We miss you.

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October 22, 2003.  Four years ago today.  That’s the day my stepdad left this earth for a better place in Heaven.  He was 51 years old.  He had fought a good fight.  His kidneys didn’t work anymore, and he hung in there as long as he could.  My sister was slated to give him one of her kidneys in May of 2003, but by a twist of fate his surgeon cut a ligament in her hand and had to take some time off to heal.  In that time, dad became too ill to withstand the surgery and was unable to get the kidney that he so badly needed.  I learned a lot of about kidneys that year, how they function, how they are affected by what you eat and drink, what happens when they don’t function.  As a result of those kidneys not functioning properly some of his bowel tissue died and he ended up having quite a lot of his colon removed and lived the rest of his life with a colostomy bag on his side.  That was bad. 

And from my point of view, that wasn’t even the worst part.  He spent the entire summer of 2003 in the hospital, the same one where he had received his heart transplant 8 years before that I wrote about yesterday.  That summer he was weak and debilitated from the bowel surgery and lying in bed for so long, trying to regain his strength with physical therapy.  There was a day during that time period that a nurse found him not breathing and administered a certain medication to help respirations develop.  Apparently he was given too much medication or his brain was deprived of oxygen for too long, and dad lost his short-term memory. 

THAT was the bad part.  Oh, he would remember us.  He knew when his kids came to visit him that we were his kids.  He still knew my mother as his wife.  But he couldn’t remember that you had been to visit him just yesterday and would ask why you never came to see him.  He’d cry because no one ever came to see him.  He couldn’t remember things that happened 3 months ago.  He couldn’t remember why he was even in the hospital, had no idea that he had had a bowel surgery and a colostomy.  As a result of that, he didn’t remember that his colostomy bag was there.  This meant that my mom was constantly explaining and re-explaining things to him to try to remind him.  Can you imagine waking up every day and finding this colostomy bag hooked to your side and saying WHOA, how the hell did THAT get there?  And to top if off, he had hallucinations.  Oh my, he would see things that others in the room didn’t see.  I would always try to distract him from it when he would mention it and try to get him to talk about something else, but I suppose it’s hard to ignore a man on fire in the corner when you REALLY think you see him there. 

The doctors finally admitted that he wasn’t going to get well enough for a kidney transplant, and they sent him home.  It was hard.  It was hard to admit that the transplant wasn’t going to happen.  Hard to admit that he wasn’t EVER going to get better.  It was hard to see him sick and weak and suffering.  But I think the hardest part for me was his not remembering.  It was so stressful, it made me not want to go visit him.  Then when I DID go visit him, I would usually cry all the way home.  For the way he used to be.  For the way I wished he could be again.   For all the questions I never asked him and now would never have the answers to.  For my mother who had lived with her husband for 30 years and now had to watch him be like that 24 hours a day 7 days a week.  It was HARD. 

But still with all that said and done, I’m grateful.  My family is grateful.  We’re forever indebted to the woman who donated her organs so that my dad could receive her heart and have another 8 years of life with his wife and family.  Because of her generosity, we got to keep him around another 8 years.  And of course we knew it may not last forever.  He was very lucky that he didn’t have immediate rejection of that heart like so many transplant recipients do.  He was very lucky that he didn’t have problem after problem with the transplant like so many recipients do.  He just enjoyed life for 8 more years.  It was probably actually all the drugs that he took to prevent rejection of that new heart that finally took their toll on his kidneys and made them fail.  Organ donation is sort of a double-edged sword in that respect, but of course we, his family, wouldn’t change a thing.  We had 8 extra “bonus” years, and we’ll cherish them forever. 

John Edward Cordes 1952-2003

We miss you.

We love you.

You left too soon.

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