Still, despite the tenuous nature of my life, I was crawling out of my skin to get out on the red carpet again. I wasn’t ready, physically or emotionally, but I felt like my career would be over if I didn’t. I hadn’t worked on the red carpet in almost a year; the closest I’d been was my remote Oscar appearance eight months earlier. It felt like I’d been gone for a millennium.
I felt that I had something to prove—to the world, and to myself. So at the end of August I decided to go on the Dialysis Tour. Stop one: the VMAs in Miami. Stop two: New York, to do a special for The Insider. Stop three: The Emmys in Los Angeles. Stop four: Chicago, for a follow-up appearance on Oprah. As always, I would be traveling with my pooch, my BlackBerry, a beauty supply store on wheels, and my camera crew. But this time, I would be bringing along a new assistant: My dialysis machine.
Hurricanes swept through Miami a few days before I got on a plane to go to the VMAs. They nearly cancelled the party. I called Shari in a panic: “What if there is a power failure because of the hurricane and I can’t plug my dialysis machine in? What if I get stranded in the middle of nowhere without my dialysis machine? If I miss even one day, the doctor says the toxins will build up in my body and make me sick. Should I even go?”
Shari told me I was making a mistake. “Put your health first!” She warned me. But I didn’t listen. I wanted to be busy and stimulated and occupied by the things I knew. I wanted to see celebrities in ill-fitting dresses and with botched boob jobs, leaking saline all over the red carpet.
I brought my dialysis machine on board the airplane with me, in a special wheeled carrier bag, along with a note from Doris explaining to security that I was a transplantee traveling with life-sustaining medical equipment. The actual bags of dialysis solution were supposed to be shipped to my hotel, but I couldn’t help thinking, What if the boxes don’t arrive at all? What will I do?
I carried my drugs with me in a plastic ziplock freezer bag. My entire clock was still set around when I had to take my pills, forty of them a day. There were syrups, powders to be mixed with water, ghastly tasting liquids that I took with a spoon. It was ironic: I hadn’t even been allowed to take aspirin as a child and now I’d become a walking pharmacy. Before, I could barely swallow a pill; now I felt like the Jenna Jameson of pill takers, deep-throating thirty pills in one gulp.
On the plane to Miami, I nearly gnawed apart the airplane safety card with anxiety. Fortunately, when I arrived at my hotel, I greeted the safely delivered boxes of dialysis equipment with the same glee that I once greeted bags of free premiere swag.
When my wake-up call rang the following morning, I got my real wake-up call: My posh hotel room had been transformed into a makeshift dialysis center, with syringes and pills bottles everywhere. The maid probably thought it was a travelling meth lab. I unplugged myself from the machine, emptied three bags of body waste down the drain of the beautiful marble tub. When I finished I took a shower, did a nutrient caviar hair mask, and let hair and makeup transform me into Mr. Red Carpet Fancy Pants. I was worried about being back on the red carpet, for the first time in almost a year. Would I be able to do my job after such a scarring, intense experience? Did I still have the same Chatty Cathy Cojo in me?
But it doesn’t take a lot of sense memory to dive back into philosophical discourse with Jessica Simpson about lip waxing. It wasn’t like I was leading a scientific inquiry into drug trials for parasitic infections. The truth was I slipped back into fluffdom so easily that it was alarming to me: I went from emergency rooms and hospitals and biopsies to speaking pig latin with Shakira in the blink of an eye. It kind of scared me how ingrained the superficial Hollywood bon vivant in me really was.
The stars were incredibly polite. Not one person mentioned my size—which was pretty generous, considering that I’ve eviscerated half of Hollywood. Instead, most of them showed genuine concern for my situation, even interrupting our interviews to quiz me: “How are you feeling? I’m glad you’re well!”
I was growing comfortable with being the Prince of PKD. Sure, I was weak and disoriented, and my feet weren’t quite on the ground. But even though I had been on a sabbatical, I still felt a part of it. I knew all the players on that carpet.
