One year ago I was barely alive. My blood was utterly toxic. I slept most of the time. When awake, I had trouble finishing a sentence. Food tasted like cardboard. My breath and my body exuded horrid, acrid odors. My kidneys were failing.
When one thinks about a person with kidney disease, one often pictures someone going in for dialysis a few times a week. That was not so in my case. As a result of the biggest emotional trauma I'd ever experienced (another story for another time), my kidneys began a rapid, frightening decline.
Nine years ago, after a routine physical, my doctor suggested I see a nephrologist to see if he could determine why my creatinine levels were abnormally high. I was very fortunate to be referred to Dr. Luis Alvarez (not a fake name). He is one of the very best doctors I've ever known. He is smart, kind, gentle, attentive and has a sense of humor. I know. Doesn't sound like your run-of-the-mill specialist. Further blood tests, followed by a biopsy of both beans, showed that my kidneys were operating at a third of capacity and that this had likely been the case for a long time already. The good doctor suggested some dietary guidelines to help slow down the degeneration of these vital organs. I seemed to be asymptomatic and Dr. Alvarez suggested, after monitoring my blood for several seasons, that I might very well make it through the rest of my days without an intervention.
To this day I marvel at my mother's intuitive wisdom. One day when I was twelve, seemingly out of the blue, she told me the story of how they'd almost lost me when I was a toddler of one-and-a-half. I'd come down with pneumonia and then double pneumonia in rapid succession. They took me to the hospital. I had a raging, high fever. I was barely getting enough oxygen to survive. Somewhere in the early morning, after my folks had been at my side for twenty hours, and I was still in desperate straits, trying to breathe in a baby-sized oxygen tent, the doctors told my folks to go home and get some sleep. They were going to try a Hail Mary with a then fairly new drug called penicillin. My folks were prepared for the worst. When they returned to the hospital early the next morning, I'd made a sudden, seemingly miraculous recovery. When, many years later, I asked my older brother and sister what they remembered about that crisis, they drew a blank. And no wonder. Why would my dear parents let on that the baby was mortally ill?
My clear recollection of this startling story helped the specialists determine what likely had caused the initial damage to my kidneys. Dr. Alvarez told me that my predilection from an early age to vegetarianism and, thus, a lower protein diet had likely helped keep my damaged kidneys going so well for so long. Everyone who has known me as child, teenager and/or adult has seen me as a very energetic and vital fellow. I rarely became ill, and never in a significant way.
When the rapid fall in kidney function became apparent, my doctor suggested that it was time to get listed at the Kidney Transplant Program at Stanford. Through the enormous outpouring of loving support from family members and close friends who stepped forward to offer me one of their healthy kidneys, they found a good match for me within six months! My beloved sister-in-law Jane took the big step and, after a certain hospital nephrologist did several months of appalling hemming and hawing, this past March 27, right around Easter, I received one of Jane's very healthy kidneys.
Here comes the wow. After a very successful transplant, and in no time flat, I not only recovered and felt more and more energetic, but I experienced (and am still experiencing) a most amazing set of changes in my body and mind. Over the sixty years of living with handicapped kidneys, I had grown used to constant and growing anaemia. I inherited lots of smarts and I was a happy fellow, all along.
But this was something else. As my organs, especially my brain, started getting flooded with oxygen levels unknown by me until now, my thought processes took off. My senses were sharpened, hearing and smelling as I'd never done before. I was writing articles in my mind and then nonchalantly setting them into type later in the day. I was (and am) conscious of being able to think on several levels at once. And most important of all, with my blood detoxified and brilliantly oxygenated, gone was every vestige of worry, of anxiety, of anger and spiritual turmoil. I awake every morning feeling blessed. I walk through each day marveling at every moment. In short, I feel like a child blessed with wisdom. Modern medicine and much, much love saved my life when I was a little toddler. With the coming of spring this past year, in the time of rebirth, I have been blessed once again.
Mindblowing.