I began to notice strange physical symptoms. There were traces of blood in my urine. I would wake up in the middle of the night with horrible cramps in my feet. And no matter how much sleep I got, I was tired all the time—once I caught myself almost falling asleep behind the wheel of my car during rush hour. My body wasn’t listening to my mind’s staunch commands to ignore the enemy incursion: It was insisting that I take the plunge and call a doctor.
That fall, I finally picked up the phone to call the kidney specialist that my doctor had recommended. I had bought as much time as I could afford. This was the moment of reckoning.
“You are very late in the game,” the kidney specialist, Dr. Moss, gravely intoned, the first time I met with him. “Your kidney function is dangerously low. Maybe, if you are lucky, you have six or eight months, tops, before your kidneys fail. I wouldn’t bet on a year.”
It was as if I’d been thrown naked into the Arctic Sea. Suddenly I thought I could feel my rotting kidneys for the very first time. “What would happen if I don’t get a kidney by then?”
“You are looking at two possible scenarios,” he said. I was either going to have to get a kidney transplant immediately, or, once my kidneys began to go, I would need to go on dialysis. Dialysis is a life support procedure that filters waste from your blood and excess fluid from your body when your kidneys can no longer do it themselves: I could spend the rest of my life hooked up to a machine.
Dr. Moss promptly put me on medication: I was anemic. He talked about low white blood cells, iron deficiencies, calcium supplements, potassium levels. He stabbed me with needles. He took blood tests and urine samples galore. He told me to make an appointment at the kidney transplant clinic at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in West Hollywood, immediately.
I had entered Kidneyland. I was officially a patient now. Somehow, I had managed to walk through a door: WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF SICKNESS. We have air-conditioning and HBO.
CHAPTER 3
Welcome to Hotel Cedars-Sinai
At most hospitals in America, you wouldn’t find paparazzi and movie stars hanging around the triage tables, but Cedars-Sinai is not your average hospital. At Cedars, valet parking is practically included in the bill and filet mignon is served instead of lime jello. This is where Britney Spears has her epidurals administered, Lindsay Lohan recovers from “exhaustion,” and Brad Pitt is treated for obscure exotic viruses. It is, in a word, The Hollywood Hospital.
And I imagined myself as its latest megastar patient. I had deluded myself into believing that my very presence at Cedars-Sinai would create nothing short of pandemonium. On the way to the hospital, I built up my own self-importance in my head until I was convinced I was Madonna and that I would need a disguise to hide from the paparazzi. I had visions of a beekeepers hat, seven veils and a feathered mask worthy of the Venetian Ball dancing through my head. I could practically hear the buzz about my presence tearing through Cedars-Sinai, the gossip bouncing from nurses station to nurses station, spreading like a conjuctivitus plague in a preschool. The rumor would bounce through gynecology, rev past urology, veer right at geriatrics, and torpedo its way straight toward nephrectomy.
I darted through the hospital on my way to the kidney clinic with the collar of my McQueen leather trench coat turned up, hidden behind humongous black sunglasses, anticipating the throngs of stalkarazzi with 300 mm telephoto lenses around every corner. No one was there, of course. But imagining myself as the first lady of Malawi was simply a distracting fantasy, a way to forget what I was really here to do.
But in all seriousness, secrecy was important to me at that moment. I was terrified that news of my illness would end up in the media, maybe even meriting a column inch in Women’s Wear Daily. I still hadn’t told any of my family or friends about my illness. I was still just taking baby steps with accepting my plight—and I certainly didn’t want them to learn about it from seeing it on TV.
This maiden visit to the kidney clinic was my first foray as a sick person in public since I’d been diagnosed. When I walked into the waiting room, I was still absolutely horrified. There were curious eyeballs everywhere. I felt, surely everyone in the room knew my white blood cell count, my sperm count, the exact size and shape of my kidneys, and my urine output.
Even without the fear of exposure, I was on the verge of a panic attack: Today was the day I was going to have to take the next step toward dealing with my failing kidneys. I was inching closer to major surgery.
