Finding Out Someone Would Save My Life

Because yesterday was the ninth anniversary of my second kidney transplant, I thought I would share an excerpt from my book, which is in the final editing process.  Maybe it's fitting that it will probably be published in September.  It's a month of intense highs and lows for me.

Blindsided

Why is the word always associated with an unwelcome surprise?  The term comes from something approaching from outside your field of vision, your “blind” side, catching you off guard.

     It’s a situation I am only too familiar with.  With non-existent peripheral vision, people and objects always seem to come out of nowhere.  I get blindsided almost every day.  It can cause everything from mild surprise to injury. 

     But, it’s possible to be blindsided by something good.  Out of nowhere, exactly what you need.  Sometimes, it’s far beyond what you hoped for.  You find yourself saying, “I never would have expected that in a million years.”

     Chance?  Maybe.  Luck?  Probably.  God?  Yes.

     There’s no other explanation for an unexpected gift so completely unselfish that it leaves you shaking your head in awe.  A gift of such profound generosity that Hallmark doesn’t make a greeting card to express the gratitude you feel.  That’s divine intervention.  That is all the proof anyone needs for the existence of a mysterious, but loving God.

     I guess you could say God made me legally blind—and has blindsided me over and over since then.    

 

Connie

     My parents and I sat in the waiting area of transplant office at OU Med Center.  I was there for a checkup with Dr. Squires.  We had been there long enough for them to finish reading the Ft. Smith and Greenwood newspapers they had brought to keep them entertained during the wait.  Mom was reminding me of things to ask Dr. Squires.

     She added, “And be sure to tell him that Connie wants to donate a kidney,so find out how that works.”  

     What?? 

     “What are you talking about?” I said.  “Who is Connie?”

     Did I hear her right?  Someone wants to give me a kidney? 

     “Didn’t I tell you Connie Grote wants to give you a kidney?” she asked.

     “No!”

     “Oh, I thought I had told you about that,” she said, a little embarrassed at the oversight.

     “Someone wants to give me a kidney?”  I asked incredulously. 

     “Yes, Connie Grote, who cuts my hair, offered to give you one.”

     At that moment, the nurse called my name and I went to have my vital signs checked, which was the first part of a typical appointment at the transplant office.  My throat had suddenly gone dry and I could barely speak to the nurse.  This unexpected announcement had triggered a dozen emotions all at once. 

     Someone wants to give me a kidney!  I can’t believe this.  I don’t even know her.  Mom said her name is Connie something.

     I couldn’t even remember her last name.  I wanted to dart back to the waiting area and ask my mother for more details.  She had just casually dropped this information in my lap and now I had to have my checkup.  While waiting in the examining room, I pressed my thumb and forefinger in the corners of my eyes to stop the tear ducts.  Shock, gratitude, curiosity, desperation, hope, skepticism, worry, relief, exhilaration—those and a dozen other emotions elbowed each other out of the way in a rush to the front of my brain, which had suddenly grown crowded with thoughts and unfamiliar emotions I didn’t have a name for. 

     “I just found out someone wants to give me a kidney,” I told Barbara, the transplant coordinator as she began to go over my medications on my chart.

     “That’s wonderful,” she said.  I can’t remember what else she said, or what all Dr. Squires told me when I shared the news with him.  He explained all the steps necessary for her to be tested to make sure she was a suitable donor for me. 

     After my checkup, my parents and I went to eat lunch in Bricktown, an area of Oklahoma City with several restaurants.  It was our custom, but this time was different.  Over lunch, I told my parents what Dr. Squires had said about the subject of a live donor and got as many details as I could from my mother. 

     Mom said she had talked to Connie about my situation the last few times she had gone for a haircut. 

     “One day, she tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘I’ll give your son a kidney.’  Well, I was flabbergasted.” Mom said.  So, the news had come right out of the blue to her just as it had for me. 

