I called my mother on the way home from Malibu to check in on the dinner preparations. While Shari and I were on the beach, my parents had been cooking: They were the poor man’s Mario Batali and Paula Deen, dancing around the kitchen together as they sprinkled bread crumbs over everything in sight.
“Is everything ready for ET?” I asked.
“Darling. Everything is perfect, it’s gorjus. I made your favorite, triple-layer lasagna and roast chicken, so gorjus. It’s melt in your mouth!” she gushed. In the background, I could hear my father singing “That’s Amore.” “We have the candles, and I brought Grandma’s crocheted tablecloth!”
“What’s Alisa doing?” I asked. “Did she help you?”
“You must be joking. Your sister is on the terrace, getting a tan.”
I arrived home feeling very Zen after my fantasy day with Shari, oozing good energy as I floated toward the front door. As we were about to walk in, Shari whispered one final time: “Don’t let anyone get to you,” she said. “Let’s enjoy this dinner.”
“Of course,” I said. My promise lasted about a nanosecond.
My parents flung open the front door with cries of delight, hugs and kisses all around. And then my sister came leaping into the living room to say hello.
I adore Alisa, but her wardrobe has always been a bone of contention. She may be a woman of a certain age, not far off from a hot flash, but she dresses like Hannah Montana. She is adorable, only five feet tall, 105 pounds (97 without makeup and accessories), with the body of an eighteen-year-old and those gorgeous Cojocaru legs. But I’m mortified by her skintight skirts, her platform heels, the glitter tube tops that she wears to synagogue.
That day, she was prepped and ready for the ET camera crews in a day-glo orange cut-off midriff tank top, spray-on jeans, and four inch-high Lucite wedges. Her shimmering, shiny, sunken stomach was doused with sparkling body lotion. My eyes went straight to her belly button. And there! Could it be? Was it? Incredulous, I looked closer. It was the darkest moment in the history of the Cojocaru family: My sister was wearing a belly ring in public.
“What are you wearing!” I shrieked. “Are you insane?”
“What?” Alisa bleated. She looked down at her belly button. “What’s wrong with this?”
“You are four hundred twenty years old and you are wearing a belly ring? Do you think you are Janet Jackson? You are a plague on this family! A social embarassment! You need electroshock therapy!”
WWIII had erupted. My dad began to scream at Alisa: “You see? I told you so. How many times have I told you to stop dressing like that? You should be ashamed of yourself.”
My sister had tears in her eyes. “What’s wrong? This is California! This outfit is normal!”
Shari had fled. Stinky ducked for cover under the couch. The dogs in the neighborhood were howling in response to the frequency of my shrieks. I fished out my wallet, took out a fifty dollar bill, and threw it at Alisa. “Go stay at the stripper hotel down the street with all the other pole dancers. You’re not staying here looking like that!”
The pent-up stress inside me had finally found its outlet. I could have talked until I was blue in the face about being rational, visited a dozen therapists, taken three different antidepressants, but the truth was that I was an emotional wreck, and the one person guaranteed to set me off was my sister. It was full-scale blitzkrieg.
Alisa ran away, as fast as you can run in platform heels. In the kitchen, my dad clanged pots furiously. My mother fretted in the living room. Doors slammed all over the house. Finally, my sister emerged upstairs in a virgin-white Donna Karan cashmere sweater set.
“Thank God,” I said. The Cojos move on very quickly: By the time the ET crews arrived, everything was back to normal again. Soon, my sister was laughing so hard that the Manischewitz wine was coming out of her nose. My dad was eating his third helping of lasagna. And I was regaling the family with X-rated stories about the Olsen twins. We forgot that anything had happened at all and that anything out of the ordinary was going to happen the following day either.
Still, before I went to bed that night, I gave my sister a list of everything she was forbidden to wear to the hospital: Sheer tops. Fishnets of any kind. Rubber. Anything that lit up on the nipples. T-shirts with bull’s-eyes on them, or anything that said “Honk if you like my puppies.”
