2 . . . years since heart surgery (single bypass) due to Lupus complications, atherosclerosis.

1.5. . . years since my nephrologist said, “It’s time to find a kidney donor.”

42 . . . days since the kidney transplant.

5 . . . average number of days a kidney transplant patient stays at the hospital.

16 . . . days I spent at Methodist Hospital.

>15 . . . . doctors, including 5 nephrologists, a hematologist, an endocrinologist, 2 surgeons, 3 internists, 1 physical therapist, 1 nutritionist, 3 pharmacists, and probably several more I can’t remember.

60 . . . percent . . . damage my new kidney took because my APLA (blood-clotting disorder) went berserk post transplant.  While it’s impossible to determine how long a transplanted kidney will last, it is highly likely that its longevity has been compromised.

30,000 . . . U.S. dollars . . . per dose of Soliris (Euclizamab), a rare drug used to treat my ultra-rare condition.

16 . . . infusions I will receive of this drug.

17 . . . prescription medications I was taking when I returned home from the hospital.

419,528 . . . U.S. dollars . . . for my surgery and hospital stay.  Number does not include my donor’s surgery and hospital stay.  Aetna, O, Aetna, please come through!

3 . . . kidneys in my body.  Just one is working though!

10-15 . . . years . . . average lifespan of a transplanted kidney.

75 . . . years I HOPE my new kidney will last.

3 . . . lifetime friends I have gained . . . my friend and “swap” donor, Laura Horelica, my donor Nadia Salameh, and the other recipient, Susan Mashni.  Wonderful, amazing people all.

Depressing answer.  Yet, I’ve been wanting to properly thank the people involved in rescuing me from it, so I felt like I should answer the question.

(deletes two paragraphs) No, I will leave it to your imagination.  It roils me to have written about this calamity so many times.  Kicking up the dust with writing somehow keeps the disease alive, if only mentally.  If you’re really interested in details you can scour my blog archives.  Summary:  it blows (kidney failure, not my blog archives).

Instead – casting Eeyore aside –  I really wanted this to be upbeat and full of hope, because I’m being given a new lease on life.  Being hopeful, I must note, takes an effort.  I wish it didn’t, because I realize the amazing good fortune I have, but when you’ve been down and kicked for so long, you wonder when things will turn around.  It’s not been fun to be in a situation where hope is dangerous . . . and it hasn’t just been the vile disease process, but also the ups and downs of the kidney transplant screening process.  And it’s been the oh-so-fun dialysis in the meantime!

SHIT there I go again.  Back to the hope and the thankfulness!

There’s a host of people I should thank, but the donors are foremost in my heart.  It’s “donors” because there are two people giving up a kidney for me.  Since my donor, Laura, wasn’t an entirely perfect match for me, she’ll be donating to another person needing a kidney, while I will receive one from that person’s donor.  This way, kidney “life” will be optimized for everyone.

Thank you, Laura.  And thank you, Susan.  You are both love in action.  You are heroes and great role models.  You are inspiration to live a great life.  You are saviors.

Laura, you’ve been SO UPBEAT throughout.  I know it’s your personality but you must have not known upfront that the screening process would take forever.  I was careful to NOT tell you so you’d stay, but I know you would have anyway.  You did, and I thank you for your infectious joy in doing this harrowing thing.

I also must thank those who went through screening and didn’t pass.  Mom, Sheri, Lauren, and yes, even you, Jody, even though your silent desertion caused anguish and tribulation.  Your heart was in the right place.  Thanks also to all those who had wanted to be screened – Kristy, Amber, Amber, Wendy, Lori, Jessica, Ellen, Linda, Sue, Rebecca, JB, Danelle, and everyone else I’ve forgotten.  Screw that saying about good intentions.  I was impassioned by your intentions.

