had several ups and downs this week, more downs than ups.

I met with my Red Hat sisters at a high tea in Spokane at the “Taste and See Tea Room.” (See their website.)

(Cindy Hval writes about it here.)

Tonight, there will be 25 women, all co-workers, attending high tea to celebrate one of our own – who is losing her fight with colon cancer. She has been part of this place, a family away from home, for almost 29 years, starting when she was 29 years old. Half her life.

In the middle of all of this, I am facing more tests for a transplant and the likelihood that I will NOT be a candidate. What I am feeling and dealing with is so short of what my co-worker is going through, not even comparable. But I’m still feeling it.

I am experiencing an overwhelming sadness – for things lost, friends slipping away, time moving on and not, damn it, standing still.

Tonight we are gathering in all our finery, hats, jewels, gloves to honor and celebrate the life of our friend. We are helpless in what to say and can only say – we love you. I love you.
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To School We Go, Giggidty Gig

I just passed a co-worker who is leaving early to plan for Back to School Shopping for the Kids.

I remember those days. For my parents, it had to be pretty bad – four kids, 6, 8, 10, and 12 – shopping for clothes. I could almost hear my Dad’s wallet squeak painfully.

Then with my boys – we combined our visit to the grandparents on the coast with school clothes shopping. Partly because my Dad by this time had a fuller wallet and he would “help” me buy clothes and shoes.

For many years, the boys were the same size and it made it pretty easy to shop. I had convinced them by the time they were in 1st and 2nd grade that everyone, all siblings, all over the world, wore each other’s clothes. There were no personal, this-is-mine clothes, except for shoes. Everything got washed together. Everything got folded together. Everything got worn together. I suppose that is why, when one day we were frantically tearing their bedroom apart looking for matching socks, that they finally gave up and wore mismatching socks. Both boys were wearing one brown sock and one green sock.

And boys are SOOO much easier than girls. I had only one incident (at Walmart) that both boys were stubbornly adamant that they would NOT be caught dead in jeans with yellow thread (I think they were Wranglers). It was “lame” and they weren’t going to do it. They’d go to school naked if I bought jeans with yellow thread.

So – here’s my sympathy to all you parents going shopping this weekend for school clothes.

But – look at it this way – it also means that you are going to be FREE during the day for the next nine months. Hallelujah!

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Mooseknuckle and Huckleberries

I spent summers on the Oregon coast when I was little. Such memories!

My grandparents started building their home on the beach in 1955. Several great aunts and great uncles lived on the tiny lumber road that twisted and turned up a very steep hill to the top of our very own “personal mountain.” On top sat a little two story cabin, one room on the main floor for a kitchen table and a huge monstrous wood burning stove, one long room upstairs with several beds – enough to sleep my family of six and my mother’s brother’s family of four, AND our grandparents.

The cabin was called Mooseknuckle. So was the Mountain. We have no idea where this name came from, other than my grandfather (Gramps) was a teller of tall tales and his imagination knew no bounds. He would tell us stories that would make our eyes bulge out and we would go to bed totally unable to sleep with all the excited thoughts running around in our heads.

Once upon a time, there was a logger on the Mountain and there was Indian Joe. Indian Joe was like Goliath in the Bible and the logger was like David. Indian Joe was a bully and mean and ugly and terrorized the poor wee logger. But one day the logger grabbed Indian Joe by his little finger and hauled him over his shoulder and off he flew, off the Mountain, while the logger yelled, MOOSEKNUCKLE!, something he yelled whenever he felled a tree. It worked for the trees, so it must work for Indian Joe.

My grandmother was equally adventurous and we would walk everywhere – up the Mountain; up the highway to an old fashioned hamburger joint that served the absolutely best hamburgers I have ever tasted in my whole life; across the fields to the ocean, telling us to watch out for “cow pies;” up the wider logging road south of the cabin, where we picked gobs of wild strawberries or huckleberries and feasted on short cake for dinner. Wherever we went, we would sign a song she taught us in one lazy afternoon.

Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wouldn't you?
Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wouldn't you?

I sang this song exactly as she taught us and it was years before I realized I wasn’t singing la-de-da gibberish. It was actually real words. (Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy, a kid will eat ivy too, wouldn’t you?)

