The Man Who Gave Me His Kidney

I was twenty-three. The other people in those recliners were mostly in their sixties and seventies, kind folks, and they treated me like a granddaughter and it broke my heart every time, because I could see in their faces that they thought it was a crime for a girl my age to be tied to that machine. There was a man named Harold who brought me butterscotch candies and told me I would get my kidney, that the Lord had not brought me this far to leave me, and I smiled and thanked him and did not believe one word of it, because by then I had learned what the list was.

The list is the transplant waiting list, and in those years it was long, and the thing nobody wants to say out loud is that a deceased-donor kidney, the kind that comes when some other family has the worst day of their life, can take five years, six, seven. I was told, gently, that I might wait a long time. I was told my blood type made it harder. I was young and otherwise strong, which helped, but there were a lot of people ahead of me, and there are only so many kidneys, and the math of it does not care how old you are or how much life you have left to live.

So I made my peace with the machine, which is to say I did not make my peace with it at all. I kept working the Skillet on my off days. I lost weight I did not have to lose. I watched my friends get married and start having babies and buy little houses on the edge of town, and I sat in my mother’s spare room in a body that was slowly poisoning itself, and I learned a kind of patience that I would not wish on anybody, the patience of waiting for a stranger’s death to possibly, maybe, someday save your life.

And then, fourteen months in, my coordinator Brenda called me on an ordinary Wednesday and told me to come to the city, and not for dialysis.

They had a kidney for me. A living kidney.

I did not understand at first. A living donor, I knew, was usually a family member, a sister giving a kidney to a brother, a mother to a child, somebody who loved you enough to go under the knife and give up a piece of themselves. But I did not have a match in my family. My mother had tried and been ruled out. My brother had tried and been ruled out. I had no living donor.