By now at the awards show, they’d be cueing up the music.  But I must also thank my family and friends.  I said in an earlier post that I have an embarrassment of riches in this category, and it’s true.  Thank you, everyone, for the support – the meals, the text messages and emails, the cards, the hospital visits, the blog comments, the re-tweets, and the love.

Thanks to Laura’s family, and to the family of my donor.  Your support of all of us . . . it means everything.

For all the dialysis nurses, you were angelic visitors in my crummy world.  Thank you.

Mom, thanks for setting your life aside for us for the last several years.  You’re amazing.

Finally – and I’m tearing up here – to my devoted wife, my everything . . . you have stood by me to hell and back.  I love you more than anything in this world.

As of this writing, it’s 13 days until the transplant.  As we move closer, my hope increases, and it’s all because of you.  Thanks – JT

No, the tub wasn’t full of ice and I hadn’t had my kidney stolen by Black Market organ thieves (how f**ing ironic that would be).  Actually, I was in the tub because I’ve had lupus for 10 years which begat kidney failure which begat the need for dialysis which begat a jugular catheter which can’t get wet in a shower.  Hence, the bath.

So I’m sitting there enjoying some quiet.  It should be about an hour until the four kids in the house need to get up.  Then, in a moment that flashed like lightning, all of the following occurred:  (1) my six-year-old daughter appears from behind the towel rack  (2) I jerk like an electrocuted Tasmanian devil  (3) I slam my hand on the corner of the bath tub, and (4) my hand bleeds.

My ninja-like reaction was presumably in preparation to vanquish the morning zombie, who was obviously intelligent because he’d somehow bypassed the house burglar alarm.  After several milliseconds, though, I’d discovered it wasn’t a zombie, but rather my precious little girl at the end of my look.  She’d arisen quite early for school and had ventured downstairs.  Of course, my knee-jerk reaction was to scream.

“PIPPI!  WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU DOING!?!??!”

And she runs off.  Boo, daddy.

After toweling off, I discover we have run out of regular band-aids.  So I do what anyone would do:  I raid the Barbie band-aids.  Ordeal over, but it’s still a head-scratcher.

You’d think having dealt with bullshit like lupus and heart surgery, maybe I wouldn’t have to deal with any other ticky tack stuff . . . yet, here you are, Chronic Jumpiness.  Amazingly, like lupus, no cure is known.

One time several years earlier, my apartment-mate came home, opened the door, and said, “Hey.”  I hadn’t heard the door, so of course his “hey” initiated the launch of a glass of cabernet into orbit, staining carpet, wall, and chairs.  He laughed.  A lot.

Another time I drove a car – barefoot – to one of those “enter and sit” car washes.  As the brushes churned, I sat carefree until I felt something crawling – a cockroach – on my bare feet.  You might as well have tasered me in the nuts the way I freaked out.  I became a stomping, shrieking, fetal-positioned teenage girl in a horror flick.  Trapped in the carwash.  That experience took months to wear off.

Good friends have ribbed me – maybe deservedly so – that this is Weenie-dom, plain and simple.  I get it.  I mean, I issue warnings to people who are getting to know me, “Look, the worst thing you can do to me is hide behind a door, and jump out and scare me.  You might get a spinning side kick in the head before I know what’s happening.”  At least my wife – the one who has witnessed the most comical epilepsies – has accepted it.  And she still loves me!

As you might imagine, the worst jumpy moments occur when I’m in and out of sleep.  Here, where anything is possible, I take Nervous Nellie to new stratospheres.  In that dream where snakes cover the floor, I kick real kicks.  In that dream where I fight the soccer goalie and I’m blind, I throw real punches.  I’m surprised my wife hasn’t concocted a bed shield, or a zap system to wake my ass up when things get tense and I’m out of it.

I haven’t dwelt too much on this condition, but it seems irreversible.  I think it also is my embarrassing cross to bear, similar to those who don’t care enough to rectify their “your/you’re” or “their/there/they’re” grammar problems.  I can no more control this problem by screaming, “Self, stop being a weenie!” than I can improve others’ grammar by screaming, “you grammatical birdbrains don’t deserve your computer!!!”

