The Morning the Whole Plant Stood Outside
The list for a man with Sal’s blood type runs four to six years. His wife Marge is type A and couldn’t give. His son and his daughter were tested too, and neither could do it. Sal told me at lunch without a bit of self-pity. “I’ll be dead or I’ll be lucky,” he said, and went back to his sandwich.
Three weeks later at the plant’s spring blood drive, the nurse handed me my donor card. O positive.
I called the transplant center from the tailgate of my truck on my lunch break. A woman named Pam, the donor coordinator, asked me gently if I wanted to think about it.
“I’ve been thinking about it for about 12 minutes,” I said.
The testing took 11 weeks and six trips to Columbus, with Renata driving.
When Pam finally said we had a match and a surgery date, I drove to Sal’s house on a Saturday after his dialysis. Marge opened the door, and I told her first, because I thought she had a right. She put her hand over her mouth and sat down on the hall bench without a word.
Sal did not take it well. He was in his recliner with a blanket over him, thin as a rail. “No,” he said. “You’ve got two kids and a mortgage.”
“I’ve got two kidneys.”
I knelt by the chair, which I could do then, and took his hand. It was cold. “If I needed one, you’d already be in the car.”
That was the only time he ever thanked me out loud. After that he thanked me every day without saying anything. It’s a different language.
The surgery was on the second Tuesday of August. Pastor Dave Linder prayed over us in the pre-op room with the nurses standing in the doorway, heads bowed. Sal was wheeled past my bay, and he lifted two fingers off the bed rail at me, the way you wave to a man across a field.
I woke feeling like I’d been kicked by a horse and then told it was my fault. They kept me 2 nights.
On the second morning I heard something rolling in the hall. It was Sal, pushing his own drip pole in a hospital gown with his socks pulled up, Marge holding his elbow. He had color in his face I hadn’t seen in two years.
He came to the side of my bed. He didn’t say anything. He took my hand and pulled it down low on his right side, under the gown, where the new one sits in front of the hip. I could feel a hard shape under the skin, the size of a fist.
“Feel that?” His voice cracked. “It’s warm.”
A kidney isn’t a heart. It doesn’t beat. But it was warm under my hand, like a loaf just out of the oven, and I understood that a piece of me was in him doing its work.
“I woke up and I had to pee, Dwayne,” he said. “Do you know how long it’s been?”
Marge was crying. I held his hand and neither of us said one more word, and that was the best minute of my life. I include my wedding. Renata knows it’s true.