Glamour, Interrupted Read online

  The whole production line was beginning again. Shoes were being polished, outfits were put together, vats of peroxide were being readied, and my dance card was starting to fill. There were premieres to attend. I penciled in Sahara, which was premiering on April 4, 2005. I was hoping that Penelope would make her grand entrance on a camel, and that just by shaking Matthew’s hand my man-boob pecs would harden. I had front-row tickets to see U2 at the Staples Center in early April, and I’d been obsessing over the concert for months. Bono was going to spit on me! In my house, it was U2 twenty-four hours a day.

  But the cold that I’d come down with in Chicago wasn’t going away; in fact, it was getting worse. The doctor had told me that since I was such a recent transplantee, still very vulnerable, that I should call him even if I got the beginnings of a bunion. But I blew it off: It’s just a cold, I rationalized. I’ll be fine.

  But by the morning of the U2 concert, I was so weak that I couldn’t get out of bed; I alternated between extreme chills and soaring fevers. My entire body was taken over by severe aches, from head to toe. I was struck ill all of a sudden, as if my lights had been punched out. I had blackouts, flashes, and strange dreams of dancing kidneys, stethoscopes that came alive like snakes, and orderlies with axes. It was time to send up a smoke signal to Dr. Jordan.

  “You have to come in immediately for a blood test,” he insisted.

  I gave the U2 tickets away to a friend who had to physically tear them out of my viselike grip. And then I drove myself to Cedars-Sinai, hoping that I’d get an antibiotic and a nothing-to-worry-about diagnosis from Dr. Jordan.

  Dr. Jordan took my blood and sent me home, promising to call later with the results. I came back just in time to get into my jammies, pop a sleeping pill, and catch the last twenty minutes of The View. I was going to sleep away my worries for the rest of the afternoon. I was in REM 72, on a whitewater river rafting trip in the Congo with my “buds” Aaron Eckhart and Tom Brady, when the phone rang. It was Jenny from Dr. Jordan’s office. “I’m sorry, but your kidney numbers are really elevated,” she said. “Dr. Jordan needs you to have a kidney biopsy. Why don’t you take an hour to get your stuff together, and then I’m going to need to check you in to the hospital. You’ll be doing a biopsy first thing tomorrow.”

  No, no, no. I was supposed to get the kidney transplant and then live happily ever after. I had already fought so much in such a short time that I hadn’t even had a chance to catch my breath and process what had happened—and now, I had to deal with even more? It didn’t seem right. But this was the part of the conversation with Dr. Jordan that I had tuned out, the fine print that explained about the complications and the risks and the horror stories about kidneys not lasting.

  There is no easy way to really confirm if your body is rejecting a transplanted kidney: the doctors can’t just draw blood or have you pee in a cup. The only way to tell what’s going on is to biopsy the kidney and look at a piece of it under a microscope. This is how a biopsy works. You get The Call that your blood tests have come back and your kidney’s creatinine number is high. (Your creatinine number is a measurement of the function of your kidney and how well it is filtering out the toxins in your body.) This might just be the result of the toxic drugs that you’re taking, but there’s a chance that you might be rejecting. It’s every kidney patient’s nightmare, the Big R. So pack your bags: You’re going to be spending a night in the hospital and getting a biopsy.

  You check in to the third floor of Cedars-Sinai and are assigned a day bed, one of a dozen tiny little cubicles in a big room. There you are, back in the hospital again, and you are feeling traumatized. This is not a little thing: It’s a thing. As you undress, your heart is sinking, you’re asking yourself, Am I going to come out of the hospital alive? Will I go home without a kidney?

  You aren’t allowed to eat. If your biopsy is scheduled for the afternoon and runs late, you might not have had a bite since dinner the previous evening. You lie there, in a hospital gown, waiting, hungry. Eventually, your bed is wheeled in to a small operating room. It’s serious enough that there’s a whole team there: two kidney doctors, a handful of nurses, the ultrasound technician, the pathologist. They give you a Valium to relax you and then the ultrasound technician looks around for a spot on your stomach. And then—Whap! They stab you with a gigantic needle, like a staple gun, pierce your stomach and pull a piece of your kidney out. The pathologist examines the sample; and then, frequently, they’ll say “I don’t have enough.” Which means they are going to go back and do the whole thing again.

  Even if the biopsy is successful, you can’t just say ta-ta. You have to stay motionless for fear of bleeding, and you’ll have to stay overnight in the hospital. If the doctors think that your body might be rejecting the kidney you’ll be injected with a massive dose of steroids. Steroids cause you to retain water, so you can imagine what happens: You bloat up until your face is so swollen and distorted that you look like a Bundt cake.

  I had four biopsies in the months after my kidney transplant. What the doctors finally discovered was that I had contracted the polyomavirus in my kidney. Annabelle had been infected with a very common bug, one of a multitude of bacterium that humans host in their bodies that, with a healthy immune system, are usually killed off every day. In a normal body the polyomavirus would be insignificant and undetectable. But once it got into my body, with my compromised immune system, it flared up and came to life, like a dormant animal waking up.

