‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come in with you?’ Paige asked as she pulled her car up outside the hospital entrance. ‘I was planning on going to the studio and working on some concepts for another book, but there’s no rush for that if you need more support.’
‘No!’ Rebecca hadn’t meant to sound so adamant, but she’d been coming here three times a week for almost two months and was well and truly an old hand. More than that, after a whole morning of driving around Sydney with her daughter trying to find a wedding dress, she was actually relieved to be heading into the dialysis unit for a little R&R. ‘You go work on your pictures, my illness has already taken you enough away from your work.’
‘Alright then,’ Paige said as Rebecca climbed out of the car. ‘But I’ll be back well before you’re done, I’ll meet you in the waiting room at four o’clock. Have—I’ll see you later.’
Fun? Rebecca thought as she shut the door and started inside. Lucky Paige had caught herself before finishing that sentence because the mood she was in right now she might have actually snapped. This morning had been supposed to be fun, but at one stage during the trek from one bridal boutique to the next, she’d had to stop herself grabbing hold of Paige and trying to shake some sense into her. It was all very well wanting to find the perfect gown, but it was almost as if Paige didn’t want to find one.
For someone who generally didn’t pay much attention to fashion and whose idea of dressing up was wearing knee-high boots with her skinny jeans instead of her usual sneakers, she was being ridiculous!
Today wasn’t their first dress-hunting excursion and what Rebecca had been looking forward to had become a kind of torture. Paige must have tried on every gown in the city over the past week or so and none of them had come close to satisfying her. She’d looked like a princess in almost all of them but, according to Paige, they were all either too flamboyant or too revealing, too traditional or not traditional enough. At this rate she’d be getting married in her regular uniform of jeans, a paint-smeared t-shirt and a pair of Converse.
As she approached the entrance of the dialysis unit, she resolved to talk some sense into Paige that very afternoon.
‘Hello, Rebecca,’ smiled the young woman behind the registration desk as she checked in for her session. ‘How are you feeling today?’
‘Fine thanks,’ she said, deciding not to bore this poor woman with the morning’s frustrations. And physically—aside from the tiredness, which could be down to her marathon dress hunt—she was feeling better than she had a couple of months ago. As inconvenient as it had been to reshuffle her lessons and other commitments for her thrice-weekly sessions, dialysis was making things easier that she hadn’t even really realised had become hard.
‘Excellent. Well, you know the drill. Take a seat and your nurse will be here to collect you soon.’
Less than ten minutes later, Rebecca was settled into position, attached to the machine, blood pumping in and out of her body. She’d had so many blood tests to monitor her levels of protein, glucose and other things she couldn’t keep in her head that these days she barely even noticed the needle go in, and the dialysis unit was beginning to feel like a home away from home.
The first time she’d arrived for treatment, she’d felt like a nervous little girl on her first day at school. She’d been surprised by how many people were actually on the life-saving treatment; people who if she’d walked past in the street she’d never have suspected of being sick at all. People who over the course of a few weeks she’d developed a bond with.
Unlike her family, these people understood how it felt to have to live your life around dialysis appointments and were happy to fill her in on how things worked and share their experiences.
The first person who’d spoken to her had been a man who, with tattoos covering his arms and a long, thick ginger beard, looked like he’d be more at home sitting on a Harley Davidson than a dialysis chair. ‘This your first time, love?’
She’d nodded and he’d shot her an understanding smile. At least that’s what she’d thought it was but it was hard to tell through his facial jungle. ‘Don’t worry, love, the first year is the hardest.’
First year? She certainly hoped she wasn’t here that long, but, unless she agreed to Solomon’s generous offer, she quite possibly could be. Her stomach twisted at the thought—she still wasn’t comfortable with the idea of Solomon being her donor, but then again, would she be comfortable with the idea of anyone she knew making such a sacrifice for her? It was awful to feel so dependent on someone.
‘He’s right,’ had said an elderly woman whom Rebecca quickly nicknamed Pollyanna. ‘We’re lucky to live in a country where dialysis is easily accessible or many of us wouldn’t be here anymore.’