     She went on, “I asked her ‘Connie, what if someone in your own family needs a kidney someday?’  She said ‘God will take care of them.’  So I said ‘Well, OK then.’  Can you believe that?” 

There's more to that chapter, but you have the main part.  It's actually the first part I wrote when I started the book.  It just seemed like the right place to start.  What do you think?

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Author site http://www.jimfairbanks.net/

Festivals, Fayetteville, and Roots

The Fayetteville Roots Festival is August 23-26.

It brings in live music, food, vendors, and is a celebration of Ozark Mountain culture.  And no, Ozark Mountain culture isn’t an oxymoron.  One of the great things about Fayetteville is that it embraces the future without abandoning its past.

For the majority of people now living in Northwest Arkansas, the roots don’t run deep yet.  For the most part, that’s a good thing.  It means this area has a healthy economy and people want to retire here or move here because it’s a great place to live.  All you have to do is travel east of Little Rock to see what the other side of that coin looks like.

For some of us, “Fayettevile roots” has a literal meaning.  I was born in the Missouri Ozarks and my parents came back here when I was a few months old.  Some of my early childhood was spent in the River Valley before my family returned here.  I grew up, for the most part, less than a mile from the U of A campus.  It was the 70s and early 80s, when Fayetteville was a notorious party town.  It did not escape my attention, but that's for another post.

My mother was born here.  My parents were married in a church just down the street from where she attended grade school.  They met in the 50s when they both worked on the square.  She worked at a dime store—one of the first handful owned by Sam Walton.  Right after they got married, they lived in some apartments on Meadow Street that, just like their marriage, have withstood the test of time.

My grandfather was a football star at Fayetteville High School in the 1930s.  The school won the state championship all three years he played for FHS.  His name is engraved on the sidewalk at Harmon Field with other winning team members throughout the years.  The “football jock” gene somehow didn’t get passed down to me.

But, my grandmother’s knack for telling a story did.

When I was a kid, she told me countless stories of what the area was like in the early 20^th century.  My favorite is about the Saturday her family rode in from Farmington after a rain.  Most people came to town to do their trading on Saturday.  It was the 1920s, before the square was paved.  Their wagon got stuck in the mud.  It’s pretty hard to imagine now.  It was hard to imagine back in the 70s when she told me that story.

These stories about my family and this area made one thing cliear: the two are intertwined, as impossible to separate from each other as vines of stubborn kudzu.

For me, going to the farmer’s market on the square to buy fresh, locally-grown produce feels like it’s in my DNA.  I’m a consumer.  Two generatons of my family were the producers and sold it to general stores downtown.  I can find a high point in town, look across the hills, and know they haven’t changed at all since since members of my family first saw them in the mid-1800s—no matter how much the buildings on them have.

The university has definitely helped make this town what it is today.  Enrollment jumped in the 60s and 70s when the Baby Boomers reached college age.  They helped make Dickson Street “funky” and cool.  After that, the city’s reputation was sealed.  Artsy, eclectic, creative, progressive, laid-back, fun, quirky Fayetteville was the perfect place for an artistically-inclined kid like me to grow up.  It had plenty of opportunities and was an accepting place for me to return to after losing part of my vision.  It’s always been fertile ground for the mind of the writer I was destined to become.

I love hearing newcomers say things like, “I didn’t know this was such a great place!” 

I just smile and say, “Yes, it is.”

But, it has been a great place for a long time.  Even my great-grandparents knew that.

 

The Newcomers Field Guide to Hill Folk, a humorous look at Northwest Arkansas, is now available in print AND ebook.  You don't have to be a newcomer to like it.  You might even recognize people you know.

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Lost In the Gym

A couple of weeks ago I went to the gym and almost everything had been rearranged since my last visit.  I know what you’re thinking.  “That’s what he gets for only going once every six months.”  But it had only been two days.