I’m really a normal guy.  It just so happens that sudden sounds tend to erupt and frazzle me with nuclear force.  So thanks for understanding.  Just clank some pots and pans from a distance before entering the room next time.

Epilogue/FAQ

Q:  Do you like haunted houses?

A: They’re on par with rectal exams.

Q:  Do you like the horror movie scenes where the dumbass teenager is walking backwards and turns around suddenly and BAP! she’s dead?  

A:  No.  Vehemently no.

Q:  Why are you slamming yourself so bad?  I mean, this is definitely man-card revocable material.

A:  It’s good to have a self-deprecating post once in a while; it’s an existential exoneration for all the times I’ve ripped other people for frivolous stuff.

Q:  Do you pee sitting down, too?

A:  Actually, most of the time, yes, and that’s another hilarious story for another blog post.

Q:  Were you subjected to shock therapy or lobotomization as a child?

A:  I don’t think so.

Q:  Did you like this :23 video?

A:  My laptop hit the ceiling. 

I remember the first CD I ever bought – Locust Abortion Technician (pictured to the right) by the Butthole Surfers in 1987.  It sat all by itself on my bedside table in the freshman dorm.  Sometimes I would just take it out of the case and admire it, being careful not to smudge the disc.  We’d been so accustomed to kid-glove handling with cassettes and vinyl; these CDs seemed like fragile jewels that we’d certainly replace at least once.

“Maaaaaan, it souuuuuuunds greaaaaaaaat!” our dorm-mates mused in the smoky mist.  ”Annnnd you can rewind it, like, innnnstannntlyyy!  Hey, play Sweatloaf again!”

Cassettes were suddenly regarded as aural garbage, and perhaps rightfully so.  No more hiss, no more warbling, and no more 74-foot long unravelings.

Yeah, man, CDs were great!  Crystal clear audio, a fairly durable medium (it turned out), and more capacity that your standard cassette.  The only disadvantage to buying a CD was that the packaging was impossible to open.  I remember one comedian suggesting that the CD wraps were so impenetrable, they should be used for contraception.

I guess one more disadvantage was: no more making mix tapes for your mates, or that special girl.  It would be 20+ years before that kind of file sharing would become relatively affordable.  Now, using neat programs like I-Tunes, you can just gift songs to your friends if you know their email address.  It’s less personal than a mix tape, but it’s way less hassle.  Plus their cassette player is long gone.

So the problem now is that we have 400+ CDs full of music that we need to “keep” somehow.  Thanks to AAC format, we’re able to smush gazillions of songs onto our hard drives, and the play them through our I-Pods, computers, phones, and what have you.  Even though audiophiles remind us that CD-quality audio is notably higher, the AAC files boom just fine (mostly).  Also, thankfully, these CDs can be ‘reverse burned’ into your I-Tunes in less than a minute, so that’s convenient too.  I-Tunes is even nice enough to import your album artwork & information so YOU DON’T HAVE TO.

Yet, burning all 400+ CDs into I-Tunes is a daunting task.  So I imagine a musical “vetting” of sorts will occur.  I’m sure that you, like me, own several pieces of music that you wouldn’t admit you’d purchased with your own money.  ”Oh, that Sia CD?  Um, that was a gift.  Chumbawumba?  Oh, I got that free when I worked at the radio station.  Greatest 20 Songs of the 1990s?  Laugh out LOUD!  There were NO great songs in the 90s, well, except for Beck.”

So once the 400 discs have been whittled down to 274, it’ll be time to start the Big Burn.  I read where, in some parts of the world, trained monkeys harvest coconuts from treetops.  So how hard would it be for a monkey to insert a disc, press “Yes,” and repeat 274 times?  Easy.  Guess I’ll just need to have a crap-ton of bananas on hand.

