Baby, It’s Cold Inside

For the last year I have been grappling with some unwelcome truths. I’ve been silent on this blog in large part because every time I start to write, every time I enter the cutting whirlwind that my mind has become, my spirit shrinks away from the exhausting task of explaining all my sorrows. I read a description once that said that despair was a cold desert devoid of life, and it’s true; sadness is a hollow pain, anger is a stinging fire, but despair is an aching emptiness. When I think too much or too long about my current situation, I feel like I am endlessly cycling through those three emotions, though I seem to spend most of the cycle in that cold desert.

Not that my life is without happiness. Even without the little delights like the impossibly blue autumn sky, the wind soughing through brittle yellow leaves, and the so very comforting feeling of cold feet slowly getting warm under an afghan that brighten my days, there is that little sun, that precious joybug, my Little Bird, who fills every corner of me with happy light. No matter how hard dialysis was, no matter how ragged I feel, physically or emotionally, knowing that I am coming home to her calms and lifts me. Being a family with her and Kohl is the most important thing in my life.

That highlights one of my pains, though. I feel as though I am being robbed of my time with her. Three days a week I go to a dialysis clinic, get hooked up to a machine through a catheter attached to my jugular vein, and sit in a chair while a machine cleans my blood for four hours. I leave a little before six, before she is awake, and I get home around 10:30, so it’s not as though I am missing huge chunks of her life, and an unexpected benefit of my absence is that she and Kohl have some fantastic daddy-daughter time on a regular basis. Still, after twelve years of longing for her, every moment feels precious, and I resent missing out.

That’s my sadness.

The anger comes because it seems unfair that my previous surgeries have directly contributed to my high level of antibodies, which is the reason neither of my brothers who have been tested are able to give me a kidney. I am frustrated that it took so long for my medical team to get my hemoglobin levels under control, which led to four blood transfusions, another cause of my antibody level. I am tired of being pressured to get a fistula, a permanent joining of an artery with a vein in my arm. And every time I’m too sick to go to a long awaited outing, or I miss out on an important occasion because I have to go to dialysis or have a procedure done, I feel bitter that one more thing is being taken away from me.

The despair hits me when, after again running through the former two topics, I remember that because of my antibodies I could be spending years in this same situation. The helplessness I feel is both infuriating and debilitating.

The real emptiness creeps in because I don’t know how to talk to anyone about my pain and my loneliness. A terminal illness, like so many other kinds of tragedy, singles you out in ways that are almost unknowable to others. I remember once being asked by a family friend what it felt like as my kidneys were failing. I tried to explain by describing how I could feel my body dying by degrees, that every day I was closer to death.

“Well, that’s true for everyone,” she said dismissively.

I don’t know if she felt that I was aggrandizing myself and needed to be taken down a peg, or if she was just uncomfortable with how open I was being, but it was one of the first times I realized that very few people want to know how I am feeling when they ask how I am feeling.

In addition, I already feel like I talk about my kidney disease all the time, though not in great depth. You know those people whose lives are so consumed by one thing that all conversational roads lead to their own particular Rome? Sometimes I feel that I have two discussion settings: my daughter and my disease, and, believe me, stories about my little girl are a lot more entertaining.

I’m not sure how to break the cycle. Join a support group? Break down in front of one of my closest friends and hope they aren’t made horribly uncomfortable by a situation they can’t do anything about? Spend all of my time reading escapist literature to avoid my pain?

I don’t know the answer. Right now I’m fighting my way through each day, trying not to let my imagination speculate on how many more days of struggle might be ahead of me, and writing this post because, unfortunately for all of you, this blog is about kidney disease and not my daughter.

You guys really signed up for the wrong conversational default.