I also have no memory of being wheeled in to the recovery room, where I was put next to Abby, and we held hands, and I thanked her for the beautiful gift of life she’d given me. “I’m alive,” I apparently said to her. “Are you alive?”
And I have no memory at all of waking up for the first time in my hospital room, with my friends and family around me. In fact, the first clear post-operation memory I have is of the following morning, when I awoke, looked down to see the incision at the base of my stomach, and discovered that I’d had my very first Brazilian bikini wax courtesy of Cedars-Sinai’s ace surgical team. I was Steven Cojocaru from the neck up, and Dakota Fanning from the waist down.
CHAPTER 6
Dude, Where’s My Catheter?
I’d had a pep talk with myself before I went into the hospital. I was not going to raise my usual ridiculous, royal demands. I promised myself, no checking the thread count on the hospital sheets; nary a complaint about the channel selection on the television or the sandpaper towels; not a squeak about not being able to ring up for French onion soup and a banana-espresso milkshake at two in the morning.
But mere hours after my epic surgery, all these vows vanished. Eyes at half-mast, speaking in morphinized tongues, I was wheeled into my hospital room. I don’t remember much, but Shari later told me that my gravelly, drug-addled voice immediately boomed out from the bed: “This room is disgusting.”
In regressive therapy, I can call it up now: My room was the size of a voting booth, and meat-locker cold. It was painted a ravishing new color of mucus that’s not yet in Ralph Lauren’s color palette for DuPont. The sliver of a grimy window offered a view straight into a construction site, where jackhammers were pounding. Just on the other side of the wall, steel girders were being pummelled together.
Barely coherent, I buzzed for the nurse.
“Yes?” she said, over the intercom.
“I need to change my room,” I apparently told her. “This room is not acceptible. I’m moving within the hour. And oh, bring me some Vicodin on ice.”
If healing is a spiritual process, I thought, then how could I possibly heal here? Maybe it was the drugs, but I had a sick obsession with my accommodations, maybe because I knew the best kept secret in town: That Cedars-Sinai has its very own enclave, a pied à terre for VIPs—the fabled and hush-hush Club Floor.
There, the rooms aren’t just rooms, they are suites worthy of the Four Seasons, with million-dollar panoramic views of Hollywood. On the Club Floor, you get polished wood floors, cozy couches for lounging, and a dining room table should you want to read the trades in your bathrobe while feasting on eggs Benedict with hollandaise. Best of all are the boudoirs with lighted mirrors, with more megawattage than Jessica Simpson’s bicuspids.
A C-section will get you to the Club Floor, if you’re a VIP. So will cholera, a flesh-eating virus, or a wandering spleen. A kidney transplant, however, will not get you there: All transplant patients—whether they have lost a kidney or a lung or a heart—are ensconsed on the Transplant Floor, where the transplant specialists are.
Certainly, I was extremely grateful to be alive, and to be on any floor, bottom line. But shamefully, as much as I tried to suppress and hide the diva in me, I sickly, inappropriately, got competitive. If Gwen Stefani’s uterus was on the Club Floor, why couldn’t my kidney? Why was I in steerage, stuck with the graham crackers?
Abby’s kidney had taken to my body immediately. Hearing this, the night after my transplant, I experienced a pure shot of joy—I had a new kidney in me! I had arrived at the other side of this illness: I felt like I had sailed across the treacherous Pacific in a canoe and managed to land safely on the beaches of Hawaii in time for happy hour. But I didn’t have time to break out the champagne and the kidney shaped ice cream cake from Baskin-Robbins. There was work to be done: I had to heal.
Lying there in the hospital bed, the reality of my situation hit me. I was hooked up to a half-dozen machines—an EKG monitored my heart, and a blood pressure monitor squeezed my arm every fifteen minutes, keeping me from getting in a good nap. I had an IV, an oxygen tube in my finger, and a catheter jammed into my John Steinberg. A constant stream of nurses and doctors trudged in and out, jotting notes, staring at machines, taking down numbers. They all wore face masks—my immune system had been compromised by the kidney transplant and they didn’t want any germs to endanger the vulnerable new kidney—which made me realize how precarious my situation really was.
