Sick (2 page)

I am riding my bike to Bellevue Hospital to get a sonogram, up First Avenue on a dirty New York summer day. There is no bicycle parking at the hospital, and in my head I make a bad Jerry Seinfeld-esque joke, something like, “Of course there's no bike parking at the hospital. If you can ride your bike to the hospital, you don't need to be there.” Once I am inside the hospital, I find the waiting room and wait to be seen.

The room where I get my sonogram is dim. I enter sheepishly, trying to hold the gown I'm asked to wear closed at the back. There is a small, thin bed alongside the wall, and a woman, the technician, sits next to it in front of a monitor. “Lay down on your side,” she says. The lights are off. Grey sunlight comes in sideways through a lone window, stretching and elongating across the walls. And it's dim. Dim like I'm home again and too sick to go to school and my mother is taking care of me. I lay down on the bed, face the wall, and think about my mother coming into check on me while the woman is preparing the machine. She places
her hands on my back and begins to rub rhythmically. I imagine it's my mother's hands rubbing my back; the hands that soothed the fever out of me as a child and made the bad things go away. But it is not. It is a stranger in a sterile grey, dead and dull room, looking into a part of me that I could never see. Someone just doing their job.

She does this for a few minutes and then, abruptly, she stops and gets up. “You're done. You can get dressed now,” she says, like I've taken part in some sort of seedy exchange. “You'll get the results soon.”

She leaves the room, and I'm alone.

My father sits in a recliner in front of a TV with the dialysis machine to his right and a wooden chair between the two. A single window fills the room with cool, fading sunlight, disappearing behind the houses as my father's night on dialysis begins. Two tubes in his right arm connect my father to the machine; one so that his blood can leave, and the other so that it can return. He does this three nights a week, for six hours at a time so that his blood can be cleaned. All of the tubes, blinking lights and locomotion of the machine are for one single purpose: to bring his blood to the thin cylinder that acts as an artificial kidney.

He does this for eight years. I am anywhere from two to ten years old. My sister and I spend a lot of time here, simply called “the dialysis room” which used to be my brother's bedroom before him and my other brother started sharing a room. We make games using the assortment of supplies that can be found here: the blood pressure cuff, the standing scale, the centrifuge. These are our play things and for the moment, while my father waits out another night dependent on this machine, we are oblivious to their meanings.

I'm eight years old and the phone rings as I'm eating dinner in the kitchen with my mom, brothers and sister. Dad is in the dialysis room eating dinner alone. He's on the waiting list to receive a transplant. It's already been a year and a half. Upon the first ring from the phone, my mother tenses, holds her breath, and shoots my brother Greg an awful, menacing look. For the past two weeks, we'd been receiving prank phone calls from the same person. He speaks gibberish, curses and says lewd things, and sometimes says nothing at all. My mother's convinced it's one of my brother's high school friends, since admitting that he and several friends had prank called another friend about a month ago.

It rings several times before she gets up to answer, and she spits out a bitter “Hello” as she holds the receiver to her mouth. She doesn't say anything for a
few seconds, she's just listening, and then she explodes screaming, “Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this? Don't you understand that every time the phone rings in this house, I think it's a call from the hospital to tell me that they've found a kidney for my husband? Why are you doing this to us? Just leave us alone, please.” She slams the phone onto the hook and collapses, sobbing, onto the countertop. My brothers, sister and I are frozen, backs against our chairs, our eyes wide as we look at each other, at her, and our mouths are open like we're going to say something, but we don't. After a minute, she goes to her bedroom without looking at us.

My brothers, the oldest, seem to know something that I can't understand. My sister and I are scared. None of us says anything. We gather the dirty dishes into the dishwasher and then turn on the TV. Mom doesn't make an appearance for the rest of the night, and our house never receives another prank call again.

I'm ten years old and my parents have just left to go to Boston in a flurry of suitcases and phone calls. They have a kidney for my father. My Aunt Mary, who is my father's sister and got her own transplant a few years before, comes over to take care of us. Apparently, she has been given permission to spoil us for the next week, so we stay home from school, watch rented movies, and eat whipped cream out of the can. I'm happy. Everyone else is happy. And after two weeks, dad comes home. We wait at the window all day, and finally the car drives up. We gather around the door, shouting and jumping, and they walk in, my mother supporting my father. As we run to him my mom puts a hand out and says sternly, “Don't. Be careful. Don't touch him.” And I recoil in a kind of fear as they slowly walk the steps to their bedroom, because I've always been able to touch my father before.

I'm fourteen and at the hospital. My father is coming out of a six hour surgery to clip an aneurysm that was found in his brain. The aneurysm is an effect of having PKD, although my parents won't tell us that for many years. Outside of the recovery room, I'm gripping a get well card that I made by hand and had everyone sign. My mom and I are allowed to see him, and he is barely conscious. I hand him the card in his left hand as my mother grips his right. “What's this?” she says without looking at it, and drops the card to the ground. I bend to pick it up and when I stand again, my mother is squeezing his hand with both of hers. Shaking her head with her lips closed tight, she begins to cry and says, “Longest day of my life, Victor. Longest day of my life.”

I ‘m sixteen and Aunt Mary is in the hospital because she's feeling pains in her abdomen. My parents say that she'll be fine and out in a few days. But after a few days, my father comes home from the hospital and I can sense that something's wrong. “I don't think she's going to come out of the hospital,” he says to us later that night. Her transplanted kidney failed and her body wasn't taking to the dialysis. While she's still conscious, my father asks if she would like to see us, the kids, and she tells him no. “ You wouldn't want to see her anyway, not the way she looks now,” my father says. And after ten days in the hospital, my aunt, who never had a partner or any children and loved us like her own, dies at the age of fifty four.

It's been almost a month since my sonogram.

“So I have the report right here in front of me,” my nephrologist says to me over the phone. “And it looks as though you've got cysts in both your kidneys.” I had been sitting lazily in my chair, doodling on a piece of paper, but now I am upright, the pen poised in mid air. I believe I've misheard her and say, “What?”

“You have Polycystic Kidney Disease. Did you know that?” she asks.