There was Gwyneth, walking down the red carpet, a breath of fresh air: Her husband, Chris Martin of Coldplay, was performing at the ceremony. Gwyneth had just had a baby and her lactating breasts were spilling out her top. She lit up when she saw me and pulled me aside to murmur in my ear. “Coj,” she whispered urgently. “You have to tell me: Are my boobs everywhere?” she asked.
Somewhere in her cleavage, I staked a flag. Cojo had landed.
CHAPTER 13
The Miracle
Kidney etiquette is very clear. You do not flat out ask someone to give you a kidney. You can’t put them on the spot like that. Instead, you just have to hope that people will come forward and offer. You do sigh a lot on the telephone and say, “Pardon me, my dialysis machine has just lost power and I’m going to die in fourteen minutes if I don’t get a kidney.” But you try to be subtle about it.
After I lost Abby’s kidney, I called in a repairman to oil the hinges on my front door because I was waiting for the stampede of friends and family who would be breaking it down to offer me a kidney. I needn’t have worried about the door. People changed the subject, avoided the topic, danced around an offer. Perhaps out of guilt they would say “I’d love to give you a kidney, but…” There was always a but. I couldn’t blame them. They had families, boyfriends and girlfriends, children.
By September of 2005 I was starting to feel desperate. I had heard whispers from other patients that it was possible to go to a foreign country and buy an organ. I was told that Southeastern Europe and Southwestern Asia were the It spots for kidneys, the Turks and Caicos of the organ trade, where you could pick up a fresh kidney for the American markup rate of $100,000. I entertained the idea for a second, but I quickly pulled myself back from the brink. As Dr. Jordan put it, “You’re at an amazing American facility and you already lost a kidney. What would happen in a place with less than optimal care?” The risks were high, and I couldn’t live with myself knowing the moral questions involved. Who knew where that kidney came from, or how its owner parted with it?
Meanwhile, I was starting to get kidney offers from a place I hadn’t expected: People who had heard about my plight on ET or The Insider or Oprah. My inbox was full of notes from strangers who were offering to give me their internal organs, and I was shocked to be the recipient of such widespread, self-sacrificing generosity.
If you need a kidney, I’m here. That is, of course, if you don’t mind having a woman, a Jewban (I’m Cuban and Jewish), filtering for you. My offer comes from the heart. Besides, I have two kidneys, and I was in school the day they taught sharing!!
Dear Cojo, I hope you don’t think that I’m a crazed fan. I am listed as an organ donor if something were to happen to me, but I would also like to be tested for you as well. I think you are great, and it hurts me to see you like you are.
Hey Cojo. I’ll give you a kidney, you gimme a makeover. I think that’s pretty fair, huh?
The kidney offers from viewers touched me more than anything will ever touch me in my life. My friends began to set up a screening process, making phone calls to interview the people who had made serious offers. But just when we were starting to pursue this as a viable option, Dr. Jordan called me with an unexpected proposition: “I think we should talk about testing your mother.”
I had never seriously considered this as a possibility until Dr. Jordan had uttered her name. My family had held a mandatory town hall Cojocaru conference when I lost Abby’s kidney: Both my sister and my father wanted to give me their kidneys, but neither turned out to be a match. The only family member I refused to consider was my mother: I had her on a pedestal—she was precious cargo, fine and delicate, and 70 years old. I would call 911 if she got a mole. I was never going to consider putting her in any danger.
So
when Dr. Jordan suggested testing her, I stopped breathing for a second and almost blacked out. My first thought was, What?! You want to kill my mother? You want to put my mother on the operating table and scoop a kidney out of her? It was one of the only times in my life that I was speechless—save for being on the operating table myself.
“What are you talking about?” I finally stammered. “Where is this coming from?”
“I’ve known your mother for a while now,” Dr. Jordan said. “She is an incredibly spry, robust, healthy woman for her age. She looks and acts like she’s much younger than she really is. We should test her. Maybe she’s an option.”
In the kidney community, doctors talk a lot about the perfect kidney candidate. It’s a morbid discussion. They talk about the allegorical, metaphorical football player who is twenty years old, strong, the picture of health, with a vital, active, dynamic fresh kidney. But in order for that kidney to be available for a transplant, the football player has to have one final touchdown—literally.