Don’t get me wrong, I hate these waiter dreams.  They’re so ridiculous and frustrating that I wonder why I spend precious brain cells creating them, being terrified in them, and losing sleep because of them.  But I thought it might be interesting if some of you ex- or current foodservers might have these same nightmares I have.

WHO ARE YOU?

This, the squirreliest of all my nightmares, usually occurs at Chili’s, my first waiter job.  In this dream, I walk into the restaurant filled with dumb nostalgia; “I can’t believe I’m really back!  I’m really here and I have my first shift!”

The hostess points to my section and tells me I have tables.  As I greet my first two-top, it occurs to me that I have no idea what is on the menu, and that I’ve received zero training for this first shift.  Yet, the people order two Miller Lites – which is doable – so I set off to find the bar.

Here’s where the trouble begins.  I walk up to the computer terminal where orders are punched in.  I have no idea what my ID number is (required to log in).  So I look around a sea of waiters and waitresses – none of whom I recognize – and I say, “UM, WHERE’S THE MANAGER?”  A manager-looking person comes up to me and says, “Who are you?”  I respond, “I’m Jeff, I used to work here and now I’m back.  What’s my ID number?”

As we languish by the terminal, I notice that I have 2 more tables in my station.  They’re looking around for me.  I don’t have an ID number, and the manager doesn’t know who I am!  He finally punches me in, but I didn’t remember the number.

I go back to my station and take two more drink orders and an appetizer order at the first table.  I come back with a fistful of tickets, and no way to ring them up.  It’s been about 10 minutes and I haven’t even delivered drinks to the table!  That’s when the terror ramps up (OMIGOD I’M IN THE WEEDS!) and I wake up thanking God I’m not back in the profession.

DISTANT, DISAPPEARING SECTION

This pulse-inflating dream happened again recently.  I am working again at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse in Nashville, TN.

As usual, I have no problem taking orders at my first table.  But as I walk out of the section to fetch drinks, I realize I’m walking in a shopping mall.  After striding briskly for two full minutes, I reach the bar to get my drinks.  This is magical, because I haven’t rung them up.  Apparently I’ve received some karmic redemption from the first scenario.

But now I’m in trouble.  I have a tray of drinks, and I’m double-timing it because I know my station’s way far away.  So I race past Payless, Cinnabon, FootLocker, and Hot Topic.  I get back to where I think my station is, but it’s gone.  ”Swell,” I ponder angrily, “Ruth’s Chris has morphing stations now!”  After clambering around everywhere I find my table . . . but somehow my tray of drinks is gone.  It’s been 15 minutes easy, and I am fawning with apology.  ”Oh God, I am so sorry!”  Of course I’ve been given more tables now, and thankfully my 202/159 blood pressure wakes me up.

NECK HIGH WEEDS

The third dream is the restaurant equivalent of the Alamo.  In this peculiar situation, I’m the only waiter in the building.  The only other people there are the general manager, the fry cook, and the hostess.

It’s 10:59 a.m. and the crowd outside the door is reminiscent of a Who concert circa 1978.  It’s as if all the other restaurants in town have closed, and by God, Chili’s is open for lunch.  As 11:00 arrives, the mob pours in and seats itself.  Within 10 seconds, all of the tables (roughly 42) are occupied, and there are 50 more people waiting to be seated.

As I scurry to strap on my apron, the General Manager comes running toward me, donned in his own apron, shouting, “Jeff, you take ‘Smoking’, I’ll take ‘Non’!!!

The me in the dream doesn’t realize how absurd this is, so I charge madly toward the tables, who are all shouting their orders at once.

This is where my wife swats me awake, and I am eternally grateful.

WHAT DID I MISS?

Former foodservers!  I’m sure I’ve missed several themes on these waiter nightmares.  Foreign languages, quicksand, zombies, nudity . . .Please share your dreams in the comments!

In the meantime, sleep well.