But as divine fate would have it, I was met at the door of the kidney clinic by an associate who we’ll call Lorenzo. He was the man who would do my intake and walk me through the introductory process. Wait! I know that shirt he’s wearing, I thought. It’s last spring’s Banana Republic button-down in citrine, and look at those darling little Cole Haan loafers. His tan was hazmat orange from too many weekends at the White Party in Palm Springs. I could have sworn he was wearing the new glitter plum lip liner from M•A•C I thought: A sister! Here! Everything is going to be just fine.
Lorenzo knew instinctively what I needed. Like a mother hen, he immediately whisked me out of sight of the other patients. He may have only been five feet tall and barely 120 pounds but he had a fiercely protective glare and didn’t hesitate to swat away anyone who looked in my direction. When we were safely alone in the elevator, he turned to me and girlishly giggled. “I know I shouldn’t say this, but I know who you are, and I just looooooooovvvvvvvvve you!”
It was as if I had breathed for the first time since my diagnosis. I had met an ally and confidante. Someone to lean on. After months of suffering alone, it was a gift to have met someone who was so kind and compassionate and relatable. Someone who got me.
“Oh thank you!” I blushed. “And I am fainting over the color of your shirt!”
Lorenzo brought me to Dr. Stanley Jordan’s office and started to leave. Don’t leave me don’t leave me don’t leave me, I was thinking. But his eyes said that it was time to cut the umbilical cord.
Dr. Jordan’s cramped office was decorated in post-modern medical paper chic—towers of files, mounds of paperwork—and was devoid of any of the trappings of your average Beverly Hills physician, not even a leather club chair or a gold-framed Harvard diploma on the wall. It certainly didn’t seem big enough for the head honcho of kidneys in Hollywood. (I later found out that there’s a whole hierarchy of body parts at the hospital: Hearts are A-list, very Brad Pitt; and lungs are also all the rage, soooo George Clooney. But kidneys? Straight C-list. Think Carrot Top.)
As I sat there, I decided Dr. Jordan must be an ogre. After all, he would be in charge of the mutilation and destruction of my beautiful kidneys, taking away my last vestige of innocence and bringing me into the pits of surgical hell. I imagined him as a hunchback with long claws and beady little eyes, a crooked toothless slit of a mouth, knife scars across his face, maybe a hook for an arm. Worst of all, I imagined him in polyester pants with the biggest sartorial offense of all time, three pens in the pocket of his lab coat. I almost believed that he was going to rip my kidneys out then and there.
The door opened with a squeak of rusty hinges, and I jerked around and looked up to face my tormentor. And there was a dead ringer for a young Tom Brokaw standing in front of me. This man had the kindest eyes—and, even better, a flattering haircut (the number one requirement of any person who was going to be overseeing my surgery). He was wearing a lab coat—no pens!—and his pants appeared to be an acceptible lightweight all-seasons wool.
“I’m Dr. Jordan,” the man said, offering his hand. As I looked in his eyes, it was the patient-doctor version of love at first sight.
Dr. Jordan was calm, warm, gracious, and immediately soothing. He looked at my kidney numbers and was extremely patient about my questions, which was a good sign. At the end of the nitty-gritty discussion, he got very real.
“This is fixable,” he said, leaning forward and looking me in the eyes. “This is treatable. We have an over ninety percent success rate with our
transplants.”
Fixable? Fixable? You mean, not deadable? Not last-ritesable? The word bounced around my cerebellum, did cartwheels in my head. Fixable? It was like fireworks were going off. I feasted on the word fixable as though it was a medium-rare filet mignon in a lovely reduction sauce.
I’m Mr. Cynical. Usually I meet somebody and by the time they’ve barely said hello, I have had them Googled, fingerprinted, and followed by the FBI for a few weeks. But something special happened in Dr. Jordan’s office, something extraordinary. There was an aura about Dr. Jordan that was so truthful and pure and mystical that without hesitation, I believed him.
“Howfastcanwedoit?” I blurted out, knowing that there weren’t very many miles left on my kidney. I was petrified that he was going to say that it could take years.