And I was in excruciating pain. I could barely sit up: I felt like I had been run over by a Yukon. I was bandaged, so I couldn’t see the incision that stretched across my abdomen, but even through the fog of painkillers I could feel the stabbing pain. I couldn’t even adjust myself to get more comfortable: Any body movement at all was unbearable.
My first night in the hospital, I was too terrified to be alone: I insisted that the nurse roll cots into my room so that Shari and my mother could stay with me, and my father slept in the waiting room just outside. Something had shifted, both physically and emotionally, when I was on that operating table, and I was still terrified by what I had become. I left the surgery with a new identity: I was now a patient, a transplantee. I had joined a new club.
The second Abby was allowed to get out of bed, the day after the surgery, she came to visit me. The nurse brought her in a wheelchair. It struck me that Abby looked like a woman who had just given birth: She had a glow to her. Her eyes were lit up and sparkling. I had never seen her smile like that, a beautiful, peaceful, happy, fulfilled smile. Even though she was in pain, her spirits were very high. And within minutes, we were cracking jokes and giggling, defusing our pain with humor.
My nurse, Dorina, told me what was up. She was a no-nonsense kind of lady. “We need to get you walking,” she said, when she came in to see me on Friday night. “We have to wake up your organs, because they’ve been sleeping for a very long time. Walking is one of the keys to recovery.”
On Saturday morning, Dorina hooked up my portable IV, and Shari and I went for our first walk. I realized, quickly, how we take things for granted—things like walking, or going to the bathroom. Suddenly, I could do neither.
“Concentrate on your breathing,” Shari told me, as we inched down the hall. “It will distract you from the pain.” Trust me: When you are in that much pain, nothing can distract you, but I didn’t stop, and I didn’t rest in chairs along the way. I was proud of myself for sticking with it.
My commitment to my recovery was one thing, but living with a catheter was another: I wanted that thing out of my body. “It’s robbing me of my manhood!” I complained to Dorina. “I might never be able to use my penis again. What if it leaves me with a deformed, lopsided peter? What if I get an erection and the catheter pops out and into a nurse’s eye?” Dorina, however, would have none of it: My urine was one of the best ways that they had to measure how fast I was recovering, and nurses arrived several times a day to examine its color and quantity. A full bucket was cause for celebration: It meant my kidneys were functioning. So instead I made it my goal to have the nicest urine of anyone on the floor: It had to be yellow, with a hint of marigold.
To amuse ourselves, Shari and I had come up with nicknames for everyone on the staff. There was the Troll, a squat little nurse who harassed me constantly about what I wanted to eat for lunch. The nurse with the untamed mess of fried, bleached-blonde platinum hair and bleeding red lipstick was immediately dubbed Courtney Love. The male nurse with the Russian accent and the piercing blue eyes was Mikhail Baryshnikov. The only people who escaped our nicknames were Dr. Jordan, and Jenny, my kidney coordinator: They were exempt, because they were perfect. They loved their resident diva, and I did everything I could to entertain them (and myself).
Grimly wiling the hours away, I looked at them for distraction and validation. They would come in and ooh and aah, proudly, that the color was coming back into my face. What they didn’t know was that their little medical minx got up just a few minutes early
on those days—maybe, around 3:45 a.m.-ish—and put on just a touch of brightening makeup…just a smidge, really. Just some sheer fluid foundation. Plus a little Stephane Marais concealer. A little bit of Dermalogica eye cream, Chanel mascara in Noir, Nars blush in Orgasm. Some M•A•C hush luminizer painted on top of my cheekbones, with a touch of Clarins bronzer. On my eyes? Just a drop of color: Anastasia eyebrow pencil, eyebrow brush, and world-famous eyebrow gel. Oh, and three different eyeshadows: a rainbow courtesy of Dior, Lorac, and Laura Mercier. A dusting of powder by Bobbi Brown. Face primer by Shiseido. Fake mink eyelashes by Shu Uemura. And finally, topping it all off: nostril shine diminisher by Pinkie Swear.