My mother was the antithesis of that football player. But she had the potential to be a much better match for me than any quarterback. “You would need fewer drugs, because she would be a genetic match,” Dr. Jordan explained.
“Isn’t she ancient?” I asked.
“It’s been done before with family members who are that age,” he said. “Just let me test her for blood typing, and then we can talk.”
That week, my mother was visiting from Montreal. When I told her that Dr. Jordan had recommended that we test her, she started dancing around the house. I’d never seen her that happy—well, maybe at my bar mitzvah after two rum & cokes. She was so giddy that her voice went up fifteen octaves. “I am giving you a kidney!” she yelled.
“No, don’t be ridiculous. We’re just talking about it as a maybe-maybe, probably not a real option,” I told her. I thought that this was something serious that we would discuss and deliberate about. My mother had no intention of the sort.
“No,” she replied. “I feel it in my bones I am going to give you a kidney.”
She left for Montreal a few days later, gave blood at a hospital there, and within weeks we had determined that she was a match. It presented me with the ultimate moral dilemma. I wanted her kidney. I did. But I also didn’t. The natural instinct for self-preservation and survival was clashing with the other natural instinct of putting your loved ones before you. No wonder I was so torn up inside. I was deathly afraid for my mother.
Inside, I was also feeling guilty for even thinking about using her kidney to pull myself out of my hooked-up-to-a-machine hell. Secretly, I wanted my new kidney to come from my mother: We were the same person, it was meant to be. In the end, I knew that her kidney would be my salvation. But even for me, the most self-absorbed narcissist on the planet, this felt like a new world record of selfishness.
By the time October rolled around, my mother had been poked, prodded, tested, and retested. The doctors examined every organ twice, gave her blood tests, stress tests, psychological tests, heart tests. She had to see a dozen different doctors. She was a total trooper, never complaining, never once showing any fear. I was the one who spent my days on pins and needles.
Rather than making a decision one way or another, I was a wimp: I let events unfold without my input. A committee at Cedars-Sinai convened to discuss my mother’s kidney candidacy and came back with a unanimous verdict: It would be safe to use her as a donor.
“She is the perfect candidate for you,” Dr. Jordan told me. “It couldn’t be a better match. And she’s in such great shape that I really don’t think it’s a big risk.”
So I added yet another surgery to my datebook: On October 11, 2005, my mother would be giving me her kidney.
CHAPTER 14
One Tarnished Belly Ring, Manischewitz Wine Spritzers, and Air Kisses from the Gurney
My personal emergency hotline when I’m in an emotional maelstrom is 1–800-SHARI. The Cojo Clan had swooped down on my tranquil abode with all their bombastic love and familiar dysfunction. My mother was about to go under the knife and, two for the price of one, so was I. I was thinking the unthinkable: Would Mom survive the operation? And what was my kidney transplant sequel going to be: Box office bonanza? Or an opening weekend flop, where the kidney never takes?
I was getting an ulcer worrying about surviving: Not just the surgery, but surviving my high-strung, overwrought family and their theatrics. Who else would I reach out to—who could orchestrate her way through this madness and hold my delicate paw—but Shari, the childhood friend who loved me even when I had a unibrow and buck teeth? I put her in charge of directing all the emotional traffic.
Shari flew in the day before the surgery. When I picked her up at the airport, I didn’t mince words about what I needed. “My father and sister are freaking out since half the family is about to be filleted at Cedars tomorrow morning,” I told her. “I need a break from all this tension. My sister keeps looking at me like I’m a mother murderer, and my father has dueling rabbis saying prayers, one for me and one for Mom.”
“OK,” Shari said. “Let’s have a live-for-the-moment day. Let’s run away.”
Her words gave me the strength to do cartwheels: “Let’s run away” are my three favorite words, in Latin, English, or Swahili.
The spiritual journey began at Fred Segal in Santa Monica. Shari announced that it was time to get a new hospital look, and she was buying.
“Well, since you put it that way,” I said. “I’m feeling fresh. Renewed. This transplant is a new beginning: I need the sartorial equivalent of a Summer’s Eve douche.”