Such sweet memories of grandparents as they should be.
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Quail run

We have one of the last barns standing in the Spokane Valley (just west of Millwood) and a field that lays beside it, which is mowed about once a month just to keep it from getting wild looking. But a little wild is a good thing. There is a family of quail that live in the field, by one of the trees that Mechanic Man has to mow around. He’s very careful in his efforts because the Quail Family will roust itself up and away from the tree and scatter to another corner of the field, while he passes by, Mama, Papa, and several babies. When he would get far enough away from the home ground, the Quails would lift their heads up, and scurry across the grass back to their “home.” This would go on every time he circled – getting further away from them to the point they figured he was finally over his rampaging of their homeland.

That was in the spring time. Mr. and Mrs. Quail raised their little ones, sent them off into the world, and this weekend we chanced upon them crossing our road and scurrying past our car and into the field and to the same home tree. This time with half a dozen NEW little ones, all little puff balls, flitting to and from among the blades of grass. So they have had two sets of families this summer, which means our little space for them is quite perfect.
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Over Thinking

Don’t you just feel like Winnie the Pooh sometimes? I go around mumbling to myself, “Think. Think. Think.” And then I realize that I’m thinking too much and overanalyzing something that should be very simple.

Like some recipes. I was making my first batch of cinnamon rolls from scratch. Everything went perfectly until the recipe said “place cut side down.” I had my dough rolled up and I had sliced the roll into one-inch pieces and all the pieces were standing up side by side waiting for further instructions. And now it said “place cut side down.” And I thought and thought and thought. I pondered the book from a distance, hands on hips, wondering why they would put this particular instruction in and that I must be missing something. Something really important. I decided that the book was trying to talk to some moron idiot simple-minded twit that didn’t know a cut side down from a cut side up. I’m looking at the roll of pinwheels thinking (because of that silly instruction, that was put in there for SOME good reason, surely) that there must be a “right side” and a “left side” and they want one of those sides down. But which one? It was way too much thinking. The idiot is the person who puts the pinwheel standing up in the pan, hoping that by some miracle it will flip itself on the flat side (either side will do) of the pinwheel. Good grief!!!! In fact, the idiot was the author. How ELSE would you put a cinnamon roll in the pan??? I ask you?

Or those tags on pillows and mattresses that say something like “under penalty of law do not remove this label.” I used to ponder that one too when I was little and sent to my room for my naps because I was tired. This commandment was said by my mother who promptly fell asleep on the couch totally exhausted after I don’t know what while I was still burning with energy after beating pans all morning long, and then finding Mom’s matches and lighting them one by one and dropping them in the dog food to see if the dog food would catch fire. How tiring is THAT? So I’d go to my room and contemplate the tags on my pillow and then after further scrutiny and research would find the same tag on my mattress and I had to really work to rip that tag off to see what a penalty of law was.

I’m still waiting.

And then there’s the form from the State whose first question was: Can you read this? (with a Yes or No box)

How do you answer that?

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The Piano and the Exes

My parents gave me a piano when I was 11 years old. Yeah. Wow. I mean, it was a HUGE deal to me. And kind of a heavy burden to bear. It meant I felt like I should practice way more and really study at my lessons in order to “earn” the right to have a whole piano to myself. Oh, I shared it with my brothers and sister – and lessons were paid for all around, but I was the only one who continued with it.

So, when I was divorced, my parents helped me move and in one of the truck loads to my new apartment was “the piano.”

I loved that piano. I would play on it for hours. When I was growing up, I would play on it for an hour before school, again after school for several hours. I played and played and played. Actually the reason I did this was, one, well, I enjoyed it, but two, after a meltdown in college where I majored in music, I had to perform in front of a panel of four judges and I suddenly could NOT remember a note of music and had to slither back out to the hallway and gather up all my music books and bring them back to the studio piano and play by reading the music instead of by memory. Ever since, I have not been able to memorize music and have to have it in front of me all the time. I would play a piece over and over, and eventually I would play by memory but only if I had the sheet music right in front of me – just in case.

I had several moments while being a single mother that I just did not have one dime to spare for food or for the light bill. I would scrounge in the cupboards until they were bare. And one day I spiraled down to desperation and I sold my piano for $400 to my piano tuner. $400.

I left the house the day they picked up the piano. I couldn’t bear to watch it leave. It was winter and snow was on the ground. I remember coming home and seeing the tracks of the people who slid it down the sidewalk to their moving van. I cried for a week.

