I came home from dialysis on a Wednesday and my house was gone.
Not burned down. Not flooded. Gone the way a mouth goes empty when someone pulls every tooth out one at a time and calls it dental care. The porch swing my husband Arturo hung the summer before he died was gone. The china cabinet my mother carried across the river in the back of a borrowed truck in 1958 was gone. My saints on the mantel, my recliner with the cigarette burn on the left arm from a boyfriend I had before Arturo and never told anyone about, my kitchen table where I had fed three children and then, God willing, ten grandchildren, all of it, gone, and in its place a house so empty my own voice came back to me off the walls when I said, out loud, to nobody, “Bueno. Okay then.”
I want you to understand what four hours on a dialysis machine does to a woman my age before I tell you what I found when those four hours were over, because the two things happened at exactly the same time, and that was not an accident. That was a plan.
I am seventy-four years old. Three mornings a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, a van from Rio Vista Kidney Center picks me up at 5:40 in the morning from my house on Los Nogales Street here in Del Rio, and by 6:15 I am in a recliner with two needles in my left arm, watching my blood leave my body, travel through a machine the size of a dorm refrigerator, and come back to me cleaner than my own kidneys can manage anymore. Four hours. Sometimes four and a half if my numbers are stubborn. I sit there with a heated blanket over my legs and I watch the clock on the wall above the nurses’ station, and I think about small things on purpose, because if I think about big things for four hours with tubes running out of my arm, I will come apart in front of people who have enough to do already.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
TAP ” READ MORE ” 👇