The next morning at Cedars-Sinai, my mother was practically beating down the door to get into surgery: She was practically jumping out of her skin. She paced back and forth, pleading with the nurses, “Take me! Take me now! I can’t wait another second to give my son my kidney!”
When the nurses did come to take to her to pre-op, there was no time for a big dramatic emotional moment. I wanted to clutch at her, but she was consumed by her rush to get to the operating room. I was blubbering. I was mush. But my mom was noble: Her head was high and she was peaceful and gracious and proud. She touched my cheeks and held me without saying anything.
Before she left, she whispered in my ear, “I can’t wait to wake up and know that you are well.”
As the rest of the family sat waiting in Robin’s office for the moment when I’d be carted away to the operating room again, it was my sister who cried the most. I was headed into surgery, my father was silently watching his wife and his son go under the knife, Shari was holding my hand so tightly that it was about to snap off, but it was my sister who was the most distraught, and I loved her for it.
As I was finally wheeled off to the operating room, I made a mock-sour face at Alisa: Here we go. I blew her a kiss from the gurney, and we both smiled. Blood is blood.
CHAPTER 15
El Cojo Puede Hacer Pis
(or The Tinkle Heard Around the World)
My eyes blearily cracked open. My head was throbbing. My heavy eyes were like little slits, and I could barely make out my surroundings. I began to cough in a way I’d never coughed before: I couldn’t catch my breath. What was going on with my throat? What was going on with my mouth? My tongue was pressed against a cold plastic object: Something was lodged in my throat.
I had some kind of breathing tube in my mouth! I started to gag. Where was I? I opened my eyes wider and tried desperately to focus.
This wasn’t a hospital room: I was in some kind of a holding tank, an empty windowless space with a lot of growling machines. I was completely alone. I wanted to reach up and rip the tube out of my mouth, but I couldn’t move my arm. It was strapped down. I was strapped down.
Every movement was a struggle, but the adrenaline was driving me: I kicked and heaved violently, like a trapped animal, trying to break free. I felt like I was drowning, submerged, claustrophobic: I wanted desperately to breathe on my own.
It was like being in a mental ward, and I thought I was losing my mind. Disoriented, I didn’t know what had happened to me: How long had I been under? Was it a day later or a year? I felt as if I’d woken up into an Edgar Allan Poe story, the one where the protagonist is buried alive. Maybe I had been buried alive. Maybe I was dead. Hearing my struggle, a nurse ran into the room and quickly stabbed me with a needle. “You are in the ICU, on a ventilator,” he told me. “You have to calm down. Everything is OK.”
“Take it out!” I tried to scream. The only sound that came out of my mouth was a gurgling moan. But the sedative was working and within seconds I had been sent back into oblivion.
I woke up again hours later to see my father hovering over the bed. It took me a moment to focus. The ventilator was gone, but my throat still ached.
“Dad, what happened? What’s going on?” I asked him. My voice was dry and scratchy.
“There was a problem,” he told me. “Just after the transplant operation, when you were still in the recovery room, an alarm went off. Something went wrong with the arteries in your legs, and they had to operate on you again. Your kidney, to protect itself, has shut itself down. But they say it will wake up.”
I wanted to cry. The kidney wasn’t working? I thought I’d e
arned so much karma over the last year that it was time for a payback.
“How is Mom?” I asked, afraid to even hear. “Is she OK?”
“Your mom is terrific, everything is fine with her,” he said. His voice cracked as he looked at me. “Your sister and I were pacing the hallways.”
My father and I have clashed over our lifetime: probably because I would walk right over him to get to my mother. But at that moment it was just me and him. “Steven, I’m so proud of you,” he said. “You have been so great. We are all together in this.” It was the validating moment that every boy dreams off: The big father-son moment, as real and raw as you can get.
“I love you, Dad,” I said. “Thank you so much for everything you’ve done for me.”
