Glamour, Interrupted

by Steven Cojocaru

  After a day of this, my mother snapped out of it: it was enough bleakness, enough bathing in the dark. She made a special announcement: “No more grieving.” She had watched me fading away and something in her finally decided, “I can’t let him go into this with all of us in such bad shape.”

  My mother launched her full-scale Operation Sunshine mission. She summoned my friend Linda: “Bring Stinky over immediately.” I hadn’t seen my dog in two months—while I went in and out of the hospital, he had been living with Linda and Steve, their daughter Sophie, and their two poodles, Lucky and Chelsea. Living without him was like having a hole in my heart: I was pining for him. That afternoon, I went down to the hospital’s outdoor plaza, in my bathrobe and slippers and PJs, with hair that hadn’t seen a comb in a week. I sat on a bench in the garden, next to the lung cancer patients who were smoking (the hospital had generously provided ashtrays for them: I’m surprised they didn’t have a crack-smoking section), and waited for my dog to arrive.

  I don’t know what fences Linda jumped, but she somehow smuggled Stinky into that plaza. It was like a slow-motion scene out of Love Story: I could have sworn I heard violins. Stinky saw me, leaped into my arms, and then my Maltese started howling like I’d never heard him howl before. My heart exploded: It was a major reunion.

  That night, my mother decided that we were going to have a celebration in my room. We were all starving: I wasn’t keeping food down, my parents hadn’t eaten in weeks from anxiety. But mostly, we were hungry to be repaired, hungry for a respite from our suffering.

  So we had an in-room pizza party. This was a big no-no. On hemodialysis, I was on a very strict diet. I couldn’t eat tomatoes, avocados, or bananas, for fear of getting too much potassium in my blood; and milk and cheese were restricted for fear of a phosphorus overdose. I was being fed egg white omelettes—exactly three egg whites. Even my water was measured out, drop by drop.

  But I felt like the misery I was enduring had given me a Get Out of Jail Free card: I just didn’t care anymore. I had received my baby, sweet, keeping-me-alive kidney in January and here I was in June, and it was gone, poof. All that time, I’d been the model patient: I’m not one for rules, but I’d done everything to the letter. Not anymore. That night, it was everything be damned. If I was going to go down I was going to go down in a blaze of carbs and dairy and sugar and nicotine.

  In my bathrobe, I crawled my way to the elevator, and snuck down to the hospital plaza to smoke one last illicit cigarette. Wheezing and short of breath, I inhaled an entire pack. Then I went back upstairs, guzzled a liter of diet soda, devoured a pizza on my own, had two heaping pieces of chocolate cake.

  I felt sick afterward: My stomach had expanded, and I was bloated and depressed. Instead of a celebration, that meal suddenly felt like the Last Supper.

  I woke up after the nephrectomy with a flood of thoughts racing through my head: Once again, it was the pain, the depression, the sense of defeat. But one thought kept floating to the surface until I became fixated on it: What had happened to Annabelle? What had the surgeons done with the kidney when they took it out? With all that we went through, had she just been tossed away in a trash bag? Was she in a Dumpster? Was she in the Cedars-Sinai incinerator at this very moment?

  I called Dr. Jordan in, barely coherent. I realized I was crying. “Dr Jordan,” I said. “What happened to Annabelle?”

  He looked at me, confused. “Who?”

  “Annabelle! My kidney! What did you do with my kidney when you took her out?”

  He smiled, very gently. “The kidney has gone to pathology, where it will be studied. We’ll be using it to learn about the nature of this virus for future transplantees.”

  I was strangely comforted by this fact, and in the days to come, when I felt like I had hit bottom, I would sometimes think about that. The kidney had gone to a good place: It wasn’t for naught. I could see the bigger picture. In my mind, Annabelle deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for scientific medical research; I was already planning the oufit for the ceremony in Stockholm. Margiela, I thought.

  Another fashion miracle: I’d made it to the Hospital Ward A-list at last. Getting a kidney taken out had landed me on the Club Floor. Lindsay, schmindsay; Britney—whatever: Some divine intervention had decided I was getting to hop past the star-u-tants and net the ultimate in superstardom. I had landed in the Audrey Hepburn Memorial Suite. It seemed darkly poetic that fashion-obsessed me was in the same room where this style icon, a woman I had always worshipped, had spent her final days battling cancer.