We immediately conference-called Zac Posen to consult on a fabulous new direction for my hospital wardrobe. “Cashmere is so two minutes ago,” he declared. “I think luxurious smooth cottons are mad-chic. Think crisp. Think St. Barts.”
“Yes, yes, Zac!” I cried. “I see me in cotton palazzos and a lighter-than-air chemise, very Nautica model meets Portofino gigolo!”
Shari shrieked at the entire Fred Segal’s salestaff. “Get me every single piece of cotton you have in the store. And give me colors! I want primrose! Seafoam! Coral!”
From there, we cruised to Malibu, a place where it feels like disease doesn’t exist. We drove with the top down, caution to the wind, bombing down the freeway as we broke the barriers of sound and light. We giggled as we looked at our wind-whipped tumbleweed ’dos. Shari had brought her 1970s supermixes with her—the kind of music that worms its way into your brain and gives you an embolism—and demanded that we play “Shake Your Groove Thing” on an endless loop.
It was sensory overload: The gorgeous white sand beaches, the waves on the coastline, the seagulls swooping overhead. Shari was humming along off-tune, beating the dashboard. We stopped at a liquor store and bought Peach Nectar wine coolers and guzzled them out of brown paper bags. Hammered, Shari shook her hair out and began wolf-whistling the surfers that we drove by: “Nice butt, beach boy!” I ripped off my shirt, slathered my chest in baby oil, revved up my motor and challenged a Subaru Outback to a drag race.
The end of the day found us passed out on the beach, my chest burnt to crimson, the empty baby oil bottles tossed in a heap nearby, Shari’s sexy ’do a rats-nest of sand, sweat, and sea kelp. The Peach Nectar buzz had worn off.
I looked at Shari, facedown in the sand, and something came over me. I was warmed by the knowledge that I had such a solid friend, a partner in crime, an ally in my kidney war. I began to think of the transplant the next morning, of my mother undergoing surgery, of the long recovery I still faced after my transplant. My first transplant had initially felt like a fairy tale: Going in, I didn’t really believe that anything could go wrong with that kidney. But this time I knew the reality of my situation, all the different things that could happen, and I didn’t like the odds.
Shari noticed that my face had changed. “What are you thinking?” she asked.
“Shari, am I doing the right thing by putting my mom through this
?” I said. “Tell me the truth. I can’t think straight anymore. Tell me what to do.”
“Everything will be OK,” she said. “Your mom is going to be fine. You have doctors who have been very positive about this surgery.”
I was still quiet: “I feel so selfish taking a kidney from my mother,” I said.
Shari shook her head. “It’s not being selfish,” she said. “Look: I’ve talked to your mother, and she wants to give you this kidney with all her heart: She’s doing it with so much love. Even if she has to hit you over the head until you’re unconscious, she’s giving you this kidney. She feels like it’s her purpose, to save your life.
“This has brought her the first joy she’s had since you were diagnosed last year,” she continued. “You have to understand that. She’s giving you a gift, and you have to take it. It’s not being selfish. So stop worrying: We’ll get through this. It’s all going to be good.”
One side effect of my disease was that, after more than a year of struggle, I was finally starting to listen to people in a way I never had before. I was learning to trust: People like Dr. Jordan. Dr. Cohen, Doris the Dialysis Diva, even my parents. I wasn’t in control; everything wasn’t in my hands; and I needed to trust the people around me who were telling me what to do. At that moment, I trusted Shari, my personal social worker. Listening to her words, I decided to stop worrying, as much as I could. My whole family was coming together to face the biggest challenge of our lives. I needed them, and they needed me.
No medical procedure in my life—whether it be a reverse vasectomy or a mole removal—is complete without a television camera nearby to record it. Entertainment Tonight was taping the preparations for my second transplant and, the night before the surgery, they arrived to capture what was supposed to be the perfect nuclear family enjoying a lovely home-cooked meal the evening before this big milestone. It was a coming-together-in-crisis repast. I was envisioning a soothing evening together, just me, my family, Shari, and half a dozen members of the film crew.
Glamour, Interrupted Page 12
