LizBeth2778's Journal

I've been thinking about something recently...and I wanted to share.

When I was about 13 or 14 I was at camp and my friends was reading everyone's palms, and what she told me has stuck with me since then. Why? I have no idea, but I've been thinking about it a lot in the last year or two. She looked at my life line and said to me that I could have a very long life, or a short one, one that could have gotten cut off around my 32nd year. She told me that there was decision I had to make in order to prevent my death at age 32ish. Of course at the time 32 seemed ridiculously far away...now...not so much. Every once in awhile I would make a decision and think to myself...."hm, I wonder that decision is the one that I had to make to live longer..."

Obviously I've been thinking about it since I recently quit smoking and drinking, either of those things could have easily caused my early demise, but I've also beent hinking about other things, what if I hadn't moved to CT? What if I hadn't moved to NY? What if I had gone to a different college? It is so funny to think of how many teeny tiny decisions can affect EVERYTHING!!!

There is one decision I made awhile ago that I know has allowed me a longer life, because had I not made it, I would have died...for sure. I don't think I've told anyone on here about this, so I thought I'd share The Kidney Story with all of you, since it's entertaining and has shaped my life a lot.

This is a loooong story, just a warning!

So in 2000 I was 22 and still living in Kalamazoo, Michigan (yes, it is a real city, I promise, a very col one at that!). Matt and I were together and I had taken up rollerblading. I was out one morning and due to my complete lack of coordination and balance my legs flew up out from under and I fell flat on my butt on the concrete (really, I didn't trip on anything at all! It was just em being clutzy). It hurt so bad that I had to catch my breath before I could even get up and I had to take the blades off and walk back to my car crying, limping and holding those ridiculously heavy skates! I got back to Matt's place slept for awhile and then we went to work at the coffee shop we worked at and I was in pain the whole day. Matt insisted that we go to hospital once we were done closing the shop and forced me to sit down and stop helping him. So we went, I got X-Rayed they said I sprained it and to stay off of it for awhile...ok, fine. They gave me some drugs and sent me on my way. Well, the next day I was home, resting and I got a call from the hospital asking me to come back because whoever was working the night before had mis-read my X-Rays and I had to get new ones done. Damn, so I went back, got more X-Rays. The doctor eventually came back (the doctor I got this time was actually a customer of ours at the shop, so it was interesting) and told me I had fractured my vertebrae and I needed to get a CATSCAN done to make sure there was not bone hitting my spinal cord. Ok, whatever. The doctor eventualy comes back with the results for the CATScan and she says that there is no bone hitting the spinal cord...."but" she says. That is NEVER good! "But, are you having any trouble peeing?"

WHAT? No....what does that have to do with my fractured spine? Well, it turns out my left kidney, I will now refer to him as Harvey, because that is what I named him (yes after the rabbit) was so swollen it showed up in the CATscan, which apparently it shouldn't. So at the age of 22 I am assinged a urologist and sent on my way. Turns out Harvey's exit was blocked by scar tissue, the urologist thinks it was either a birth defect or a tail bone injury I suffered when I was younger in an unfortunate sledding incident in which I had to walk around with a pillow to all of my classes. Further investigation on Matt's part has uncinvered that a large quantity of Strep infections in childhood (which I had) can cause kidney scarring. Anyways, Harvey is so backed up that he has stopped working (lasy bastard) and the right one, Lucinda, is doing all of the work. We go through a few tests to see if we can wake Harvey up, I had to take Castor Oil for my barium Z-Ray, that WAS NOT fun! He didn't. I was then given the option to leave him in or take him out. Now, at 22 a major surgery like that was not somethng that sounded like fun, especially since the urologist sounded so confident that I would be fine if I left it in, so that's what I did. And life went on. Matt and I broke up, I moved to New Haven, started dating Austin the Breakdancer/Jerkface (that's another story, kind of, but I don't want to waste my time talking about him) and life was peachy.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2004. I was in Vermont with my friend Dexter, I was stage managing his one man play at a private prep school. We were getting ready to start driving back to CT when I started having really bad back pain, the entire drive home it just kept getting worse and worse, it was on the left side of my back, Dex seemed pretty convinced that I was having back spasms, so I got home, was in complete misrey, but tried to just leave it a that. Well, the next month and a half of my life was filled with nothing but constant worsening chronic pain. I ws way sicker than I was letting on too, I was throwing up, barely eating, losing wieght, sweating through my sheets at night, and very pale. I went to the clinic they gave my muscle relaxers that allowed me to sleep for maybe four hours a night before the pain woke me up since lying down was the worst position possible for me. Now, at the time I was working with the Yale Med School as a fake patient for their students to interview and one of my characters had kidney stones and I couldn't help but notice that a lot of my symptoms were the same, and I started thinking it was something more severe than back spasms, but I was scared because I didn't have health insurance and I had seen letter from meetings the doctors had left behind at Yale of people who couldn't pay their rent because of their medical bills. So I went back to clinic and told them about Harvey, the useless kidney and how that was the side that was hurting me. They took blood and scheduled me for an ultrasound on March 4th or something, this was on Feb 26th. The blood on the 28th and it came back fine, nothing was wrong with me.

Feb. 29th I was walking to work, in pain as I had put in a 10 hour shift the night before (I had to go in the back and cry off the pain at least three times that night) and had a 10 hour shift that day. My aunt called me as I was walking to work and all she said to me was "how are you doing?" I knew she had called because my mom was so worried by that point, I just birst into tears right there and she told me to go to the ER, NOW! We would figure out how to pay for it, go. So, I did. I let my co-workers and boss know, I called my friend Kyle who was a 30 minute drive away, but made it in 15 and she took me to the ER. They took my temp, and pulse...they actually took my pulse twice because they couldn't believe how fast it was, I got in half an hour (yes, that is how sick I was). I got three vials of blood drawn (I used to be scared of needles, I'm not anymore) and had a CAT Scan. The blood came back (keep in mind I had just had blood drawn at the clinic that came up with nothing) and as the doctor put it I had a "rip roaring kidney infection!" The CAT Scan came back...here it comes....Harvey had burst and formed an abcess...he was going to have to come out. And after all that, finally, they put my on Morphine and I was out of pain for the first time in almost two months. The next day I recieved two pints of blood, as it was all going into the kidney, and i had tubes put in to drain the kidney and the absess, I had those in for the month that I had to wait for my surgery. I was in the hospital for five days. I went home and hung out waiting to be hacked open...

And that's about it. On April 14th 2004 I had a full nephrectomy (kidney removal) apparently a surgery as major as heart or brain. It was a six week recovery period and it took me about a year to feel normal again (yes, I was smoking through all of this) Talking to doctors later I learned that if I had gone to work that day...I could have died. That abcess could have ruptured, I'm lucky it formed in the first place. So honestly, if someone asks me what the best decision I've ever made is, it would be listening to my Aunt that day. And hey, I've got a pretty good story to show for it and a kick as scar that I tell people i got in a knife fight, the fact that they actually believe me is a little scary!

Incidentally, in case you are wondering, you can function normally with only 20% of one kidney, isn't that a-maz-ing? The human body, what a machine.

I hope ya'll enjoyed this long-winded story. I felt like telling it to you, since it's so imprtant to me!