Looking down, I noticed the carpet was cleaner.  If I was able to tell the difference it must have been pretty dirty before.  They must have taken the opportunity to put those heavy machines—with their seats, bars, and stacks of weights—in a formation that made more sense.  For me, it was like a bad Helen Keller joke.  I spent a few minutes after using each one I needed to slowly spin around, looking for the one I needed next.

It made me feel a little self-conscious until I saw that I wasn’t the only one.  A few people even said stuff like, “I can’t find anything either.”  If misery loves company, so do blind folks.  I decided I would give myself some extra time each time I went until I memorized where everything was.

I really like the health club that I use.  It’s been at the current location two years.  The building was once a six-screen cinema.  I’ve lived in a former printing building, a former Catholic church, and a former carriage house.  I like old buildings that are remade into something different than their original function.  This one was originally a two-screen cinema when it was built in the 1970s.  The first movie I ever saw there was Star Wars.  Looking at in now, you would never guess what it had been before.

A week after the rearrangement, I was using a machine to work out my legs.  I hate working out my legs and I take unusually long breaks between sets.  Looking around, I finally realized the system they’d used when they moved everything.  There was a long, wide aisle running the length of the room.

Sometimes when we bother to look up at the bigger picture, we notice things are more orderly than we thought.

You Don't Have to Be A Standout to Be Somebody

Thanks to Facebook I was invited to the 30 year reunion for the class I went to school with, but didn’t graduate with.  Midway through 11^th grade my family moved.  That didn’t matter to those who planned the reunion.  It was about the shared experience of growing up here.

There were over 400 who graduated from FHS in 1982.  I wasn’t involved in any activities, wasn’t athletic, or a standout by any definition of the word.  I doubted many people would even remember me.  In addition to that, the big hairstyle of that era has been replaced by a crewcut and mostly relocated to my face in the form of a beard.

That tiny insecure voice inside told me to be ready for someone to tap me on the shoulder and say, “You didn’t actually graduate with us, so you have to leave.”

It also told me to be ready in case someone copped an attitude with me, like a high school student would.  Health issues (some potentially fatal), life in some big cities, vision loss, life in a couple of large cities with vision loss have all created a much less easily intimidated version of me than the one people might remember in high school.  I’ve had to learn to stand up for myself over the years.

Then a different tiny voice told me that time and maturity hasn’t ignored all those people.  It told me to just expect a good time.  Never mind the high odds of me being the only legally blind one there.  Or the only one with a couple of transplanted organs.  I might not be the most enviable one there, but I was pretty sure I had the most atypical life.

Three weeks before the reunion, I had my gall bladder removed along with a hernia repair.  I was down 15 pounds, which would have been a blessing for some, but not in my case.  In just a few weeks I went from being in the best shape of my life to the same scrawny body I had in high school.  It was a chore to find clothes that didn’t hang off me.  Everybody wants to look at these things, whether it’s been 10 years or 70. 

Yes, I was a little self-conscious beforehand about being the only visually-impaired one there.  But, that's almost always the case and I'm finally coming to terms with it.  Besides, most of the others have to use reading glasses these days.  I guess that makes me a trendsetter.

I had a good time.  People walked up and spoke to me, so it didn’t matter that I couldn’t see across the room.  I said, “You actually remember me?” about a dozen times.  The usual response was, “Of course I do.”

When I said that to Ziva, followed by, “I was such a nobody,” she looked me in the eye and said, “Everybody is somebody.”  This from one of the cool, tall, pretty chicks back in high school who I didn’t really know back then.  I had approached her wanting to connect with a fellow writer.

The next thing I knew, I was having a great time with her, Jinger, and Lisa (more cool, pretty girls who were at the reunion) on Dickson Street.  I expected to see old friends that night, but never expected to make new ones of people I hadn’t known back then.

Since then, I’ve done a little revising on the history book in my head.  I already knew that sometime since 1982, I had become somebody.  It turns out you don’t have to be a standout to be somebody and more people notice you than you think.

