Hey folks - Thanks for the support and well wishes. I still feel strange about the ask, but I do think it's the thing to do. For more information on donating, call Susanna at 612-863-8886. The formatting made that hard to see on the last post. As a reminder, you are anonymous until you have passed all the tests and have decided to donate, and of course you can back out at any time. Thanks again for giving it a thought - I know it is no small thing.
"He said I was unequipped to meet life because I had no sense of humor."
Monday, November 23, 2015
Sunday, November 22, 2015
Got a Spare Kidney?
It’s been a busy time – C and I are closing on our new house
November 30th and moving the following weekend. My term at the U is
wrapping up and I’m finished with my licensure work. I feel more grounded than
I have in a while, and have found the energy to reinvest in conversations about
policing and refugees and politics. Dialysis has been smooth for the past two
weeks, and seems to be continuing to be smooth, so access failure isn’t such a
pressing concern. It is only a matter of weeks before the access needs more
treatment, and it is only a matter of time (probably in the 12 month range)
before it fails entirely.
Corinne and I listened to The Martian over a few car trips
last year. The premise, that Mark Watney is stuck on Mars for months which turn
to years, entirely alone, fending for his life, is incredibly engaging. A
rescue mission would be dangerous and he worries about his colleagues and
friends risking their lives to save his. This resonated with me. It is
overwhelming to think about the sacrifices people have made for me by donating
a part of themselves. It’s overwhelming to consider that people would consider
being tested to donate. And it is overwhelming to think that to find someone to
donate, I need to advertise for that kind of generosity.
I’m not sure how to write about this. I worry that these
posts will shift from informative story-telling to a kind of soliciting
story-telling. I wonder who I am to ask for such a thing. I worry that I am
antagonizing people who have already been tested, or who want to donate and
cannot. Yet I also imagine that many of you have thought about being tested and
just haven’t for whatever reason, which is exactly where I would be, to be
honest.
Asking for things in general is tough for me, and this is a
big ask. But I’m weeks away from being eligible for a transplant and there is
no donor in sight. I don’t know – how does anyone navigate this kind of thing?
I want to say – please get tested. And I want to say – I’m sure someone will
turn up and suddenly the wait will be over. I want to say – I feel great,
dialysis is no trouble. And I want to say – I feel like my life is on hold
until this is sorted out. That’s all true. Well I think I’ll leave it here. I
wanted to embed this renewed called for donors in a more substantial post, but
that isn’t really working. Please consider getting tested: (Susanna @ 612-863-8886).
Thanks for reading.
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Vein Balloons
So this is why I missed dialysis on Wednesday. I’m trying to
write a paper for my Critical Discourse Analysis course, which obviously isn’t
going very well. So this will serve as a little break.
When my kidney doc heard that as a result of a blasted
vasculature, I received a synthetic forearm graft instead of a natural fistula,
he seemed disappointed, though at the time I did not appreciate the difference.
A synthetic graft, being synthetic, tends to have more complications than a natural
fistula because of a body’s reaction to it. I, being a young healthy person, am
having those reactions. Bummer indeed.
I’ve heard that typically grafts require treatment every 3-6
months, sometimes less and sometimes more frequently. While I had a very high
initial “access flow” (meaning the blood was moving through the graft and back
to my heart nicely – the number was 1200 something), after about three months
the access flow wasn’t flowing quite so nicely (600 something) so I went to the
vascular center in a strip mall on County rd D and 35W to have my veins
ballooned via angiogram. Piece of cake. I got to watch the whole thing – kind
of a crazy enterprise, x-rays, contrast dye, I got to know my left arm and
shoulder from the inside. They ballooned one spot in my forearm, not painful at
all. I was back at dialysis that afternoon after a nice lunch at Blackbird.
Six weeks after that (in October), I was back at the
vascular center with an even slower flow rate (300 something), for some more
serious ballooning. This time the narrowing was in my upper arm. I had bravely
(stupidly) foregone the sedatives assuming it would be the same cakewalk as my
previous visit. I survived fine, but it was a bit of a ride. Ballooning felt
like my vein being stretched – which is to say it felt like when I have sat with
my legs dangling off a ledge or something, then had jumped down and my feet
felt like they had exploded. Know the feeling? It wasn’t quite so acute, but it
was uncomfortable, and it lasted about 15 minutes. The vein is stretching and tearing a bit. The interventional radiologist almost put a stent in because the vein was damaged. Lots of breathing and a few
bad jokes to try to pass the time. Six weeks was a quicker turn around than
most of us hoped for, and the whole graft thing was starting to become the adventure Dr Hall was worried about.