  I went home with my parents at the end of June without a single functioning kidney to my name, and with the address of an outpatient dialysis center in Beverly Hills in my day planner. This dialysis center would be my new second home, a place I would be visiting three times a week, four hours a visit, until I finally found a new kidney to replace the one that I’d just lost. If that never happened, I’d be coming to this center for the rest of my life.

  At least it would be in a good neighborhood. It was right in the middle of Robertson Boulevard, Los Angeles’ shopping nirvana, kitty-corner from Kitson, where Paris Hilton and her friends blow their trust funds; and the organic juice bar where you can stop in for a $12 mango-wheatgerm smoothie with a boost of ginkgo biloba. I thought that the dialysis center would be like an annex of the Ivy: I’d get a $30 chopped salad along with some clean new blood.

  I walked into the dialysis center with a virgin eye, expecting—because of its location—muted lighting, chandeliers, zebra rugs, and gorgeous wallpaper, maybe some Lalique crystal figurines of kidneys. What I saw was worse than anything I could have dreamed of—and when I dream dark things, it’s Night of the Living Dead meets Apocalypse Now. If I’d thought dialysis was bad at the hospital, that was the La Prairie Spa at the Beverly Hills Hotel—the one downstairs with the beautiful peach damask wallpaper—compared to this.

  This place felt like a triage center in a war zone. It was one enormous room, with dozens of sick people sitting in old torn La-Z-Boy chairs, attached to machines. The place reeked of illness and medicine and blood. The dialysis machines made cold, computerized noises—beeping and clicking and rattling and buzzing. And everywhere I turned, patients—many elderly and very fragile—were moaning. An ambulance was ominously parked at the front entrance, with paramedics at the ready, waiting for someone to collapse. Adding to the grisly scene were the nurses, who wore paper hazmat suits with plastic shields. Standing in the doorway, it felt to me like the world had come to an end, and I was in a biological warfare recovery center.

  I was seeing all this through the eyes of someone who had been sheltered. Up until that point I had been alone in my hospital room with no one to measure myself against. Suddenly, I was surrounded by other kidney patients, and it was horrifying. I’ve learned since that people who are on dialysis long-term grow comfortable with the process: It’s a fact of life for them. They build a little community, they get to know the nurses, make friends over the years, and start kidney cliques. But I didn’t see the other dialysis patients as comrades yet; I didn’t want to even make eye contact with them, because I didn’t want to be one of them. I was in so much denial, so angry, that I needed to divorce myself from all this. So I put my blinders on and refused to speak to anybody. If someone smiled at me, I looked the other way. If I opened a crack in the door, I was afraid I’d be sucked in.

  “This is the most horrible place I have seen in my entire life, bar none,” I told my mother, as we walked through the center to my assigned machine. I clung to her like I was a barnacle. “I can’t do this.”

  This Romanian rock of Gibraltar held my hand while the nurse was hooking me up to the machine. My mother sat there for four hours, stroking my face, massaging my hands, as I slipped in and out of consciousness. I couldn’t read because I was seeing double: trying to read W magazine felt like tackling The Brothers Karamazov in its original Russian. I was too tired to do anything but sleep and watch the blood flow hypnotically back and
forth through the tubes until it put me in a trance. The smell of chemicals and blood was overwhelming, the worst kind of medicinal smell. I felt as if my body’s circuits had been fried, and my electrical system was going nuts. My feet burned like they were on fire, I had indescribable aches, and my body seemed to separate completely from my mind.

  As I lay there, feeling my worst, I suddenly thought of my last vacation in Paris. Of course, I went shopping and bought every French designer label. I bought a beret. I almost bought a jockstrap with a French flag on it. When I walked down the cobblestone streets in my Lanvin boots the smell of piping hot croissants wafted through my remodeled nostrils. I practically bathed in café au lait. I lost myself for hours in vintage jewelry stores on the Left Bank; in the loveliest park in Paris, the Place des Vosges in the funky Marais; and in the inspiring sight of older French women on the streets, carrying themselves so elegantly, the epitome of chic with their carefully coiffed hair and their artfully arrayed silk scarves.