I might not have bothered going to all the effort, because other than the nurses and the kidney team, no one else was allowed to visit me: My doctors were concerned about the germs visitors might carry in from the outside world, and I was basically quarantined. Only my family was coming to visit; even Abby was gone, having been released from the hospital after only two days. I had visions of bringing the party to me—maybe grilling up some baby back ribs and wieners in my hospital room, hosting a potato sack race and an open bar, but that was not to happen. I wasn’t even allowed flowers in my room. Instead, my room became Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory: It seemed like half of Brentwood had sent chocolate macaroons, chocolate bagels, chocolate menorahs. Other people sent balloons, so many balloons that we began to fear that we would asphyxiate from them. (I donated them all to the children’s ward downstairs, where they would be better appreciated.)
I was hungry for human contact, but part of me was happy that no one could come visit: I didn’t want people to see me as less than I was, so vulnerable and sick. Despite putting forth my best face for the staff, the truth was that I was emotionally drained and ached all over. Thank God for the most beautiful thing in the world: the morphine drip. I was pushing that button way before my next allotment. Ten seconds after I got one dose, I would push it again to no avail. And again. And again. I wanted to be numb: I wanted a holiday from emotional pain, I wanted to feel light and floaty. In my opinion, there is no nobility in pain; there’s nothing heroic about saying I’ll live with it and suffer. No, I’m too much of a wuss for that. I’d take a morphine drip for a papercut if I could.
The walks grew a little easier—feeling better, I’d swapped out my bathrobe for the cashmere sweatsuit—but they were always desperate, dark moments. When I ventured out to walk I couldn’t avoid the other patients. I was surrounded by ailing patients waiting for liver and lung transplants, patients whose lives were draining away from them. I could see it in their skin and in their eyes, and it haunted me. I could hear the lung cancer patients hacking nonstop. I didn’t want to look: I didn’t want to see it. I was just beginning to cope with my illness, and I couldn’t handle anyone else’s. I had to get home.
The third night of my stay at Cedars-Sinai, Shari and I “attended” the Golden Globes. Shari had seen how visibly devastated I was not to be on that red carpet, and she gleefully suggested that we have our own Golden Globes party right there in room 603C. I felt like a child invited to a birthday party with ponies, a carousel ride, and pink cotton candy. One special privilege at Cedars-Sinai—regardless of what floor you’re on—is the “deluxe menu.” This is a glamorous a la carte meal, as decadent as anything that you might be served at a chic restaurant in the Left Bank of Paris. Tonight was the night, we decided, to splurge: With my doctor’s permission, we ordered filet mignon and potato souffle. For dessert we had, hands-down, the world’s richest chocolate cake. I knew I was eating better than the attendees of the Golden Globes with their rubber banquet chicken. Shari took the edge off with a bouqueted glass of crisp French sauvignon blanc. I relished my sparkling apple cider; in my mind, I was swilling Louis Roederer Cristal 1990 Krug.
Our meal was rolled in on a special cart, decorated with a tablecloth and freshly cut calla lilies. “It’s Versailles a la carte!” I beamed. As we tore into the freshly baked baguette, and watched the actresses swan by in their dresses on the television set, we could pretend we were on the red carpet with them. Lucky Shari got a blow-by-blow critique of the gowns floating by—her own personal Cojo’s Top Five Best and Worst. As much as it hurt to raise my hand with an IV needle jabbed into my forearm, I applauded Uma in her light-as-air white goddess gown and screamed out, “Celestial! Quelle Grandeur!” I got a muscle spasm in my neck when Nicole Kidman desecrated the red carpet in a one-shouldered feathered monstrosity. “Someone feed some bread crumbs to that runaway cockatoo!” I bellowed.
On Tuesday morning, after five nights in the hospital, I was released. Dr. Jordan came by first, checked my vital signs, and bade me farewell. “Jenny is going to come by before you leave,” he told me. “She needs to teach you how to take your drugs.”
This is something I hadn’t considered before. In the hospital, they had been constantly giving me drugs, but I had no idea what they were. How hard can it be? I thought. I’ve been known to take codeine to soothe the anguish of a bad, patchy spray tan. When Jenny arrived in my room early that afternoon, she had a bag of pills with her that was the size of a Goyard weekend bag. I shut off One Life to Live and yawned as she sat down next to me. My brain was already preparing the celebratory bath I planned to take when I got home.
