New things to me

My new diet was odd. The diet that I was put on, the kidney diet, I was told is the second most difficult medical diet to maintain, only the diabetic kidney diet is more difficult. I had to eat low levels of phosphorus, potassium and fluid. The kidney is an amazing organ, it takes minerals and maintains the correct level you body needs. When you kidney doesn’t work, many minerals that your body needs can become toxic if you get too much of them. Phosphorus is in almost everything you eat, but it is a big molecule and science has created a pill that bonds to the phosphorus molecule, making it too big for your body to absorb. Potassium is critical to heart function, but too much of it can either speed up the heart too much or slow it down too much. I learned that potassium is one of the things they inject when they give a lethal injection, which makes you really want to watch the level of potassium you eat! But there is no pill to prevent potassium from being absorbed into your body, so you must control it with diet. Basically, it means eating nothing healthy…wheat bread, gone. Vegetables, gone. Fruit, gone. However, I could eat unlimited fats and sugars. Great, unlimited mayonnaise and jelly beans (this is why the diabetic kidney diet is so hard, you can’t have the sugars). The third restriction was fluid. The kidney, as we all know, processes any fluid we drink and whatever the body doesn’t need, it passes to the bladder. I was told to only drink 50 ounces of fluid per day, this includes anything you drink, ice, watermelon…anything that has fluid in it. I ate a lot of plain chicken and white rice at this time in my life, but eating the same thing over and over again gets tiring. The doctors are afraid that on this diet you won’t get enough calories, so you eat sweets to get your calorie count up. This sounds awesome, but trust me you get really tired of eating sweets all the time. My personal favorite was smarties, a small chalky candy that comes in a roll with about twenty little flavored round pieces. However, I quickly got tired of smarties too. I wondered what the dentist would say?

My new schedule was odd. Monday, Wednesday and Friday I would wake up at 6am to drive to the dialysis clinic where I would sit for three hours. I was joined by about 40 people each day that had the same schedule as I did. Most of them spoke Spanish, which made conversation difficult. Como se dicen “dialysis” en Espanol?

Although no one really feels like talking, anyway. Even though you are in a “community” room, you just want to sit in your chair with your TV remote or books and live in your own personal space for three hours. I found that most people sleep, however after experiencing the effects of dialysis on the body, most people don’t choose to sleep, they are exhausted and must sleep.

I had decided that I wanted to be productive with the time I had to sit there. However, not being able to move my left arm made simple tasks like reading, working on a laptop, or writing an arduous task.

I stole glimpses at the tired Hispanic man to my right who only had one leg, wondering what had happened to the other. I watched the African-American woman across from me get hooked up the dialysis machine from a port in her leg. She seemed to reject the idea that she needed dialysis, often coming into the center with a 42-ounce Coke from McDonalds. Although the coke looked good, I knew there were extremely high levels of phosphorus and 42 ounces in one shot? That is almost 90% of my daily fluid total!

I quickly learned most people in the dialysis center were there as a result of diabetes. Really? I knew nothing about diabetes. I just thought you had that if you ate too much sugar as a kid, and I didn’t know what it really meant if you had it. But I soon saw the effects of untreated diabetes. The disease attacks the kidneys, which results in the need for dialysis, and if it continues, it literally begins to eat away at the body. As I looked around, there were many people who had different amputations, mostly the toes, feet or legs, from what I saw. Thank you, God, that I don’t have diabetes, but, God, I pray for those that do.

The strange thing about dialysis is that you could drive past a dialysis clinic and never know. They always give the name of the building something like “DaVita” or “medical center.” They also keep the blinds drawn all the time, which makes looking out of them very difficult. I never knew which was worse, having people walk by looking in at you on a machine, or not being able to look out a window and see what the rest of the “normal” world was doing.

I learned what a nephrologist was: a kidney doctor. I had an Indian doctor who was very difficult to understand. Hearing medical terms in that thick foreign accent made it even harder to learn what he wanted me to do. I remember wanting to record the conversations so I could go home and listen to them again and try to decipher what he was saying. Thankfully, I had a very nice nurse who would come and translate the orders that were written down so I knew what was coming next.

