Bleeding Fiction

People who need organ transplants have their names put on a list. They keep track of your blood type, so that doctors will know if you're compatible with any organ that comes available, but they also track your age and mental state. This is how doctors decide who gets an organ. Kids, those younger than eighteen years old, they get precedence. After that, it mostly how long your name's been on the list.

My mother is going back on the kidney list.

She's not getting credit for the six years she spent on that list before her transplant.

My mom got a new kidney a year and a half ago. And now it's falling apart. She had a kidney virus this past summer, which no one had bothered to mention to me until now. She's had a few biopsies, to help correct her medication levels. And with all of that, the kidney just isn't strong enough to hold together any more, and her body isn't strong enough to hold on to it.

So it's only a matter of time. A month, six months at most. But when it's done, it's done, and my mom goes back on dialysis. I've explained, before, how you can come to hate the people that you love while you're waiting for a transplant and how that leads you to hate yourself, but I haven't really explained, here, what dialysis means. It means three days a week, for four hours at a time, in the hospital. It means a cold room and a machine that drains the blood out of your body, filters out the poisons, and pumps the blood back in. It means twelve hours a week when you're too weighed down with tubes and needles to move without interrupting the process and hours of wakefulness after that when you're too tired to think.

Dialysis means a very real risk of stroke and seizure and the mental degredation they bring, where you struggle to remember words you use every day, where you have to force yourself to focus through a haze every minute in order to understand an episode of Law & Order and where, at the most extreme, you can stare directly at your own child and not know who he is.

It means about a decade, max, of life expectancy. I means you might not live to see your children get married. It means that you're unlikely to live to see your grandchildren born.

I'm not big on "fair." Life isn't fair, and I don't expect it to be. Life is suffering. But there are some things that strain my acceptance of that a bit past the breaking point.