I returned to dialysis feeling more deflated than ballooned,
thinking I was now in for a visit to the strip mall every six weeks rather than
every three to six months. Two weeks later, when I went in to dialyze, my
access was clotted.
I should say that the access clotting was a kind of worst
case, nightmare scenario. If the access is clotted, no dialysis. As one tech
put it – the access is a lifeline. If it is clotted, the good people at the
strip mall clinic work to open it up. If they cannot, they reinstall (the first word to come to mind) a
shoulder catheter – the dreaded no-showering, stenosis-causing Hickman. I also
would need a more permanent access, a graft in my upper arm. That was Wednesday
last week. Not a great day.
However, this story has a happy ending, at least for now –
always for now. J
The wonderful people at the strip mall vascular surgery
center, with whom I am now well acquainted, were able to clear my graft using
some anti-clotting drugs and more balloons. So many balloons! This time I opted
for some sedation so I was more comfortable. I still watched and made my
comments and asked my questions. Those poor people are used to quiet, sleepy,
sedate patients. Not me. As of Monday, yesterday, with the help of balloons and
some blood thinners, another access flow test showed a flow rate of a robust
1700. The graft is clear and flowing strong – for now.
As it has happened so many times in my life, right when I’m
feeling kind of down about the daily routine of dialysis (always today, yesterday
or tomorrow – always always always always) something goes to shit. This week I’m
appreciating the daily routine of dialysis. I suppose it was only a matter of
time before I started settling into this new normal. And it is only a matter of time before graft will slow again,
the veins running from the graft back to my heart will narrow, or the artery
leading into the graft will narrow, and the graft might clot off again.
Something like this will happen again, maybe soon. But for now, things are moving, and I need to get back to this paper.
Thanks for reading!
Sunday, November 8, 2015
In the Chair
As I’ve written, somewhat extensively, my health struggle in
the past year has been a resistance to realigning my identity to better match
my reality as a sick person. There are plenty of good reasons for this
resistance, and in some ways I have benefitted from it. I believe that I am
more active and have continued to live my life as I want to live it due to my
insistence on conceiving myself as a healthy person circumstantially
compromised, rather than a sick person getting by. I am biking (sometimes to
and from dialysis!), finishing my license and continuing my PhD coursework. C
and I are buying a house, working on renting ours, and making plans for our
future. However, my resistance to “being sick” does not and cannot ameliorate
the daily anxiety and attention toward managing my body.
Managing my body can look like a lot of different things,
many of which I’ve written about already. I am attentive to my dialysis access
several times per day, ensuring that it is open and working well. I am
attentive to my diet and fluid consumption (this becomes more of an issue the
more degraded my kidney function becomes). I am attentive to scheduling my life
around my dialysis – while I am able to do some reading, my concentration is
limited by the environment at the clinic. I set aside work for this time, reading
and online grading, and try to work for the first chunk of my three and a half
hour run.
While the dialysis techs who “stick” me to hook me up to the
machines are about my age and fun to chat with, most of the other dialysis
patients are like a family I can’t bring myself to identify with. They tend to
be older and much sicker, though most are very friendly. The set up isn’t
conducive to much conversation, and while we have kidney failure in common – no
small thing – people tend to keep to themselves.
Occasionally someone
struggles, somehow, which is very hard for me to watch. The other day a man,
maybe in his 40s? didn’t swivel enough to move from his dialysis chair to his
wheel chair. He is missing the lower half of his left leg, something that might
have happened relatively recently, and struggles to move on his own. He didn’t
fall, he just sort of slumped while Duke, the tech, supported him under his
arms. Duke calmly asked for some help. The guy started moaning, something was
hurting him, his shirt was pulled off his back. After a moment another tech
helped him into his wheelchair. He was fine, the moment passed. Yet it has
become a powerful memory for me, relentless. I was sitting in the chair
next to him. It was hard to watch, and it was hard to not watch. I wanted to
help him, but in another way I was
him. I envision myself in that position, and it is a struggle to accept that - slumped on the floor, my back and belly exposed - with grace.
Another patient, an older guy who started treatment here after I did, came in with a New Yorker magazine and a good sense of humor. He has struggled. Now he asks the techs a lot of questions, about his blood pressure, about his flow rate, about his access. The techs are starting to give him a hard time. It's good natured and I can't blame them, it's got to be a terrible place to work. I guess - I wish I could join them, but I know too much of what he is facing. His repeated questions, his anxiety about his treatment and his future, that's all way too real for me.