Months went by, holidays went by, a couple boy friends went by, and then one day an ex-boyfriend called, knowing how I felt about my piano, and said he had a friend (the girlfriend before me) who needed to store her piano for a couple years until she got settled. If I could get another set of muscles and a truck, he would help me get the piano. And it just happened that my boys’ Dad was in town and he offered to help.

So, I’m driving my car behind the truck being driven by my ex-boyfriend, carrying his ex-girlfriend’s piano in the back, with my ex-husband bracing it along the way. There’s a moral here, I just can’t quite peg it.

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Attitude Schmattitude

It really is all in the attitude. How you look at things reflects back to you and “becomes.” It’s like what The Secret tells you – that you attract what you think about.

See, I’ve been going through a whole lot of soul searching and introspection about my progressing illness with kidney disease.

Now – I am a strong believer in positive thinking and in the tenants of The Secret. But then I get all muddled up with 1) thinking positive thoughts and 2) being realistic about what is happening to me. So – if I think about my kidney disease and my failing kidneys and start visualizing me on dialysis and then go further into the type of dialysis (tube in stomach, solution feeds through at night for eight hours) or (surgically installed fistula (extra strong vein) in my arm and going to a center every other day for four hours a day), then according to The Secret I will fulfill my “wish” and be on one of those two types of dialysis.

If I DON’T think about that and visualize me staying fit and healthy just like I am now on less than 10% kidney function (which is hardly noticeable at all!), then am I sticking my head in the sand and not being realistic???

I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. Oh, what to do, what to do, what to do.

I’ve got little tapes in my head of Dad’s experience on dialysis (horrible at best), Mom’s viewpoint of Dad’s dialysis (worse than horrible and probably why it WAS horrible), my sister’s experience of passing on dialysis and going directly into a living donor kidney (not great experience if you count the bi-monthly trips to the hospital because of this infection and that infection, losing her house because she couldn’t afford the anti-rejection drugs after the three-year Medicare period was done for), and then my brother’s experience of both dialysis and cadaver kidney transplant (both successful – the dialysis being an annoying inconvenience and dealing with impersonal stoic staff and the continuous, never-ending, always going on, needles.

I’ve been playing these tapes over and over repeatedly (too much) in the last six weeks. I have dreaded dialysis because of my Dad’s experience and I’ve worried about a kidney transplant because of my sister’s experience.

Then I spent the day with my brother on Sunday. What a difference a positive person makes!!

It’s in the attitude. Always. It goes back to that very simple concept – attitude. As my sister-in-law said, dialysis is just another little thing you do in your life, like getting up, brushing your teeth, eating breakfast, hooking up to dialysis, going to work, relaxing and watching TV. It just slips in there and becomes a routine deal. For sure, not a small deal but not a BIG deal either. And one day, you will get “the call” and a new kidney and it will be a perfect match because I’m way more like my brother than I am like my Dad or my sister. And I especially am not like my mother, who seemed to drill into all of us the doom and gloom and death-to-all attitude.

I can do this. I just have to burn those tapes.

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Disgusting Bugs

I am just not a bug person. I know, I know – every living creature has their place and purpose. And spiders should be placed outside where they came from. But there are a couple bugs that defy all logic. What are they good for, anyway??? Tell me what good a mosquito is. Give me ten good reasons why I shouldn’t try to wipe them off the face of the earth.

And earwigs. Earwigs are the scourge of the earth. Did you know that they lay 100 eggs at a time? They take only two weeks to incubate and about a week to mature. I’m surprised they don’t cover the earth from end to end.

Who named them earwigs? It’s a horrible name. I spent many years as a child, terrified that they would find my ears and crawl inside and hibernate and lay eggs (100) and then frolic and cavort inside my brain until I was totally insane. The bug version of mad cow.

I have a covey of earwigs in my lettuce. Not just a covey – a planet, a solar system, a whole universe of earwigs hiding in the dark places of lettuce leaves. I told MechanicMan that I will Not Ever Bring THAT Lettuce Inside The House. Ever. He finally pulled them up and threw them away. And then later told me he spent about an hour killing earwigs that followed him into the house. Rampaging earwigs out for revenge for the screaming deaths of their children, cousins, aunts, uncles, great grandparents. Later I was getting something out of the fridge and there on the front panel of the fridge was an earwig. Totally absolutely grossed me out and I called to MechanicMan to rescue me. We both got back to the fridge and the villainous earwig had vanished. Where did it go???

