Looking like 79 miles hard road rode until exhausted and put up wet he sat in Tom Young’s Fitness Center’s, Las Cruces, New Mexico, dressing room. I guess he declined my idea of writing up an article with photographs for publication about his recent kidney replacement. I gave him my card and credentials. A thumbnail of the experience follows.
There is no privacy in a men’s locker room, I was late for water aerobics and tarried to hear his tale. My interest not limited to his miracle four years in waiting but also the concern for the bad press received by The Veteran’s Administration.
A Viet Nam veteran his need obvious but the wait nearly killed him. Late one recent night the local police called saying, “You have one and a half hours to board a plane in El Paso bound for Nashville, they have a kidney for you.”
Accompanied by his daughter they arrived and boarded a Lear Jet, some forty miles distant, they the only passengers. The plane failed over Memphis. After critical delays they were chauffeur driven to Nashville where he received the kidney of a recently deceased nineteen-year-old girl. The staff chief surgeon, a thirty-five-year old female, in reply to his query, “does that mean I’ve breasts and a bubble butt?”
“No. It just means you’ll have to squat to pee.”
Such is life in these United States of America. In a time of crisis and anxiety we, a people of grit, know life goes on.
In another instance of father Vet and daughter; during conversation at Mountain View Memorial Center I leaned that her father, one of only six, had been blown off the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor and survived. Seems he never sweats the ‘small stuff’ either, insisting that she drive him to the hospital during a heart attack which he also survived. An otherwise $600 ride.
We the people should be proud to be who we are as citizens. As for myself, living in this Land of Enchantment, New Mexico, I know that the survivors of the Bataan Death March still celebrate surviving the event arriving in Japanese cars. It changes a person to know such people. It makes me proud too.
120607 22:14 new kidney
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