  I lay there and remembered sitting in the front row of Chanel Couture during Paris fashion week, remembered going to a wild party for a YSL fragrance called NU, where a human fishbowl was full of seminude models, remembered my pilgrimage to the memorial for Princess Diana and getting lost in the Luxembourg Gardens. The beauty and glamour of Paris, for a moment, took the pain away.

  But as I sat plugged in to a dialysis machine, I suddenly feared that I’d never get back to Paris. I was going to be a prisoner for the rest of my life. I would be chained to this machine, living on pills, so sick that travel would be out of the picture. I turned to my mother: “Do you think I’ll ever go to Paris again?” I asked.

  “Of course, you are going to go to Paris,” she told me. “You’re going to get a new kidney, the doctor said your life is going to go back to normal. I promise you, you’ll go back to France.”

  The last time she had been in Paris, she told me, was when she was emigrating to Canada with my father, in the early 1960s. They were poor, staying in a slum neighborhood, and they could barely afford a baguette. Talk about perspective. Here I was on Robertson Boulevard, where at that very minute Beverly Hills princesses were dropping a thousand dollars on rhinestone flipflops and leather halter tops while their mothers with swollen lips and barely-recovered brow lifts were drinking mint juleps at the Ivy, pissing away time. But in the dialysis center, only yards away, people were being kept alive on machines. That point was not lost on me then, and it’s still not lost on me. To this day, when I drive by that corner my heart drops. I think about who is in there, that very second, trying to survive, watching the blood run out of their body, while Mrs. Synthetic Beak is getting wedge heels at Diavolina.

  When Shari returned to Montreal after my first transplant, we had planned a summer vacation in Los Angeles together. All spring, it had been the thing that kept my spirits up. In my delusional mind, my little kidney Annabelle was going to be in perfect shape six months after my transplant: I was going to be healed and slim again, my hair would be highlighted and my life would be jolly. Everything would be fine, and Shari and I would have a magic week of spa visits and shopping.

  I had no idea that would not be the case. When Shari arrived in early July, I was at my absolute weakest physically since this whole illness had begun. I hadn’t yet discovered that I was being overmedicated by my psychiatrist; I was doing hemodialysis three times a week; I was still recovering from the nephrectomy; and as a result I was aching, suffering from unbearable nausea and dizziness. I was a shell of myself.

  Shari took over babysitting duties. All that week, she washed and folded my unmentionables, sacrificed her Chanel nail polish scrubbing my bathtub, took Stinky for walks, and prepared me chef salads with her homemade Roquefort dressing (which truth be told, tasted like brake fluid). She drove me to my hemodialysis appointments and wasn’t embarrassed to be seen with me even though the fashion maven had become a fashion disaster: It was July and hot, but I was still wearing January’s hip-hop New York Street look, a black velour tracksuit. It was very Sopranos meets Missy Elliot: all that was missing was the big gold chains. With no ventilation, I was overheated in that outfit, but I was too sick and depressed to care. Shari would sit there with me and hold my hand as I did the dialysis. Together, we would joke about how we were going to start a nail polish line that replicated the color of the blood running through the tubes.

  My one goal for that week was to take Shari to the Louis Vuitton store to buy a purse. The way an old grandma offers you hard candy, I offer my girlfriends handbags: I have a hard time saying “I love you,” so my way of showing affection is Fendi. Purses are my Hallmark card, my currency. And in the middle of my delirium I had promised Shari a handbag as a thank-you for being there, for taking care of my parents, for getting on a plane every time there was a problem. Besides, Shari is a Pavlovian dog. If you wave a handbag in front of her you can get anything out of her. She would trek across the Serengeti for a tote.

  Every morning, I woke up hoping that that would be the day that I felt well enough to make the pilgrimage to Vuitton. Every day, it took all the energy I could muster just to make it to dialysis. Finally, at four o’clock on Shari’s last day in town, I roused myself from my fevered daze. “We’re going to go,” I announced. Sweating profusely, I took off the velour tracksuit and put on jeans, a white shirt, and a blazer. My feet were burning from the dialysis, I could barely move, but I’d promised her a bag and I was going to make it happen.