A few minutes later, Dr. Cohen came in to explain the situation. The new kidney wasn’t dead, he promised. After the transplant, I had what they called a “vascular complication,” and the blood stopped flowing in my legs. Dr. Cohen had to operate immediately in order to open up my circulation again. My clever kidney had simply gone to sleep to protect itself from the shock. “I have seen this a thousand times,” Dr. Cohen told me. “I know it well. It might take a few weeks for your kidney to wake up.”
“Is there a chance it won’t wake up?” I asked. “Because I don’t think I can handle that, Dr. Cohen. Really. Just bring on the last, fatal dose of morphine if that’s the case.”
He shook his head. “No, this has happened with many of my patients. It will wake up. I’m not saying maybe, I’m saying it’s just a matter of time. But we will have to put you back on dialysis…”
At that dreaded word I thought I might have to hit him over the head. I lost it completely. “No! No! I thought I was done with that? No way! You can’t do this to me! Why is this happening?”
“Listen to Dr. Cohen,” my father said, trying to quiet my hysteria. “The kidney is going to come back. It’s just sleeping now.”
“Well, tell it to wake up,” I said. I didn’t believe them. Inside, I was monumentally crushed. Here we were again: in a hospital room with a brand-new kidney that wasn’t working. Once again, I had to fight to save an organ that someone I loved had given to me.
When my mother came down to visit me the next day, I tried to be upbeat. She had been recovering on the Club Floor, in the same Audrey Hepburn memorial suite that I’d recovered in, and had grown so beloved by the hospital staff that the nurses had taken to calling her “Mama.” She was wheeled into the ICU looking pale and small, far from the dragonslayer I loved.
“Thank God it’s over,” I told her, trying to keep a smile on my face. “Thank you for saving me.”
“I am the happiest mother in the world that I could do it,” she smiled. “Happy is not even the big enough word.”
I wished I could share her joy. I was back on dialysis; and when the doctors finally released me from the hospital, after nine days, the kidney still hadn’t woken up. I was tortured by it. “It’s going to come back,” Doris, my dialysis instructor, promised me, as she sent me home with the peritoneal dialysis machine. “You’ll see. Soon, you’re going to start to urinate a lot. That will mean the kidney is alive and kicking.”
It’s easy to preach to sick people: “Be positive! It’s all going to be all right!” But as much as positivity and faith had been the benchmarks of my story, it’s not always possible to keep a smile on your face. Everyone around me was being a cheerleader, but I was in mourning. I was furious that this second transplant had been, in my mind, a disaster. I had been wronged by the world. This was my mother’s sacred kidney! My mother = Mother Teresa! It didn’t get more clear than that!
Returning home from Cedars-Sinai in late October was like experiencing déjà vu. I had another eight weeks of bedbound recovery in front of me, but this time with a kidney that still wasn’t working and nightly dialysis sessions back on my calendar. I was once again on massive doses of steroids. My father was cooking up a storm. And my mother, despite her own pain, was playing Florence Nightingale: She baked cookies, coerced me to go on walks, made me watch Sex and the City at gunpoint. Forced cheeriness, like something from a Christmas television special, was the order of the day.
I just gave up and checked out. I had lost my mojo. I didn’t want to leave my bed. Carrie Bradshaw wasn’t doing it for me anymore. Even my mother’s overwhelming optimism wouldn’t lift me. The only thing that worked to dull my dismal mood was medication.
I had every drug at my disposal. For the most part, I had been careful not to indulge in them: At one point after losing the first kidney, I’d taken too much Vicodin, and Dr. Jordan had lectured me: “These drugs are not candy,” he said. “They show up in your liver, and I can’t have that. I need you healthy.” I’d been a saint ever since. But now I wanted to stage a Feel Sorry For Myself Parade. My mother would come in to my room and beg me, “Come on, darling, let’s walk upstairs for breakfast. Do it for me.” I would gruffly tell her, no, not in the mood, and take a Valium. When that wore off, I’d take another tranquilizer. Maybe a Klonopin or two. A nice soothing Xanax. Or dip into the painkiller arsenal: Vicodin, Darvocet, and the real cherry on the cake, Percocet. I just wanted to flatline any emotion.
