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SUNDAY JOURNAL

New hope for same old dad

By RODNEY PAGE
Published April 23, 2006

When the phone rings at 5:30 a.m. it is either a wrong number or bad news. So when the call came, it took me about two seconds to go from a deep sleep to nauseous panic.

The caller ID showed it was my dad's cell phone. My father, John, had been on the waiting list for a kidney for 14 months. It had seemed more like 14 years. The past two months had been especially stressful, with two trips to the emergency room because of infections.

I took a deep breath and pressed the talk button.

"Rod, Dad. Hey, they found a kidney for the replacement so I'm over here at Tampa General. Should start the surgery in a few hours. You don't have to come over or anything. Don't change your day. Somebody will call you and let you know what's going on."

Typical.

My dad could talk for hours about how the person who first put shrink wrap on CDs should be arrested. Or how if he ever met the TV timeout guy at football games he would take him out with one punch. Or how whoever invented the spillproof 32-ounce coffee mug is a flat-out genius.

But kidney replacement surgery? Not something to change your day over.

When I hung up, I had an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. So they put in a new kidney and everything returns to normal? Something told me it wasn't going to be that easy. Not after what we had already been through.

Then the phone rang again.

"Oh my God!" my sister, Lisa, said through tears.

*   *   *

Dad found out his kidneys were failing two years ago. He collapsed in the kitchen while his wife, Maria, was at work. He barely had enough energy to call 911. He ended up on dialysis and twice got infections that put him in the hospital. He developed a rash that made him scratch himself raw. The infections forced him to abandon the home dialysis treatment and go to a dialysis center three times a week, six to eight hours at a time, to get transfusions.

As always, he put a good spin on things. He attended as many of his grandkids' baseball and soccer games as he could - even though he insists soccer is a communist sport that is tearing the very fiber of our country. He still gathered the family periodically for his specialty, spaghetti and meatballs. He and Maria traveled to New York City and Chicago.

Dad would never say how things really were. My sister and I joked that we would find out the worst when we read his obituary. We joke about Dad a lot. That's how we handle things in our family.

But this time, the jokes felt hollow. I had worried for 14 months about whether the transplant would ever happen. There were times when I was sure it would not. I imagined being at his bedside at the end, trying to think of something to say.

"I'm sorry?" "We tried?" "Hang in there?"

I was probably having one of those dreams when the phone call came.

*   *   *

The recovery room had a beautiful view of the Tampa waterfront, but Dad couldn't have cared less. He had just come up from the surgery and was in and out of sleep. They were watching him closely because his blood pressure wouldn't go down. It wouldn't go down, he said, "because they kept taking my blood pressure."

The new kidney, taken from an 18-year-old woman, had been installed right next to the old, nonfunctioning kidney. My sister and I joked that the new kidney was going to grow up in a hurry.

Conversation was hard because he was still groggy from the surgery. That was probably a good thing. My dad and I are different in just about every way.

He's a Republican, I'm a Democrat. He's a Gator, I'm a Seminole; we didn't talk for three months after a certain football game in 1993. He's country music, I'm anything but country music. Conversations about politics, raising children, best places to vacation, any subject, really, usually ends with one of us throwing our hands in the air and letting out a big "Ahhhhhhh."

But still, there was a part of me that wanted to try.

I wanted to hand him an unopened CD.

I wanted my old dad back.

*   *   *

On his second day in the recovery room, a blood vessel leading to the kidney burst and needed to be repaired immediately. Dad spent two days in the ICU. The first day he needed a breathing tube and was completely sedated.

The second day he was conscious, but again groggy. The Winter Olympics were on TV; he spent an hour trying to figure out the rules to curling. As he watched, Maria mentioned that a new set of DVDs had arrived from the movie club.

"Oh yeah, what movies this time?" he asked.

"I don't know, John. I didn't look."

Uh-oh.

This set off a 15-minute rant about how the first thing you should do is check to see what the movie titles are.

He was back.

Maria just rolled her eyes. Dad, irritated now, fidgeted with the bed controls and tried to find the most strategic place for his Jell-O and water. The men's luge competition was on TV.

"Take a lunch tray and slide down on your back and call that a sport?" he said.

Through the miracle of transplant surgery, Dad had been given a second chance to pass on his endless wisdom. Now my kids will learn the art of chip-to-dip dispersal; how you never, ever get behind a driver with a Canadian license plate; and how the best way to fix a broken lawn mower is to beat it with a hammer.

His favorite tool.

Rodney Page is a staff writer/editorial assistant in the Times sports department.

[Last modified April 20, 2006, 14:15:26]