So, tell me – in the Biblical sense – is there any thing good about mosquitoes and earwigs? Do they make a beneficial difference by their existence. I think not.

Worms are good for bait. Lady bugs are pretty little creatures that clean the earth of aphids. Who cleans the world of mosquitoes and earwigs?

You should be very pleased (and relieved) that I didn't put up the picture I found of an earwig - actually two earwigs, one female and the other male. Be glad. Be very glad.

Well, there’s my thought for this Wednesday. I’ll ponder it awhile.

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Ten Sucks

I started the week out so well, with my Ten Things About Monday

And then Tuesday came and I thought I would do Ten things About Tuesday, but the first thing I did was see the Kidney Transplant Center in the morning and that kind of got me stuck on the number “ten.”

So, Ten Things Tuesday went like this:

Ten – the number of my blood count, which has improved from 7, but would be best at 12

Ten – the percentage of my kidney function.

Ten – the length in inches of my kidneys. Yeah – read that again. Ten inches. Let’s see. I’m 5’2” tall; that’s just under 1/6th of my entire body.

You know what? I really don’t like the number ten. It’s too blunt and short. Its numeric form is a silly dinky “one” followed by a zipless “zero”. 10. Nope don’t like 10.

I think I’m not going to do 10 list items anymore.

For more on this delirious subject, http://www.spokesman.com/blogs/commcomm/2009/jul/30/calling-all-organ-donors/
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Ten Things About Monday

1. You get to start over in the work week and fix last week’s goofs.
2. On the other hand, your building’s air conditioner was turned off all weekend, and Monday is going to be hot, hot, hot.
3. There is no filing to do because you did it Friday (for those who know me, please don’t faint)
4. It is a doubly good Monday if your boss did NOT come in over the weekend; otherwise you can’t find your desk for all the piles he cleared from HIS desk because he wanted a fresh clean slate on Monday.
5. You don’t have to really look to find something to wear because everything is cleaned, ironed, and hung up – you just need to decide if today is a Pink Monday or a Blue Monday. I choose Pink.
6. The work fridge is empty and you can place your food anywhere you want and know that you’ll find it at lunch; by Friday, several unidentified “to go” boxes will be crowded in there with no takers.
7. There are no series of email requests from your boss for this and that and the other thing (yet).
8. You start out the day so organized (savor the moment)
9. You *know* the coffee is fresh and hadn’t been sitting there since yesterday afternoon because anyone who comes in on the weekend doesn’t bother to even make it because their secretaries always make it for them. They don’t know the coffee pot from the sugar bowl.
10. You know it’s going to be a good day when the elevator goes right to your floor without stopping. (Be sure to check that it really is Monday and not Sunday, like what happened the last time you didn’t stop at any of the other floors and the office was dark and empty).

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Giving v. Taking; Transplant 101

Hey all! I am back from my round of medical tests - you would not even believe all the places on my body that were xrayed, sonogrammed, echoed, CT'd, scanned, poked, pricked, and prodded. I am going to start journaling something like, Kidney Transplant Procedures 101.

One thing that happened throughout the day was that everywhere I went, one diagnostic room after another, each technician asked “are you a giver or a receiver?” It gave me pause to think about donors. I've been thinking about deceased donors - but there are living donors out there too. A lot of them are officially known to the transplant center as “altruistic” donors. Amazingly enough, these altruistic people simply call the transplant center and tell them they wish to donate one of their kidneys, just because. I find that absolutely totally amazing and “altruistic” doesn't even come close to defining such an extraordinary gift.

I also felt kind of selfish when I was asked if I were a giver or a receiver - interpreting the question as “I'm a TAKER.” Take! Take! Take!

I was simply amazed that there are people out there that think nothing about giving up one of their kidneys – they are willing to go through all the medical tests, the surgery, the follow-up, and living the rest of their life with one kidney.

From here, I have to wait for approval from the transplant committee (if any of the tests come back showing some other illness or cancer – things could change badly). I should be officially “on the list” in three weeks.

Here’s a little tidbit: there are three times the amount of people who NEED kidneys over the amount of kidneys available at any given time.

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