  When we walked in the door of Louis Vuitton, minutes before it closed for the day, I was dragging my feet. My stomach was so distended that the buttons were popping off my shirt; I had somehow managed to squeeze myself into a size 38 waist jeans that were viciously boring into my tender abdomen. Shari was barely suppressing her inner wild hyena: She was panting and drooling all over the purse counter.

  Suddenly, the smell of leather opened my nasal passages. My pounding headache vanished as I fondled a $1,770 Vuitton logo pet carrier. It was monograms, monograms, everywhere: I was hypnotized. Shari was trying to get my attention and show me bags, but it was too late: I was gone. In my monogrammed delirium, I abandoned Shari at the purse counter and raced through the store, my heart pounding, as I touched everything: scarves, shoes, billfolds, umbrellas, iPod holders. As I rubbed myself against the mannequins, it hit me that—other than the hospital gift shop—I hadn’t been in a store in months.

  That shopping trip, I realized, wasn’t just for Shari—it was also for me. When you are sick, you become so grateful of anything that gives you a flash of your healthy life. I needed to be in a retail store again and hear the humming meditative sound of credit card machines. I’d longed to be around avarice again, with all those materialistas under one roof, clawing over hugely overpriced luxury products. I couldn’t have been happier if I had had an audience with the Dalai Lama at the Louis Vuitton boutique in Tibet.

  Dialysis still wasn’t getting any easier; in fact, it was growing more unbearable every visit. I thought of spending the rest of my life in that place and wanted to throw myself under a bus on Sunset Boulevard.

  I called Dr. Jordan and told him I couldn’t do it anymore. “I can’t cope with this,” I told him. “I know what I’m capable of and not capable of. Are there any other options than going three times a week?”

  Dr. Jordan considered my question. “Yes,” he said. “Right now you are doing hemodialysis. But there’s another option called peritoneal dialysis. You do that kind at home. You have to do it every day; but I think you would be a really good candidate for it.” While hemodialysis filters your blood outside of your body in a machine, he explained, peritoneal dialysis filters your blood inside your body. If I chose to do this, I would have a permanent tube inserted into my stomach, and every night, while I slept, a small machine called a cycler would pump my stomach full of a dextrose solution that would clean my blood and then drain all the waste fluid out. Over the course of a night, the machine would do two of these “exchanges,” at four hours
per exchange, and in the morning I would have two bags of body waste to empty.

  Not every kidney patient is a candidate for peritoneal dialysis for a variety of reasons subject to their physical condition. It also isn’t recommended for everyone, since you’re doing it yourself at home and it requires extreme diligence and responsibility. There are a lot of risks and no margin for error. But I was willing to do anything to make my escape from the dialysis center.

  “Sign me up,” I told him.

  “I have to warn you,” Dr. Jordan continued. “Your stomach will be very distended. Everything gets pumped into your belly, and you will bloat like nothing you’ve ever seen. And if you aren’t extremely careful about being sterile, you can get peritonitis, which is an extremely lethal infection. And because you won’t be in a hospital you won’t be near doctors who can help you immediately if there’s a problem.”

  I didn’t hesitate. “Yes, no question about it. Anything to save me from going back to that place,” I said.

  But my other doctor, Dr. Moss, was totally opposed to the idea of peritoneal dialysis. “You’ve been talking about your vanity this whole time,” he told me when I called him to discuss it. “With peritoneal your stomach will retain liquid and you will bloat. There is no way around it. You will blow up.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said to him. “You’re now my stylist? Come on. I’ve been living in purgatory, and now I have a chance to get out. I don’t give a crap about my vanity now. I don’t care if I’m the size of the Beverly Center. Right now, this is a godsend. I’ll deal with the rest later.” And then I “fired” him for being the Grinch Who Stole Kidney.

  I was learning that doctors are not divine beings like my mother had always said. Doctors weren’t always right. Instead, I had found a great empowerment in the midst of my disease: Sometimes I was right.