4/4/2023/1

Again it is after midnight and my body is trying to go to sleep, but my brain is again bursting with my next blog post. (The last one was only a week ago!) Here it is:

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Seven OBVIOUS reasons I don’t need a kidney transplant (a comedy routine, OBVIOUSLY) (OBVIOUSLY, key words are in all caps…)

I have always wanted to become a standup comedian. No, actually, I have always wanted to become a standup comedian since I saw Ken Jeong. Ken Jeong is a Korean-American guy who becomes a doctor, and then chucks it all and becomes a comedy actor and standup comedian. When I saw Ken Jeong I figured, if one K-A doc can become a standup comedian, why can’t I? There is really only one condition left: to be funny. OBVIOUSLY, he is. Am I?

The answer is, OBVIOUSLY, yes. If I am not funny, what am I doing writing a standup comedy routine which is probably going to be read by at least thirteen people, of whom maybe four will read the whole thing (okay, I can be long-winded) and two or three will put a like on Facebook, or even write me an encouraging comment.

OBVIOUSLY (again: actually most of this stuff is OBVIOUS, which is why many of you won’t bother to read the whole thing) I am STALLING.

To continue STALLING, I am actually only funny half of the time. By now it is no secret that I am bipolar, or manic-depressive. So about half the time I am depressed and the other half of the time I am hypomanic, which means almost-manic. During the half of time that I am depressed I am not funny. Being depressed is not funny (unless you are Steven Wright). During the other half, one of my symptoms is that I crack a lot of jokes. Not all of the jokes are funny. Maybe, if I’m lucky, half of them are. However, during these hyper spells I am talking so fast that I end up saying something funny every minute or so. I am sure that must meet the cut-off to be a funny person…

Unfortunately, as with most of my writing, I will write something I think is funny late at night, but the next morning or so I read it and think “This is not funny, this is s***!” And then I throw it away. However, in this wonderful digital age that we live in, it is actually almost impossible to really throw away something you’ve written. Whatever you do, it doesn’t really get thrown away! It gets hidden somewhere on your hard drive, in some “backup file” with a weird name with a lot of special characters in it, or better yet duplicated multiple times in “the cloud” (i.e. the Internet), and therefore impossible to expunge from the face of the earth.

OBVIOUSLY, I am still STALLING.

I was inspired to write this post by a comedian named Tig Notaro, who went VIRAL on the Internet by doing a standup routine which started “I have cancer. How are you?” and then going on and talking about three miserable things that happened to her in rapid succession. First, she became deathly ill with C. diff. Then her mother hit her head and died. Finally, she was diagnosed with bilateral breast cancer. News of her “GROUNDBREAKING set” went VIRAL on the Internet, followed several days later by an audio recording.

Another comedian, a Japanese-American named Atsuko O-something (some long Japanese name I can never remember) told the following Biblical joke: Her brother bought an expensive new car called a Genesis. If she were to buy herself a new car, it would have to be called a Job.

I actually take offense at Tig’s set being called “GROUNDBREAKING”. (OBVIOUSLY, we’re on a first-name basis now.) (OBVIOUSLY not really. That was a joke.) (If you have to tell people it’s a joke, does that mean it’s not really funny?) YEARS ago, I did a comedy sketch called “Being a cardiac patient is no fun” which began with my describing my cardiac arrest a few months before that. For SOME REASON my set didn’t go VIRAL on the Internet. That may have been because only four people saw it (one of them being my dear departed wife Carol, plus the waitress and the bartender), but I did go on to publish a transcript of it on this blog, where at least seven of you saw it as well. GROUNDBREAKING my ass!

OBVIOUSLY, I need a bigger audience for MY GROUNDBREAKING humor. However, I am too PROUD to link my blog to Twitter (where Donald Trump could read it), Instagram (where my own children and all of their millennial friends have gone to escape us baby-boomers who have taken over Facebook), and especially Tik Tok (God knows what that hell that is!). So OBVIOUSLY I am stuck with you twelve (or so).

OBVIOUSLY, I am still STALLING.

I was originally going to use the title “I need a kidney transplant.” However, again I am too PROUD to go “begging” on the Internet for a new kidney. So I cleverly changed it to “Seven OBVIOUS reasons I DON’T need a kidney transplant”. For the linguists among you, this is an example of irony, that is, saying something by saying the opposite. (Or is that called sarcasm?)

I just noticed that it is April Fool’s Day. I suppose I could claim that this is an April Fool’s joke…

True to my standup roots, my new title is a nod to George Carlin. (My fifth comedian reference in only five minutes!) (The millennials among you, if there are any left, will recognize him as the original Mr. Conductor on the Thomas the Train show. Ringo was his replacement. Or was it the other way around?) Anyway, he went VIRAL (even before VIRAL was even a word), by talking about the “Seven words you can’t say on TV.” If you don’t know or forgot the words, here they are: beep, beep, beep, beep, beepbibeep, beepbebibeep, and “tits”. I feel okay spelling out “tits” because I agree with George that it doesn’t even belong on the list. (“It’s such a friendly word.”)