The days passed in a blur. It had already been ten days since my return home. During a commercial break of Oprah one afternoon, I crawled to the bathroom. As I stood, woozy, over the toilet, it came almost out of nowhere: I had struck oil. I was urinating like a Kauaian waterfall.
“Oh my God!” I screamed. “Mom! Mom! I can pee! I can pee! The kidney has woken up!”
From the bathroom, I could hear my mother’s shrieks in the kitchen, and then footsteps scurrying down the stairs. Her purloined Peninsula Hotel houseslippers carried her to my bedroom door as fast as they would take her. “Is it true?” she asked.
I came out and flung my arms around her, even though she still had flour on her hands from making wienerschnitzel and fries. We jumped up and down and practically sang: “It’s working! It’s working!” I wanted the news flashing on JumboTron screens all over the world: COJO IS PEEING! I imagined people across the continents doing the wave in celebration, pictured the headlines of newspapers in fifty different languages: “El Cojo puede hacer pis!” “Le Cojo Urine!” “Cojo is naar de badkamers gegaan!”
In the days after it woke up, our little sleeping beauty was babied: My mother felt that if the kidney was nursed, carefully, it would thrive. We fed it my mother’s secret cure-all puree of Matzoh ball soup, her melt-on-the-tongue beef brisket, and her twenty-four-hour-rise challah bread. She wanted to make sure the kidney had regular naps, daily walks, and plenty of sunlight: It got so ridiculous that I thought she would try to burp the kidney.
I decided not to give this kidney a name: everything had a different tenor this time around. I couldn’t think of a better name than Mom’s Kidney. Bathed in love, her kidney was humming along beautifully. In between naps, I would stroll over to the doctors for blood tests.
In late November, Jenny rang with an all-too-familiar story: “Your creatinine levels are up,” she said. “We need to do a biopsy.” I drove back to Cedars-Sinai with a sinking heart: Was this kidney in danger, too? Was I repeating history?
It was a false alarm, but it still left me unsettled. And just two weeks later, I hit another bump in the road. One of my native kidneys, even though it had had its wires disconnected, so to speak, had grown a huge stone. It was an invitation to a host of infections and needed to be removed urgently.
The doctors took the enlarged native kidney out: I bade farewell to dysfunctional Phinneas forever. Two weeks later, an exasperated me was back at Cedars-Sinai, yet again with elevated creatinine levels. It looked like it might be rejection. I spent December 31, 2005, in the hospital, getting doses of steroids. It was New Year’s Eve. The ward was chillingly empty, working on a reduced staff. I saw the New Year in with a bowl of fat-free Very Vanilla Yoplait yogurt and graham crackers, an IV, and a suppository. Happy Friggin’ New Year.
&
nbsp; But after this sputtering start, my mother’s kidney eventually stopped being mercurial and we became one. She calmed down and started working, just as I jumped back into the Hollywood fray in early 2006. Her creatinine numbers were gorgeous—or as my mother would say, gorjus—and together we were back eating McCarthy Salads at the Polo Lounge and enjoying prosperous health.
But in April of 2006, I was back in the hospital once more, and it wasn’t her fault. After being cut open so many times, the organs in my abdomen were bulging out of their linings, a common complication of my kind of surgery. I had been sidelined by a hernia, which I tried to tell everyone was a sports injury from my days as the captain of the Notre Dame football team, but no one bought that story. After they sewed me up, I still spent almost a month in bed, motionless, recovering. My mother was once again my legs.
At the end of that month, I found myself driving to the hospital for another creatinine scare. Such is the life of a new transplantee: It takes a while for the kidney to function properly. It’s not easy, or neat, the way a control freak like me would have liked it. It takes a while for the right med combination to do its work.
But this time I was released after my biopsy without any sign of rejection. Who knew what the future might hold, but for now, it looked like my mother’s kidney had finally, happily, settled into my body for good. I retrieved my car from the Cedars-Sinai valet, pulled away from the parking lot, and didn’t need to look in the rearview mirror.
CHAPTER 16
Glamour, Interrupted Page 13
