The Dot-Com Bubble
My first month post-transplant was spent isolating at home, wearing a mask out to appointments (I was ahead of my time), working on my stamina by taking increasingly longer walks around the neighborhood, and being bored out of my mind. The steroids were bothering me more than they had the first time I'd received a kidney and were making me antsy. I had trouble sleeping and my mood swings were terrible. Just ask Ryan.
I had high hopes for my second transplant. The doctor had given me time to be on dialysis and let the diseased first transplant finish its life. We had not used a living related donor. There were extra safety precautions post-transplant involving IV treatments (I don't remember what they were, sorry).
Despite all of this, within a month it was clear the FSGS had just not gone away. It must be something outside of the kidney at work here, something embedded in my blood or DNA. I don't know, I'm not a doctor or scientist. All I do know is that I was deeply disappointed.
That is not to say the transplant was immediately a failure or that we were giving up on it. Since plasmapheresis had shown some degree of effectiveness in the past, my doctor decided on maintenance treatments. A series of seven every-other-day appointments every four months. I may not have this kidney as long as I had hoped, but we would keep it working for as long as we could.
I wasn't thrilled about having to return to pheresis and exacerbating the annoyance was the check-in process. Each arrival at the hospital I would have to go through registration. Every. Single. Time. Like, why I had to fill out stupid forms and tell people my medical history every other day was beyond stupid and time wasting. You have a computer, USE IT.
There were two things that eased my irritation. One, I was already familiar with the staff and got to be entertained by Pam and the gang. Two, because of my dialysis fistula I no longer needed a temporary port, so no neck catheter this time. Yes, I prefer needle sticks to having that nonsense hanging off of my body.
Just when my health was returning to normal, my work life went into crisis mode. I can't imagine there's anyone reading this who wasn't alive around the turn of the century, but in case there is, let me tell you a tale of internet folly. Around 2000 there were a slew of small, ambitious dot-com start-ups. And they were all going to be fabulously successful. Internet was the future! We can't lose!
We lost. Bigtime. The dot-com bubble burst in a spectacular fashion, the Nasdaq falling 78% between 2000 and 2002. For the entire time I had been working at Human Code, Ryan had been side-eying our business model of overworking employees and spending massive amounts of money on work parties and monthly happy hours. "It's not sustainable," he repeatedly said.
I thought we were out of the woods after being purchased by Sapient. They were a huge company! Surely everything would be fine.
It was not. Previous to my transplant a good third of the office had already been canned. They were trying to trim the "fat" so out went the entire QA department as well as all of the production assistants. I was devastated. Not only were these essential employees, they were also my friends.
In July we came into work one morning and the entire staff was immediately corralled into the meeting room. Well this couldn't be good. Apparently Sapient was still struggling and not satisfied with just reducing our staff. When they acquired Human Code it was with the goal of getting into the gaming market. We were the only office in the company that worked as its own separate unit. Unfortunately that also made it easier to jettison the entire branch.
We were all toast. The only saving grace was that there were 2 million dollars worth of projects tied up in our office that we were uniquely qualified to finish. The Human Code representatives went to the bargaining table and came back with very nice severance packages in return for finishing out the projects.
Still, by the beginning of September I was out of a job. My severance pay would be good for a number of months, and finishing up my project for Sapient had led to hellish hours, so Ryan and I scheduled a vacation. September 9 we flew to Las Vegas.
For those of you keeping track you'll recall what year this is. Two days later we were awakened by Ryan's cell phone. It was Jason. Ryan yelled at me to turn on the tv.
"What channel?"
"All of them."
By the time we tuned in, both towers were on fire. We watched them fall in real time. I remember hugging my legs on the bed with tears running down my face.
Still in shock, we went into panic mode. We had no way of knowing the attacks were over and were sitting in the Luxor pyramid in Las Vegas. If ever there were a symbol of American excess and ridiculousness, we were sitting right in the middle of it.
Both of us hopped on our phones and called every single rental car company. They were already sold out. Planes had been grounded. From our window we had a very close view of the airport and it was chilling to see all activity stopped for three days.
We were scheduled to fly back on Wednesday. Since everyone was trying to get out at the same time, I spent a lot of time on the phone with American Airlines with no success. My mother sprang into action with her American Airlines Platinum Member Powers. Her Platinum status allowed her to actually talk to a real person. Then she turned on the tiny violins by telling customer support her daughter was stranded in Vegas and would soon run out of transplant medication.
We were booked a flight for Friday.
l took a couple of other trips that fall, taking advantage of my newly obtained free time. In October I travelled home by myself to Oklahoma to visit my family. The day before I left, Jeff the Cat had treated me to a goodbye "love bite". Which is to say he chomped the hell out of my leg.
Two days into my visit, the wound started looking nasty. I will spare you the details. The morning I was scheduled to return home I woke up with a fever. Transplant patients have to be extremely careful with spiking temperatures because of their suppressed immune systems. I called my transplant team who instructed me to go straight to the ER.
My mom and I spent the afternoon at Comanche County Memorial Hospital. The doctor lanced my wound and then I got a shot of antibiotics in the butt that made me yelp out loud. We went home and I went straight to bed. My fever broke in the night and my wound looked better by morning. Jeff the Cat was taken to the vet to get his incisors shaved.
For Thanksgiving that year Doug was not coming home. My mom, in one of her surprising moves, suggested the four of us (Mom and Dad, Ryan and myself) go to St. Thomas for the holiday. We were totally on board.
If you are ever looking to visit the Caribbean for the holidays I highly recommend it. Not that many people travel for Thanksgiving and the weather is amazing. We had such a great time when my dad wasn't trying to kill us driving on the opposite side of the street on cliffsides while attempting to record with his video camera.
I had been job hunting since I became unemployed, but the search kicked into higher gear the closer it came to the end of my severance. Ryan and I agreed to expand the search radius and in February I landed a software engineering job at the GPS company Garmin. The position was located in Tempe, Arizona. It was time to pack up and start a new chapter in our lives.
This chapter was admittedly light on medical details, and I could have just jumped to Phoenix, but 2001 was so discombobulated that I felt I needed to connect the dots a bit. There were great uncertainties in my professional life, but the temporary freedom of unemployment and a new kidney allowed me to travel a bit, and it was a nice change of pace not to have to deal with dialysis.
But Arizona was in our future and with it would come a slew of new challenges, most of which as per usual involved my health. This time, however, Ryan and I would be on our own.
Up next: Phoenix
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