“Things could move quickly,” he said. “If you find a donor, we work fast. We want you to have the transplant as soon as possible: That’s our goal. It could be a matter of months.”
But first, he said, I needed to find a new kidney. Even though everyone is born with two kidneys, you only need one functioning kidney to survive, but procuring that one kidney is a formidable challenge. I was already on the national waiting list for an organ donor: Dr. Moss had put me on the list immediately after I was diagnosed. But the odds of getting a kidney soon weren’t in my favor: According to the National Kidney Foundation, at any given time, roughly sixty-three thousand U.S. patients are waiting for an organ transplant. Only sixteen thousand or so transplants take place every year. Of those, roughly half of the kidneys come from cadavers: You die in a car crash and your kidneys go to people like me. But there are simply not enough of those kind of organ donors. The wait for a kidney in Los Angeles was five to seven years—and some people, tragically, had been waiting even longer for the right match. The plight of those thousands of people outraged me: Were we living in a third world country?
Because of this shortage, in recent years, doctors like Dr. Jordan had been promoting a new solution. “You should find a living donor,” he told me. “Go to your friends and family and see if one of them is willing to donate a kidney to you. If you are fortunate, you can get the surgery as soon as possible.” In fact, a transplant using a living donor would be more likely to be successful: Kidneys taken from cadavers had a five-year survival rate of 63 percent, while living donor kidneys survived 76 percent of the time.
“What happens when I get the new kidney?” I asked. “Will I still be able to work? Will I be an invalid forever? Am I going to be healthy? Will my life ever go back to being normal? When can I highlight my hair?”
Dr. Jordan smiled gently. “People who have transplants can live long healthy lives. I have one patient who recently went trekking in the Himalayas.”
For months, in my head, I had written the script of my kidney transplant as a horror film: Something like Bela Lugosi’s classic The Body Snatcher, where helpless victims are killed by doctors who want to use their bodies for evil experiments. Now I was here, and where was the ugliness that I had feared? Where was the whiff of formaldehyde? Where was Bela with his bloody knife? Where was the big tank where they kept the live kidneys?
Here was reality, and the lights were still on: There were no gargoyles, no wolves roaming the corridors with bloody body parts hanging from their fangs, no ominous lightning cracking outside the window. My tragedy had faces now, and they didn’t bear any resemblance to Bela or Boris Karloff. It had Dr. Jordan’s empathetic face. It had Lorenzo with his little pink barrettes skipping and singing selections from Mamma Mia beside me.
Lorenzo next whisked me to the in-house social worker’s office. She needed to make sure that I was emotionally stable enough to handle the operation, and I gave her a performance worthy of Tori Spelling in the Lifetime TV classic Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?
She took in the whole visage—from the gold metallic Dries man bag to my Sex Pistols Anarchy in the UK T-shirt—and pursed her lips. “Would you describe yourself as a stable person?” she asked. “Have you ever had mental health issues? Would people say you have a temper? On what occasions do you raise your voice? Do you own a BB gun? How do you feel about kittens? Do you like to hang out in post offices?”
“Who, me?” I replied, smiling serenely. “Stable? I just won the Zen Master of the Year prize at Gurmukh’s kundalini class.”
And then we had only one last ghost to wrestle with. I had to meet my surgeon, the fabled illustrious Dr. Louis J. Cohen.
I was sitting in Dr. Cohen’s office nervously flipping through the latest issue of Kidney Monthly, absorbed in an article called “Sex Secrets of a Kidney Transplantee” when Dr. Cohen walked in the room. It was as if he came with a soundtrack of harps and singing cherubs. My surgeon—who would have my life in his hands—looked like the vision I’d always had of the Almighty. He had long white hair, like feathered angel wings. Was it central casting who sent him? It was almost like the Lord himself was here to save me.
“I’m so relieved that you don’t look like an old conservative doctor,” I told him. “You seem young to me, with that groovy long hair. I feel like you could come out and see some bands with me and my friends at Spaceland.”
He laughed. “I’m not that young. I was a surgeon in Vietnam.”