One more story. Another old guy, this one probably in his eighties, walks with a stooped shuffle. He doesn't read or watch anything and is hard of hearing. The staff yell to be heard by him. He's still driving - though he obviously shouldn't be - and hanging on to that. Two weeks ago when I pulled up in the parking lot he was face down on the sidewalk, bleeding from his face and his thumb. He was alright, but couldn't get himself up. I tried for a moment by grabbing his forearm. I felt strength in his arm as he tried to push himself up. He kept saying his car was right there. I told him to stay still while I got help from some folks inside. Two techs got him to sitting and they called an ambulance, which he didn't want. He was back in the clinic two days later and has seemed fine. He still just sits during his run - three and a half hours. I've always felt sympathetic towards people facing the loss of that freedom, but even watching him get into his car as I'm getting on my bike, his resistance resonated profoundly.
There are lighter stories which color my visits as well, but they do not persist as these do.
One more story. Another old guy, this one probably in his eighties, walks with a stooped shuffle. He doesn't read or watch anything and is hard of hearing. The staff yell to be heard by him. He's still driving - though he obviously shouldn't be - and hanging on to that. Two weeks ago when I pulled up in the parking lot he was face down on the sidewalk, bleeding from his face and his thumb. He was alright, but couldn't get himself up. I tried for a moment by grabbing his forearm. I felt strength in his arm as he tried to push himself up. He kept saying his car was right there. I told him to stay still while I got help from some folks inside. Two techs got him to sitting and they called an ambulance, which he didn't want. He was back in the clinic two days later and has seemed fine. He still just sits during his run - three and a half hours. I've always felt sympathetic towards people facing the loss of that freedom, but even watching him get into his car as I'm getting on my bike, his resistance resonated profoundly.
There are lighter stories which color my visits as well, but they do not persist as these do.
Yesterday, Friday, I came into the clinic a bit heavier - extra fluid that dialysis would pull off - because I had missed my dialysis run on Wednesday. I'll explain why in another post. I usually weigh in at 75 kilograms or so and weigh out at 73.5 kilograms, my "dry weight." This time I came in at 77.5 kilograms. I hadn't had that much pulled off before and was a little nervous about cramping and feeling dizzy. I asked that the tech pull a bit less than the full amount. She suggested we pull three. If your math is sharper than mine was, you realize that that is the full amount. As much as she had joked with me or winked about another patient, I was more her patient than her peer. I am in the chair - not facing it, not walking by. Thanks for reading.
Saturday, October 3, 2015
Habitus in the fall
Reviewing the last few updates, I can say that my life feels much less like a shit show, which is nice. I just got a flashy new bike, and I've been biking to school - and occasionally dialysis. I think I'm the only person to bike to dialysis. Maybe ever. Still great being alive. I posted the paper below - as always I'm curious to hear what you might think about it, and as always I'm self-conscious that it's not as great as it could be. Thanks for reading!
My
dentist, a family friend, told me at my last check up that I looked great,
never better. He said this because he knew I have a chronic illness – kidney
failure – and to him I looked good. He said this to me a few months ago as my
transplanted kidney was failing and I was sicker than I had been in 10 years.
But he was right; I looked great. I’ve always been able to pass as healthy,
oftentimes even to myself. Yet every time I share my health history, even with
doctors, I am reminded by their reactions of how extraordinary my life has
been.
For
years I inhabited the social world of a healthy person. There were small tells;
a conservation of movement, a deeper patience, along with periodic hospital
stays, but these hardly registered even to those who knew me well. A few months
ago my transplanted kidney failed and I began dialysis. For the first time in
ten years I felt off, un-centered – tired but not sleepy. I wrote the following
in a blog entry, “I had a hard time making decisions and wanting things, or
knowing what wanting things meant. … I would say things that weren’t true,
which I would call ‘jokes.’ It felt like someone else talking. Sometimes I
would feel cornered. I was more just a body, ungoverned, lurching from thing to
thing without consideration.” I was misaligned; my sick body didn’t make sense
in my healthy social world.
Pierre
Bourdieu describes habitus as a way of being in relationship with the world
(Bourdieu, 2000). According to Bourdieu, social influence inscribes itself upon
the habitus, which he describes as “a memory pad” (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 141). Our
habitus responds to and is created by our social environment; it is an implicit
collusion of those with similar conditionings (Bourdieu, 2000). As a person
passing as healthy to everyone including myself, my habitus formed similarly to
the healthy people around me. I understood myself as someone who could move and
work as I liked. My hopes for my life mirrored the hopes of the healthy people
around me.
Because
I was able to enact a healthy lifestyle, my habitus as a healthy person was
comfortably situated. Happiness, according to Bourdieu (2000), is the alignment
of our surroundings, or habitat, with our habitus.