These two had seemed unlikely friends but, like the other folk that Rebecca soon became familiar with, they’d connected over their shared kidney problems and all seemed to take their situation in their stride. She, Pollyanna, Old Biker Dude and a few others had regular matching appointments and as the machines whirred alongside them, they spoke about their everyday lives.
She’d learnt that Old Biker Dude was actually a retired priest and had never ridden a motorcycle in his life and that Pollyanna wasn’t just knitting aimlessly each session, but making something called twiddlemuffs for dementia patients. Her husband of sixty-three years had recently been put in a care facility because he had Alzheimer’s and she could no longer look after him properly. Yet still, she was never without a smile upon her face.
Then there was a retired footballer, a librarian about the same age as Rebecca and a young man who was studying film and television at university and had already had one kidney transplant in his teens. It was amazing how much you could learn about a person in the course of a few short hours, and, when those hours repeated themselves two or three times a week, these people came to feel like old friends.
Occasionally, they even talked about their kidney predicaments.
At eighty-four Pollyanna’s body was too old to handle a transplant operation but she didn’t seem at all daunted by the prospect of spending the rest of her life on dialysis. The librarian was almost two years into her stint on the deceased donor waiting list, which Old Biker Dude was also on. Both of them had mentioned how wrong it felt to be hoping someone would die so they could live free of dialysis. The young student’s boyfriend was going to be his donor, but he had another couple of months before his body would be stable enough for the operation. Now the footballer was an interesting case—not able to find a familial match and too impatient to wait for a deceased donor, he’d recently put an advert online and apparently had been inundated with responses.
‘Most of them are bullshit,’ he told everyone now, ‘but I’m going to meet up with this woman next week who seems genuine.’
Rebecca wasn’t sure what to think about this possibility—the idea of asking a loved one to donate was hard enough for her to come to terms with, but a stranger?
Why would someone do that for someone they’d never even met?
She was the only one contemplating the Paired Kidney Exchange Program and when she’d told her fellow patients about Solomon’s offer, they’d all gushed about what a great guy her daughter must be marrying. Pollyanna understood Rebecca’s reticence but the others all thought she was crazy not to jump at her future son-in-law’s proposition.
‘He wouldn’t offer if he didn’t want to do it,’ had been Old Biker Dude’s analysis of the situation.
Each session, once they’d exchanged greetings and caught up with the happenings in each other’s lives, there were quiet times where everyone got busy with their own stuff. While Pollyanna knitted, some patients did puzzle books, others read. The footballer played video games on his phone and Old Biker Dude often laughed out loud at whatever he was watching on his. The librarian was using the time to write a novel—apparently she’d spent her whole life dreaming about being a New York Times bestseller but had never actually got past the first chapter.
‘I guess I was always too scared of failure,’ she’d confessed to Rebecca the first time she’d admitted what she was doing. ‘But when I got my diagnosis, I suddenly knew that it would be much worse if I died without ever giving it my best shot.’
Sometimes she let Rebecca read snippets of her work-in-progress and it was very good. Rebecca had faith that this time the librarian would finish her book and this made her think about her own dreams.
What would she regret not achieving if she died tomorrow?
The answer was simple. Once upon a time she’d dreamed of being a professional singer or pianist, but not achieving either of those things wasn’t something she’d lament over on her deathbed. Careers, material possessions, none of that really mattered in the end. No, she would lie there before taking her final breath, wishing she hadn’t given in to her parents’ insistence that she give up her baby. A rock formed in her stomach now at the thought. She couldn’t change the past, but she could change the future and she’d spent the last two months deliberating on this terrifying fact.
Should she or should she not send off a request for information about her son? Could she live with the ramifications if she did?
Perhaps the more important question was, could she live with herself if she did not?
As Old Biker Dude chuckled beside her and the librarian tapped away on her laptop like her life depended on it, Rebecca took a deep breath and retrieved her phone from her handbag. The online address for the Department for Child Protection Western Australia was imprinted in her head. She typed it in and it only took a few short seconds for the form to appear on her screen.
Not allowing herself any further deliberation, Rebecca started to fill it in.