The doctor prescribed several things while I was in the dialysis center. The first was Epogen, a synthetic hormone that produces red blood cells, a normal function of your kidneys which I no longer had enough of. One problem though, Epogen is on the list of banned substances for the NFL, so my chances of playing profession ball went from “fat chance” to “fatter chance.”

The other new prescription was iron. I remember this one because when they injected it into my body through the machine, I could instantly taste and smell it. It reminded me of black licorice in a way but also had a metallic sensation too. The syringe looked like it was full of crude oil and seemed thick, although it wasn’t.

At the same time as all this was going on, I accepted a call (Presbyterian for “job” that God has called you to) at a church in San Diego. Of course I had told them about my medical situation and that part of the deal was that they would have to accept that I went to a dialysis clinic three days a week. They were thankfully willing to partner with me and I accepted the position.

It seems that when you are married and have a child that moving becomes a much larger task than it used to be when I was single. I used to just throw everything in the back of the car as many times as I needed to and drove it to the new place. With a wife and a little baby boy, we rented the biggest U-haul you could get and took half the day to load our tiny apartment into the truck. Then we drove, caravan style from Pasadena to San Diego. I was so thankful to be back in my home town, it was just one thing that I knew and felt comfortable with in an uncomfortable and unknown life.

Dialysis Began.

In May 2007 I was working in Los Angeles and knew that there was something wrong. I had terrible headaches, my heart would race with light activity, my ankles were swollen, and then there was a dark spot in my vision.

I remember going to the doctor, a doctor that I had never seen before and picked at random, and getting my blood pressure taken. The doctor looked nervous, and that is never a good thing when your doctor looks nervous! He sent me the emergency room at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, a busy Los Angeles hospital that had 24 hour police dogs to smell drugs and explosives. I had neither. I had expected to sit in the waiting room for awhile, after all I wasn't in critical condition. Or so I thought. After telling the triage nurse why I had come in, another nurse took my blood pressure.

Nurse: "Do you mind if I take your blood pressure in your other arm?"
Me: "Sure, no problem."

Then the nurse picked up the phone and started telling someone on the other end of the line my information.

Nurse: "We have a 33 year old male with BP of 260 over 180 in both arms"....pause....Room 1. You got it."
Nurse: "Come with me sir."

This is when I knew that something was really wrong. You don't go to the front of the line in a busy hospital for nothing. Suddenly a team of doctors, nurses, machines, and needles descended on me. A bombardment of questions and health history.

Doctor: "What drugs are you on?"
Me: "I am not on any drugs."
Doctor: "Seriously, what drugs have you taken?"
Me: "I am not on any drugs, I am studying to be a pastor."

Well, it was only a matter of time before the blood that had been drawn made it to the laboratory, the lab techs did whatever they do, and the results came back to my curtained "room" with a doctor telling me he had "bad news."
I had hoped to never hear those words from a doctor. But I just did.

Doctor: "Your kidneys are failing."
Me: "What does that mean? How did that happen? What could have caused that?"

No matter how many questions I asked, how many answers I heard, it couldn't bring any change to the sinking feeling I had in my heart and stomach. It is a horrible feeling to know nothing of what is going on and what is going to happen.

I was brought to the ICU. Over the next six days I was visited by my wife, family, and friends. I had pictures of newborn Calvin taped to the walls. I learned about Immuno-globulin A Nephropathy, or IGAN. I had a port-catheter inserted into my chest that had a tube near my heart. I had a kidney biopsy. I didn't know where this was going.

Me: "Lord, why is this happening to me? I am just getting ready to start my ministry as a new pastor. I have a 6 week old son. Why is this happening to ME?"
Lord: ".........."

It is interesting how sometimes the Lord appears not to answer. I wanted a voice to say, "oh, I made a mistake. I will now heal you." But that answer did not appear. What did appear was lots of prayer asking for that answer to be healing.

I went home with prescriptions I couldn't read and started a life I knew nothing about. One morning I got up at 7am and drove to a place I didn't know existed. I walked into a waiting room full of people I didn't know. I was escorted to a recliner with a machine I had never seen before.

Dialysis began.