Now I stand out without really trying and not for the reasons I would have chosen.  Now I’m somebody because of that.  But it turns out I was somebody all along.   

My L.A. Odyssey Part 7: Diagnosis and Time Warp

Friday, my parents and I get up before dawn and drive to Oklahoma City.  For the first time ever, I hope I’m having a rejection episode.  If that’s the case, I’ll be put in the hospital and given strong anti-rejection drugs that virtually take my immunity to zero.  But, my pancreas may start working again.  If it’s not rejection, it means the pancreas is just worn out.

We're at OU Med Center, where it all began in 1998 with a new kidney and pancreas.  I want to go back in time to when I was full of optimism, full of excitement and wonder about what my body was about to experience.

My battered veins don’t want to cooperate and it takes several tries before they can draw blood.  The result: it’s not rejection.  Aside from high blood sugar, all the other numbers are normal.  I'm diabetic again. 

Then I get more bad news.  I have t be cancer-free 2-5 years before I can list for another one.  That means I’m looking at another year or more before I can be put on the waiting list.  I will have to wait before I can wait.

Now I have my answer.  It’s a long, quiet drive back to my parents’ house.  Everyone is very tired.

That evening I was feeling restless and sat on the covered patio behind my parents’ house.  In the distance I heard cheering every few seconds and remembered Greenwood High School was holding graduation at the football field not far away.  I walked to the front and stood on the driveway, caught up in the swirling memories of the past couple of weeks and a graduation ceremony on that same football gield thirty years ago.  How can it be thirty years already?  But the past week made me feel every minute my age and then some.  The images of my high school graduation flicker by me, but none take form.

I’m a middle-aged man standing on a driveway listening to a man’s voice on a loudspeaker.  I can’t make out what he says but I can tell he’s reading names.  Applause and cheers follow each one.  A few lots behind me, little kids play in a yard.  They’re really little—much too young to imagine high school, much less have trouble remembering it. 

The hot breeze whips around my face and I am in a time warp.  In only a few days I’ve been drawn backwards from racing toward my future at an amazing conference in fast-paced L.A. to high school graduation in 1982.  I’ve just been diagnosed with diabetes again, like when I was twelve.  Except I’m not back there.  These are just pale watercolor shades of the past being brushed onto the modern version of me.

The task ahead of me is to blend the new ambitions, plans for the future, and a newfound self-confidence and identity with a disease I had through my teens, twenties, and early thirties—a disease that damaged me, a disease that I hated and felt I had conquered 14 years ago when I got the new pancreas.  It will be a struggle to keep from being sucked into the diabetc time machine pulling me back there.

My L.A. Odyssey Part 6: Generosity Is Never A Mistake

It’s Thursday and I’m scheduled to fly home.  I spend part of the morning standing in the small front yard, enjoying a final moment of flawless humidity-free California weather and watching life in this bustling little L.A. neighborhood take place.

Helen pulls up in her car and passes me with a quck, “Hello” like you say to a stranger.  She doesn’t recognize me because I’m wearing a ball cap and sunglasses to cut down on the glare.  And I shaved my beard off the night before.  I didn’t bring the clippers I use to trim it, thinking I would only be in L.A. six days.  It was looking a bit too Grizzly Adams and I might be put in the hospital in Oklahoma City.  I wouldn’t want to tend to it then, so I used the last of the stored power in my shaver to cut it off.

I realize that not only will I be different when I go home, I’ll look different too.  I look like I’m twelve when clean shaven, which is ironic because that’s how old I was the first time I became diabetic.

“Helen, it’s me,” I say.  We laugh, pack my things in the car and head toward LAX.

“Thanks for taking me to the airport.  That’s so nice of you,” I tell her. 

She talks about how doing kind things is part of being human.  It really is no big deal for her to do this for me, even though it takes an hour to get to the airport.  She talks about the importance of giving and tells me she’ll tip the airport employee who assists me from the check-in counter to the gate. 

