April 1st, 2013

Today is not April Fool's Day.

On this date every year, I do not engage in frivolous pranks and tomfoolery (or Dickfoolery or Harryfoolery, for that matter,) and instead I focus on something much more serious.

Mostly.

Because for me, April 1st is a day to remember the selfless act of a good friend of mine.  We will simply call him Barry, so as not to expose his true identity, and because that's what I have always called him.

Barry is a former student of mine, who graduated about ten years ago.  I ran into him after he graduated, and he joined our circle of friends (once again, Dungeons & Dragons for the win!)  For several years he was a fixture at our house, joining our table as a valued friend, and was present for some great times, and was around when our first child was gestating (not during the actual birth or implantation, he's not that good of a friend.)  As I type this, my wife is playing the Wii, where is image, immortalized as a Mii remains, cheering her on as she skis downhill.

But this was also the time when I was entering end stage renal failure.  My family's disease, PKD, was stepping up its game, and I was losing the struggle.  I will spare you the details of what it is like to wake up every day feeling you are in a slow motion death scene from the most existentialist Sam Peckinpah film of all time (that's for another post,) but suffice it to say, these were uncertain times for me and my wife.

There is of course no treatment for this disease during the early stages, no drugs you can take to halt its progress or ameliorate the symptoms.  When it gets bad enough, they put you on dialysis, and I choose not to say anything about that particular form of treatment other than to praise all the powers that I never had to go through it personally.

So until then, you just soldier on until you can get a transplant, the only actual 'cure' for PKD.  But to get a kidney, you need a donor.  Most people turn to siblings or immediate family members, but when all your siblings and half your parents (I counted,) have the same disease, it narrows the list.  I had plenty of supportive cousins, uncles and aunts, but at this time we were checking everyone to see if they would be a match for my older sister, who promised to be a tougher match.

In the midst of this all, while we sitting around returning to the Temple of Elemental Evil, the subject of my need for spare blood filtration organs, Barry calmly states "I'll give you one of mine."

And pretty much like that, Barry was on the track to give me his kidney.  Now there's a lot of stuff that happened in between, but I'm going to jump right to the action SPOILER ALERT:  Barry totally donates his kidney and saves my life.

And that is enough to make him a hero in my book.  But there are parts of this story that are not widely known, and those are the details I think people need to know about him.

You see, you can't just show up to a hospital and say "take out my kidney and give it to this guy."  You have to go through lots of different steps, such as blood tests, psychological profiles to make sure you are competent to make this big of a decision, and interviews to be certain that you are not being paid/coerced into donating.  You also have to be prepared to be out of work for a few weeks while you recover from having some rather critical parts removed.

And since I decided to have the operation in Orlando, he had to travel up there for this process, which over a hundred miles away, a good three-hour drive (it's actually two hours for me, but there might be cops reading this, so be cool.)

Barry did all of this with aplomb.  At every turn, as he tells it, the transplant people did all they could to talk him out of it, to make sure he was completely serious about this.  And he had plenty of time to turn back; it was over a year between him making his decision and the actual surgery.

Part of that was actually his fault, which is the most amazing part of this story.  Even though my numbers were bad enough to qualify me to start the transplant, (creatinine around 10, if you are familiar with the numbers,) we had to wait because Barry had just gotten a new job, the selfish prick.

Barry works with computers, and had just gotten a new job, a really good one that he was excited about.  But he couldn't take time off to donate his kidney until he had been working there for like six months, so he could get full benefits, including vacation time.

VACATION TIME.

Let that sink in for a second:  here you have a guy who is working for months to earn vacation time so he could use it (ALL of it,) to take off to Orlando and get sliced open (which is still a dangerous procedure) and have one of his precious bodily organs ripped out to save the life of someone he owed nothing.

And that is what happened.  On April 1st, 2009, they wheeled Barry away on a gurney, and not long after that, they knocked my ass out and wheeled me out after him.  When I awoke, I had a new kidney and a new lease on life.  Barry had some permanent nerve damage in his hip, an ugly scar, and one week to recover before he jumped right back to work.

So it might make me a bit of a buzzkill on April Fool's day, but this date is not about nonsense to me.  It is a holy day in remembrance of St. Barry, the patron of saving unworthy old curmudgeons.

I can't tell you how to celebrate St. Barry's Day, and what one should do to show appropriate thanks to him, because I have no fucking idea.

Seriously?  How do you say thank you for something of that magnitude?  If I were rich, I could create some sweeping gesture, but I'm not.  If I were a songwriter, I could...hold on, this is getting perilously close to an Elton John song.

I'm just a high school teacher who on his free time makes snarky blog posts.

So here you go Barry, this is all I got to give you, other than my eternal thanks.