Spare Change: So much to reflect on three years after my kidney transplant

Three years ago this week, a man I’ll never know extended my life.

He was 33, from Massachusetts, and died of a heart attack. One of his kidneys lives inside me.

I don’t know his name. His family has shown no interest in talking to me (they are surely devastated).

But he gave up both kidneys, his pancreas, corneas and maybe more. All of the recipients owe him.

He is one of the most important people to enter my life. And I know more about the guy who delivers my mail (hey, Derek) than I do about my donor.

In three years I’ve learned a Web MD-dose of information about transplants, about blood testing and to appreciate the mantra that transplants are a treatment not a cure for end-stage renal failure.

And a new kidney never bulletproofs you from other maladies that may crop up when you hit 60 or so and wonder how it is you no longer feel 30.

I doubt I’ll see many more surreal scenes as surgeon Dr. Paul Morrissey drinking coffee outside my holding room at 3:45 a.m. at Rhode Island Hospital.

Oddly at that point I was calm (I generally worry about everything), realizing Dr. Morrissey had been in on hundreds of transplants. By the way, has any doctor ever told a patient, “Hey, this is my first time scrubbing up?”

At the time I was vaguely aware of Covid and that it was touching down in Rhode Island. So I remain grateful to get into surgery when I did.

It ended nearly eight years of demanding hemodialysis at the Dialysis Center of Tiverton (I miss the people, not the treatments). That included a few false starts with potential living donors.

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Maybe the worst day in the kidney hunt came when colon cancer hit my most promising candidate in 2015, in the bottom of the ninth inning. It meant no kidney for me and a stretch of chemotherapy and radiation treatment for her.

Today she is fine and was willing to try again in 2020. I’m glad she never had to.

There were other bumps. The hospital called on a Saturday night with an available kidney. But I was being treated for a bladder infection.

So purely Rhode Island … the donor was a Newport man killed in a car accident. I’d met him.

Oh, and I also knew a man who received one of his kidneys.

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About 200 people are sitting on the transplant list at Rhode Island Hospital. It was about 175 when I rolled on in 2012.

Wait times have jumped from four to five years to five to six. As of the most recent tally (2016), about 750,000 Rhode Islanders held driver’s licenses. If even 5% signed on to be donors (with a red heart imprinted on the license) and qualified, the waiting list would go “poof!”

Instead the list grows.

I’m amazed at how people have reacted to my ordeal. I know that about a half dozen people tested to be donors and at least a dozen called the hospital to ask about my blood type (O positive) and so on.

Some locals offered rides to dialysis on stormy days. I’m hardly a religious man but I never scoffed at prayer cards or shawls or a list at a church (and even one Jewish temple).

Some of you know I am married to high school English teacher Julie Bisbano. She’s tirelessly dabbled as an unofficial medical technician, logging medicines and bandaging wounds and doing things unrelated to Yeats and Keats.

Our 2010 wedding vows may have stretched the “in sickness and health” business.

The negatives? Occasional weird hate, like the person who ended an angry anonymous email with “Good luck with your shi—y kidneys.”

Hey, good luck being a jerk.  C’est la vie.

Three years on, I am heartened to see old friend Michael Brennan (Thompson Middle School physical education teacher and Portsmouth coach) who continues to thrive after a  2021 heart transplant.

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And I miss Newport’s David Nelson, who died awaiting a second kidney transplant. Nelly spent time with me in early 2012 and detailed the sometimes rocky terrain of hemodialysis.

He was the dialysis patient who stopped by Newport Hospital (pre-Covid) to cheer up other patients. He died a year ago at age 55.

Me? I try to take my meds, do what doctors tell me. Kidney transplants are among the few things about which I’m an expert.

Anyone with questions about dialysis, transplants and the Red Sox may use the email listed here. Feel free to say hi. Kidney failure can be depressing but there’s no need to go it alone.

There are people who undergo worse, who live in relentless pain, the shut-in and infirm.

I am 64 years old. I fully expect to see 65 in June. Yes, I am a lucky guy.

Jim Gillis is a Daily News columnist. Send him email at jimgillis13@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Newport Daily News: Kidney donation offers the opporunity to look back at past three years