“These are your drugs,” Jenny said. “And you are going to have to start taking them, on your own. It’s a whole progam, and you have to be prepared, it’s a lot of work. I’m here to take you through it.”
Antirejection pills, she explained, are immunosuppressive drugs designed to affect your immune system so that it doesn’t reject a new kidney, specifically, by suppressing your white blood cells. And then she showed me the list: Pages of handwriting, covered with lines and graphs and columns, lists of times and dosages, names of pills. First, I was to get up and take two antirejection pills on an empty stomach. I had to wait half an hour for them to get into my blood stream. Then I had to hurry and shovel down breakfast, and then, on a full stomach, take the secondary pills. By midmorning, I would be gobbling handfuls of pills: two kinds of blood pressure medication, cholesterol medication, calcium pills, pills for gout. There were enormous quantities of steroids. There were certain pills that had to be taken before lunch, and then more, immediately after lunch. Late in the afternoon I was to take two different kinds of syrup. And then the whole process would happen again at dinnertime.
I was about to tinkle in my pants. No matter how much the doctors had warned me about the lifelong commitment to antirejection pills, I had thought it would be no big deal: a couple pills washed down with tequila before I headed out to the clubs. But the chart she gave me looked like the seating chart of the Vanity Fair post-Oscars party. As I looked at it, it just became one big blur, and I started to get a sick feeling in my stomach. My head started spinning. It’s too much, I can’t memorize it, I thought.
This was going to be my life? This was horrific. It was a full-time job. I would need to go to pharmaceutical college to understand it.
“It’s important that you are compliant,” Jenny emphasized. “There’s no margin for error. You cannot miss your antirejection pills.” Compliant is a big buzzword in the kidney world. There are lots of patients who do not take their drugs, do everything wrong, don’t exercise, and lose their kidneys as a result. The doctors don’t want to waste their time and valuable resources on uncooperative and irresponsible patients.
When Jenny left, Shari and I just looked at each other. “How am I going to do this?” I said. “The only thing I can think, Shari, is that you are going to have to leave your family for a couple years, and your job, your tenure, and move to LA to be my personal pharmacist.”
When I left Cedars-Sinai that morning, I had mixed emotions. I was excited that I was going home. I kept reminding myself that I was a walking miracle. But there were a lot of question marks floating around my head, a lot of fear coursing through my veins: What was in store for me? What was going to happen with my life?
Was I going to be a pill-dependent prisoner to this disease?
The nurse wheeled me out to my parents’ car in a wheelchair, as I clutched the enormous bag of pills. I slid into the backseat and lay down.
“We’re going home!” my mom beamed. “I’m so excited. Aren’t you excited, darling?”
With my friend Linda following in her car, and more friends and relatives trailing behind, it was a motorcade worthy of the Maharaja of Bengali. With a clanging bell in one hand and a bullhorn in the other, my mother had no problem sending pedestrians scurrying: “Precious cargo coming through!” A woman in a van refused to clear the way for our car, and my mother popped her head out of the sunroof and screamed: “Move out of the way! Did your famous son just have a kidney transplant!?”
My mother’s chirping enthusiasm filled up the empty space that my silence left in the car. The bag of pills was heavy in my lap. I looked at it and sighed. I closed my eyes and imagined throwing the pills out the car window, one by one, as we drove toward home. I could almost see the pharmaceutical trail I would leave behind, and the delicious sight of those dreaded capsules being flattened by a Proactiv-using punk in a banana-yellow Hummer, as he rolled obliviously down the Hollywood streets.
CHAPTER 7
Coping with Concealer
I may have been released from Cedars-Sinai, but I was moving directly to another hospital: Cojocaru Clinic, a maximum-security facility with two elderly Jews on guard and a moat made of chocolate-chip cake. I had two months—minimum—of quarantined recovery at home before I could even contemplate going back out into the world again. I still could hardly walk, I couldn’t lift anything more than a toothbrush, and I could barely sit up. Because I was still susceptible to germs, my house had been sanitized. I was allowed only limited outside visitors, and the only times I could leave home were for my hospital checkups. Even then, I had to wear a hospital mask.
Glamour, Interrupted Page 6
