Revamp and Reflect

Dear Friend-

It has been a long while since I've posted on this blog, but considering the given circumstances of my life, which I hope to go in to some detail later, I decided to attempt to use this space adequately. I can't promise that posts will be regular, but I hope to update as often as possible with information and writing that you might find relevant and interesting.

For now, I'm posting my experience on my dad's kidney transplant from my aunt who was a living donor. He has Polycystic Kidney Disease, and this new kidney has already helped him to feel much better.

Here's to your health, right?




In an operating room, I imagine the surgeon standing over the brown body, the Filipino body. It is motionless on a table and there are lights on above them... the light might even reflect a little off the skin. The lights are white and clean, just like the clothing and the walls and the instruments… like the knife that the surgeon holds in their hand. It is cool and steady as it approaches the body. The flesh seems to part on its own as the knife effortlessly opens the skin, the muscle, the tissue. It gleams as the surgeon’s hand moves like artwork over this body. My father’s body. My aunt’s body. That kidney. Whose kidney?
In a hospital waiting room, a small group of people sits in a circle holding hands, praying. Their heads are bowed and their knuckles are white. Their tears hit the floor as they repeat the name, the prayer, the question, the object, “God,” “God,” “God?” “God.” Their faith in the Creator may be unshakeable, but their reliance on human hands is more easily doubted, more easily questioned. They thank Him for letting Them do their work. They say things like “Thank you,” and “Please,” but not in that order. They all seem very polite about the thing, using good manners to ask this God for things like life, if life were a thing. And if you could ask for it. And if it could be given or taken.
In a lonely hallway, there are people crying; their faces are in their hands and they sob in a language I don’t recognize. No- they speak in a language I don’t recognize, but their sobs are a language that we all understand. They stand in the corner of a hallway, looking through the lenses of their sadness out the lenses of the window into the grey endlessness of the Washington skyline. Their tears streak their fingers and their cheeks as they eye me as I pass. Their eyes prod me; they simultaneously tell me to keep walking and also to offer some sort of reciprocal emotion. Maybe to tighten my cheek muscles, motioning to smile, but not quite making it. It’s the sign you give people when you sympathize with them, but don’t want to connect too deeply.
Then there is crying in the waiting room, but their tears aren’t the hot, confused ones of the hallway. They are the relief of letting out a held breath. They are the happiness of possibility. These tears are good tears. This operation was a good one. Again, they say “God,” but this time, they only say “Thank you.” The smiles that creep upon their faces seem foreign to the envious people around them, who smile in their direction because they’re supposed to, and because it’s all too real and because they want to be able to do this thing called praise. Or prayer.
The owners of the tears pick their bags off the floor and walk for the door with heavy legs and tired eyes. Their sacks are full of magazines and nibbled bits of crackers and fruits, they feel victorious. But the real victors are lying on hospital beds waiting for the Doctor, the real Champion, to pump a syringe full of something into their brown arm so that they can wake up. The Doctor, He walks around the room in his clean, cool, crisp clothing. It’s still white. He exits and walks the halls, not white, but cream and He feels good.
Elsewhere, He looks down from above or from all around or from wherever He is and I imagine Him smiling His ethereal smile that, if He opened it, could gobble up this planet and all of those around it. God does what He wants.
Today, I’m just glad He did what He did.