STALL, STALL, STALL…

What’s up with my kidneys? My kidneys are going downhill because the best treatment for bipolar disease is the drug lithium, which kills off the kidneys gradually over the years in 100% (yes, that’s what I said, 100%) of patients. I took it for twenty years, until my kidney function was down to 25% of normal. Since I stopped, my kidneys have continued to die. Apparently, this is the usual course of events.

My story has a hiccup to it. When I had my arrest, my kidneys shut down completely and I was put on hemodialysis. Hemodialysis was a truly miserable experience (that’s a whole nother story), and I decided that if I had to continue doing it, I would somehow find a way to end my life. But again, really I wanted to live, and my kidneys came back, against all odds. (Does anyone still listen to Phil Collins?) After two weeks I began to pee again (I remember the joyous moment when that happened in the middle of the night. It was a geyser, like Old Faithful!) My kidneys returned to their baseline. However lousy that baseline was, it still exceeded all of my doctors’ expectations, so no one complained.

Okay, I’m done STALLING! (Drum roll) Here they are (finally!): the seven OBVIOUS reasons I don’t need a kidney transplant. (Remember, that was my title…) 1) I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being “a patient”. (My friend Bill, who is a transplant surgeon, said to me “Ed, we’re all patients!”) 2) I don’t want to make the same mistake as Carol, who clung stubbornly to life even after cancer and chemo had sapped it of all happiness (Is this still comedy?) 3) I do not want to compromise my “quality of life” by getting a new kidney and having to be paranoid every time the guy next to me on the subway sneezes. (Actually of course I never take the subway.) 4) (this is a good one) I wouldn’t want to deprive some poor, more deserving young person of a kidney. (This is total BS because in my heart of hearts I don’t think anyone is more deserving than me (yeah, I know it should be “I” but that sounds dumb…) 5) Right now I can’t really think of three more OBVIOUS reasons I don’t need a kidney. Maybe I should change the name of this post. But I’m feeling too lazy to do that right now, plus that would take some “oomph” out of the George Carlin reference…

Tig is OBVIOUSLY a PROUD person, and so am I. So when my new nephrologist (a young Korean-American) asked me if I could think of anyone who might be willing to give me a kidney, I said NO. When Bill asked me the same thing, I again said NO. Finally, my new transplant nephrologist, Dr. Ron Gao (a Southeast Asian-American; we may actually be related), told me that people even go to social media to find a donor. My first reaction (actually my third reaction) was, I am too PROUD to beg friends and strangers, much less relatives, for a new kidney.

At one point I formulated the thought that I would not feel comfortable asking anyone to give me a kidney to whom I would not offer one of my kidneys if the tables were turned. That would decrease the possible donor pool to zero…

Dr. Ron asked me if I belong to a church. I said NO. Actually, I have been involved with two churches, one my mother’s in New Haven, and a church in Harvard Square called “OCBC” (Old Cambridge Baptist Church). I even put together a folk mass there inspired by Godspell, but that was a half a century ago. Literally. Since then my attendance there has been so spotty (Carol was Roman Catholic) that I can’t really say I “belong” to the church. Besides, most of my friends at OCBC are older than me (yes, Doug, this means you) or dead, and Dr. Ron told me that I need to find a “young kidney”. (For example my brother looked into becoming a kidney donor for me, but his kidneys are almost as old as mine. Thanks, bro.)

I had heard the beginning of Tig’s story about two months ago and immediately changed the channel. I wasn’t ready to hear it yet, plus I didn’t feel like hearing someone else complaining about their cancer. Whoever was complaining was still alive, and Carol wasn’t. However, after going through these phases of denial, I was finally ready to hear Tig’s story. After surviving her three horrors (not to be competitive, but I can list for you six from my own personal book of Job), she decided that she wanted to have a baby. She wanted this so badly that she went against her doctor’s orders (actually people don’t say that anymore, so let’s just say “strong recommendations”) and tried to do IVF (in vitro fertilization; “test-tube baby”; people really don’t say that anymore) with a surrogate. Where did she find the surrogate? She asked for one (half-jokingly) on her podcast. She actually found one, but the procedure didn’t end up working, and she ended up adopting and living “happily every after”.

Learning that Tig had put her PRIDE aside and gone onto the Internet to find a surrogate finally broke through my resistance.

I only found my partner Sheila after I finally put aside my foolish PRIDE and put my profile onto a dating site. Until then I was convinced that I was too good for a dating site. I immediately met another OR nurse (operating room nurse) named Sheila. After texting with her for about twelve hours, the thought came into my mind “whatever happened to MY Sheila?” The rest is history. (She is sleeping peacefully in the next room. It is 1:22 AM now…) The point is that I only found her after I put aside my PRIDE, prostrated myself to God, and opened my heart to whatever was coming next. What was coming next was MY Sheila.

I told Sheila that I was thinking of naming this post “The one reason that I need a kidney transplant” and asked her what she thought that one reason was. My answer to this was “my kidneys don’t work”. Her answer was better: “you want to live.”

It looks like my time is up. It is 2:00 AM and I am falling asleep at the switch. My battery life is down to nine percent, and I have been on battery saver for a while now.

So let me put aside all ratiocination (BS) and say the OBVIOUS real name of this post:

I want to live. I need a new kidney.

Is there anyone out there who wants to give me one?

All I can give you in return is my undying gratitude. Really.

As always, friends, thanks for reading.