The Man Who Gave Me His Kidney

I was twenty-three years old and I had never been sick a day in my life when my kidneys quit on me over the course of a single week in October.

I want to put that plainly at the start, because people hear the word transplant and they picture somebody who was fragile all along, somebody born with a bad heart or worn down by years of something. That was not me. I was a tall, strong farm girl from Prewitt, Iowa, who had walked beans in the summer heat and thrown hay bales alongside my cousins and never once sat out a thing in my life. I waited tables at the Corner Skillet on Main and I could carry four plates up each arm and never drop a fork. I was the picture of health right up until the Tuesday I could not button my jeans because my ankles had swelled up like bread dough, and the Thursday the headaches started, and the Saturday my mother took one look at my face, puffy and gray and wrong, and drove me to the clinic in town with her jaw set the whole way.

The doctor in Prewitt took one look and sent us to the city. I do not remember much of that drive except that the corn was coming off the fields on both sides of the highway, those big combines throwing dust into the slant of the afternoon light, and I kept thinking about how I was going to miss the Skillet’s Friday fish fry and that was somehow the thing that worried me, as if a shift I would miss was the biggest problem I had.

It was not the biggest problem I had. At the hospital in Iowa City they ran the blood and the doctor came in with that particular careful face they wear, and he told my mother and me that my kidneys were failing. Both of them. Fast. Something had set my own body against them, an infection I had barely noticed weeks before, a sore throat I had worked straight through, and now the filters inside me had scarred over and shut down, and the poison that a body is supposed to pass out every day was backing up in me like a clogged drain.

I was on dialysis before I understood what the word meant.

If you have never seen it, I will tell you what it is, because it was my life for two years and I think a person ought to know. Three days a week I drove the fifty minutes to the dialysis center, and I sat in a vinyl recliner with a needle the size of a drinking straw in my arm, and a machine pulled my blood out of me and ran it through a filter and put it back, four hours at a time, because the machine was doing the work my own kidneys no longer could. You come off it cold and wrung out and dizzy, and you do it again two days later, and you do it the day after that, forever, unless a kidney comes.