“Oh, you don’t have to do that.”

“Generosity is never a mistake,” she says and backs it up with a story of a time when she gave a gernerous tip and it ended up making a big difference down the line because someone remembered it.  I turn her words over in my head.  “Generosity is never a mistake.”  Five simple words that mean so much when they stand together.  I hope I can carry that with me after I’m home, after I’ve dealt with gall stones and being diabetic again, after some semblance of order is back in my life.

We stop at a Taco Bell near the airport. 

“Now I can say I took a beautiful actress to lunch,” I joke.

Helen waits with me until a guy appears to assist me.  She presses some bills in his hand and I hug her good-bye.  L.A. certainly has been surreal but in a mostly positive way.  I’ve had guardian angels in the City of Angels.  Maybe those Spanish missionaries hundreds of years ago were on to something when they named the place.

Chatting with the guy assisting me, I find his wife has a survival story of her own.  It seems all I have to do is tell my story and I attract people of a like mind.  I give him my card and tell him to have her e-mail her story to me.  It feels good to be back in this mode, going from medical case back to Man With A Mission.

I get to sit on the first row of the plane next to a guy with an injured leg and on the other side of him is a woman holding a small dog that can sense the onset of a seizure.  They are amazed at my story.

“You’re a miracle,” she tells me.  I’ve heard this before but my recent health setback makes it harder to keep that in mind.  But, like in LAX, it feels good to be back in that mode I was in at the conference, even if only for a couple of hours.

I’ve been so busy talking, I’m caught off guard when the wheels make contact with the runway.  I’m back in the Ozarks.  Part of me is relieved to be home.  Part of me wants to stay in suspened animation because early in the morning my parents and I will head to Oklahoma City to find out what, if anything, can be done.  I’m back from L.A. but the odyssey isn’t over yet.

My L.A. Odyssey Part 5: The Right Way to Start A Day

Tuesday morning I wake up very early after only a few hours of sleep, but with a smile on my face.  I can feel it.  My first thought: 

I refuse to let this get me down.

What a powerful moment it is to realize I have a choice in how I feel about this.  I never expected to reach this stage so fast.  From the intense high of the conference to the extreme sadness of accepting the failure of a transplanted organ, I’ve been hit by an emotional tsunami.  Now I find myself greeting the new day with a smile, amazed at how fast I righted the ship ater that.

With my mind at peace again, more ideas come to me like they did at the conference.  I pull the notebook from my backpack and write them down.  I’m not going to let this diagnosis stop me from moving forward.  It just means now I’ll have to do it as a diabetic. 

I spend the day resting, watching TV, and feeling thankful for a place to stay.  I could have been cooped up in a motel, feeling very depressed and alone until my flight home.

Later I’m invited to join Karry in a celebration dinner for Xerxes, who graduated from college today.  With us is Helen, another Texas native Karry met in L.A.  She has acting experience, including small roles in TV and movies.  She’s funny and lively, which keeps my mood from taking a dive.

We eat at Farfalla, an Italian bistro not far from Karry’s house.  I’m overwhelmed by all the choices and it’s hard to decide.  Being diabetic again, I know I can’t eat all I want, but my appetite still hasn’t returned full force anyway.  This outing is exactly what I needed—laughter, chatter, good food.  Now and then I look around the dining room at the décor and the other patrons and feel at peace.  I never expected to get a taste of how Angelinos actually live. 

When the check arrives, I try to pay for everyone’s dinner but Karry won’t let me.

“just let this good thing happen,” Xerxes says.  After 20 years in the U.S. there’s barely a trace of a Dutch accent.  I was raised to show gratitude for kindness, so it’s not easy to go without repaying these people.  These extra days tacked on to the end of my trip to L.A. are proving to be interesting.  The lad-back Southern California attitude appeals to me.  I see why so many people are drawn to the place.  I didn’t expect to like this city so much.  But, there are plenty of things about this trip I didn’t expect.

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