Talk about breaking the ice. “Vietnam?” I repeated.
“I was on the battlefield, performing surgeries on the spot. It was gruesome.” This moved me beyond words: I imagined him on the battlefield, saving lives, and felt fortunate that my kidneys would be in his special blessed hands. He really was an experienced surgeon, to say the least. I was humbled.
The energy of the Cedars-Sinai staff was inspiring: It charged me up. For a split second, I felt as if I’d already been cured by their optimism. I left the kidney clinic that day with a sense of new resolve. I’m not waiting anymore, I thought, and I’m not going to cower anymore. I was going to get a kidney transplant as soon as possible. A warrior had come alive inside of me.
I was still in my prime, I reminded myself. I had more to do: many more dresses to lovingly critique, more blowouts to micromanage, more celebrities to accost on the red carpet. I’d never sung in front of an audience of thousands, kayaked through the rainforest, or dived out of a plane. And, of course, my number-one goal was yet to be fulfilled: I still hadn’t slept with a celebrity!
It was time to get a new kidney and move on with my life. All I needed to do now was find one.
CHAPTER 4
Tyra’s $10 Million Ta Tas and
One Priceless Kidney
Supermodels don’t get any smarter at twenty-five thousand feet above sea level. “You kind of like walk up on the runway like you’re kind of fierce, but it’s like a controlled fierceness,” model laureate Tyra Banks expounds on the complex art of parading around in public in lingerie.
There will be no meals served today on the Victoria’s Secret jet that is carrying me, Tyra, Gisele, Heidi, Adriana and Alessandra down to Miami for the next stop of the Angels in America tour, but Gisele is generously sharing her diet tonic water with me. I am the only media figure who has been annointed with an invitation to bring my camera crew on board to record this historic journey. I am here to probe the minds of the world’s most famous professional poseurs, who are shilling the greatest invention since the ceramic flatiron, Victoria’s Secret’s new holiday gift bra.
It’s November, nearly two months since my visit to the Cedars-Sinai kidney center, and I feel like I have a split personality (with only one wardrobe between them). One minute, it’s Mammaries over Miami, and the next minute I’m caught up in the donor-finding process that is taking place on terra firma. Things are happening so quickly that I can barely process what’s going on.
“OK, it’s time for a serious question.” I cozy up to Heidi Klum: “Let’s talk cup sizes.”
But Tyra barges in to our conversation before my little German strudel can respond, and flops a bra down in my lap. But this is not just any brassiere: It’s the new
Heavenly 70 Fantasy Bra, encrusted with 2,900 pavé-set diamonds, and with a price tag of $10 million.
“This is shaped exactly to the specifications of my body,” says Tyra. “I had to get a mold done—like, had to sit there half-naked in front of a man I didn’t know.”
I have to put Tyra on hold because Gisele has summoned me for an audience. Gisele’s brow is furrowed, as if she is pondering a serious thought, and I stop, waiting for whatever deep observation is about to fall out of her mouth. “You know,” she says. “I love french fries.”
I think I’ve had an aneurism. I want to bolt to the front of the plane, crack Tyra over the head with a seat tray, steal the diamond bra, parachute out of this plane, and go build a ten million dollar kidney center somewhere.
I dread landing in Miami, normally one of my favorite playgrounds, because I know that once I’m back on land I’m finally going to come clean to the world about my kidney disease. I can’t avoid it anymore: Before I boarded the plane, I found out that I might have found a potential donor.
Finding a kidney isn’t easy. You can’t order one online, or have it delivered in a basket of muffins. There is only one way to get a kidney from a living donor: You have to find someone who wants to give you theirs.
The success of a kidney transplant depends on how compatible the donor and recipient are: not just blood type, but also six different antigens (which stimulate the production of antibodies and fight off disease). When we met in September, Dr. Jordan had told me that my best shot at a donated kidney would be a close family member: My parents or my sister Alisa. Not only would they be the most willing to have their own healthy kidney removed for my sake, he suggested, but they would be the most likely match.
Glamour, Interrupted Page 3