Since the desire for fulfillment is roughly
measured by its chances of realization, the degree of inner satisfaction that
the various agents experience does not depend as much as one might think on
their effective power in the sense of an abstract, universal capacity to
satisfy needs and desires abstractly defined for an indifferent agent; rather,
it depends on the degree to which the mode of functioning of the social world
or the field in which they are inserted enables his habitus to come into its
own. (p. 150)
I
understand sickness and wellness as an axis of social life. As a straight, cis,
white, male, and, importantly in this context, healthy, person living in Minneapolis, my habitus has aligned
smoothly with my habitat. When the body and society align, the body doesn’t
need to want, it just does; it moves and acts knowingly within its social
bounds. Living was easy. Sure, I wrestled with the ordinary dilemmas of life –
I should exercise more, relationships can be hard, what movie should I watch –
but I did not encounter the world as a foreign place.
Bourdieu
(2000) first understood habitus where it was misaligned with its habitat;
colonial North Africa- for example (p. 159). Habitus is an embodiment of social
influences, but it also has inertia, and can lag in a shifting environment. Environmental
changes can challenge us. “In crisis or sudden change, especially … too-rapid
movements in social space, agents often have difficulty in holding together
dispositions … some of them, often those who were best adapted to the previous
state of the game, have difficulty in adjusting to the new established order”
(Bourdieu, 2000, p. 161). My situation is the reverse of this – my social order
didn’t change, I did. Still, I, as Bourdieu, became most aware of my habitus
when it fell out of alignment with its environment.
Falling
out of alignment was difficult for me in part because the shift didn’t, on the
surface, seem dramatic. I spend 14 hours per week on dialysis, but it is not
painful. I experience less swelling in my legs, and I feel better than I did
before I started. I have a stronger appetite and I have more energy. Yet I feel
paralyzed; the world has become a foreign place.
I
had been on the lookout for certain types of struggles while at the mercy of
the medical institution – surgeries, tests, painful procedures, waiting rooms.
What laid me down wasn’t any event or episode, it was the dull recurrence of
dialysis, and the minute, insistent physicality of kidney failure. As Bourdieu
(2000) wrote, “it would be wrong to underestimate the pressure or oppression,
continuous and often unnoticed, of the ordinary order of things” (p. 141).
Habitus constructs the world by orienting itself to it, by responding to it. My
sickness oriented me to the world in a certain way. My response to this health
trauma displayed itself in my day-to-day physicality; how I entered a room, or
how I sat in a chair. Again, Bourdieu (2000):
It is likely that those who are ‘in their right
place’ in the social world can abandon or entrust themselves more, and more
completely, to their dispositions (this is the ‘ease’ of the well-born), than
those who occupy awkward positions, and the latter are more likely to bring to
consciousness that which, for others, is taken for granted, because they are
forced to keep watch on themselves and consciously correct the ‘first
movements’ of a habitus that generates inappropriate or misplaced behaviors. (p.
163)
As
a healthy person I was able to move without thinking. I would casually bike 10
or 15 miles to a social event, or run up a flight of stairs. I was invited to a
beach recently and declined, for no reason other than I felt disembodied. As I
became a person with kidney failure, action without thought seemed impossible.
I struggled to shift from a person who biked and stayed out late to someone who
drove and went home early. Even moving from the couch to the kitchen, or
deciding whether or not to wear socks required consideration. As my habitus
shifted against my habitat, my struggle was not against an illness; it was
determining what to do next.
There
are obvious pedagogical implications to Bourdieu’s work with habitus. Students
struggle as much with when to raise their hand as using correct punctuation. The
‘how’ of schooling: how students move in the hallways; they interact with their
teachers; how teachers address the students; these questions are as relevant as
the learning content.
Schooling
is not a neutral environment. It is a specific habitat – content, physical and
social structures, and learning outcomes – which are often white, middle class,
hetero and euro-centric (Barton & Hamilton, 2000; Gee, 2009). Students
whose habitus – ideological backgrounds, learning styles, social mechanisms –
misalign with this habitat can be positioned as at-risk or failures (Gee, 2009;
Richardson, 2003; Street, 2003). I believed that I could maintain my
comfortable, dominant access to my healthy habitat even as I lost the healthy
habitus that allowed me to enjoy it. There is power associated with being
healthy, as there is with being white, male, cis, etc, and I didn’t recognize
it. That is the clearest mark of privilege. As a high school teacher, it is
incumbent upon me to recognize the same power differential in my students whose
habitus similarly misaligns with their habitat, and work to create an
environment where they can more closely align. Like me, even students who look
great could be struggling.
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