  I don’t know why I was so cavalier when my doctors told me what was wrong in mid-April. “What do I need to take to get rid of it?” I asked. I felt medically cocky: I’d survived a transplant! Surely I could knock out a little virus.

  “No,” Dr. Jordan said. “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

  By the end of April, one of the doctors that was monitoring my kidney—Dr. Moss—was predicting that the polyomavirus was going to kill Annabelle. “This is very serious, this virus,” he told me. “It’s very likely you will lose your kidney. You need to prepare yourself for that.”

  But I refused to believe it. In a very polite way, I told him to fuck off and die. I wasn’t losing my kidney! The thought of losing this precious kidney was too painful, too devastating to even consider. How could I go through all that again?

  The fighter inside me came alive: Sure, I was devastated and hurt and scared by what he’d told me, but something bigger inside me said, No way, no way, this is not going to happen, he is being alarmist.

  And even if Dr. Moss was pessimistic, Dr. Jordan was still encouraging. “You are going to survive this!” he told me. “It’s tough, it’s going to be a fight, but we are not giving up. We are going to do everything we can to save this kidney.”

  In May, Dr. Jordan put me on an extreme course of IVIG—the equivalent of flooding your body with a very powerful cocktail of proteins that fight immune disorders—to kill off the polyomavirus. Every few weeks for eight hours at a time, I would have to lie in the hospital bed with a needle in my arm, as IV fluids dripped slowly into my bloodstream. I would will myself to get better, praying until I was cross-eyed from the effort. But my creatinine numbers still kept creeping higher, until I was practically living in Cedars-Sinai again.

  Throughout this ordeal, from the moment I got diagnosed, through all the bumps in the road—the trials and tribulations, the perils of Pauline—humor and imagination were my firing squad. They were my salvation. When you are in a hospital, steeped in tragedy and surrounded by the stench of disease, there’s nothing more potent than escaping with your daydreams. Imagination was my satellite TV: It could take me away better than any DVD. When I was in my daydreams, I wasn’t sick. It was a reprieve.

  …“Who’s the first in the congo line?!” I blast through the halls of Cedars-Sinai: “Get up everybody! Grab your piña coladas: Cojo says it’s time to stop being sick! We’re having a luau!!” I’m dancing my way across the sixth floor in a sarong, singing “Tiny Bubbles” as I strum on my uk
ulele. Behind me, all the nurses are hula dancing and wearing leis made of Dixie cups. The chief of surgery has ripped off his lab coat and is blowing bubbles, which bounce off the dialysis machines and fill the air. Chocolate syrup is pouring through all the IVs, and jelly beans are flooding out of the air vents.

  The patients have come to the doorways of their rooms, dragging their heart monitors behind them. They spill out into the hallway, beaming, and begin to dance. Mrs. Leibowitz, a sixty-five-year-old liver transplantee, flips her bedpan upside down and turns it into a bongo. A trio of congenital heart failure patients are performing a chorus line of high kicks.

  Behind the nurses station, Sol, an octogenarian kidney recipient, and his hunched-over friend Manny, a lung cancer patient, are rolling gigantic medical marijuana spliffs. “Duuude, this is the good stuff,” Manny says. “Ja, man. Crank up the Bob Marley!” Sol replies.

  The doctors come flooding into the halls, shouting, “You’ve all been cured! None of you are sick anymore! Go home!” Confetti rains down from the ceiling as the cheering patients form a parade and skip straight out the door…

  …In my fantasies, I was the pied piper of joy and merriment. I could turn Cedars-Sinai into a Carnival Cruise. But in real life, I wasn’t in the driver’s seat. I was at the mercy of a never-ending stream of doctors, nurses, orderlies, technicians, and professional blood-taking vampires. And the news kept getting worse.

  By June it was clear that the IVIG drips weren’t working. I was living and dying by my creatinine numbers. I called them the Nielsen ratings: My friends from Entertainment Tonight would call every day and ask, “How are the numbers?” In most people, the creatinine numbers are less than 1.5. Mine were 5s and 6s, and every day the doctors were coming in with the bad news that the number was going up and up. Annabelle was dying.

  Once again, I cut myself off from all my friends and family and kept the news about my impending kidney failure to myself. All the hard work I’d done—stay the course, be positive, fight the fight—went out the window. Weighing most heavily on me was the thought of Abby. I felt so sorry for her, as if I had let her down. Her sacrifice had been so tremendous, and, tragically, it had all been for naught. Our kidney was failing, but I felt like it was me who was failing her. I couldn’t tell her. I didn’t have the heart or the guts to pick up the phone and tell her that I was losing her precious kidney. Instead, I asked my mother to call her for me. It would take months for me to finally look Abby in the eyes again.

  Maybe I could have done more? Maybe I shouldn’t have flown to Oprah so soon after my transplant? When I started feeling ill, maybe I shouldn’t have waited a day or two to call the doctor? I internalized it and made it my fault.

  There is a kind of sadness where there are no words. I spent a lot of time alone in the dark. I didn’t want the lights on. I drifted in and out of consciousness, thinking about Abby. I felt flattened.

  In near-kidney failure, I had to move in to Cedars-Sinai for full-time care. When my kidney numbers careened to a near-lethal 8, my team of doctors came to see me. I knew the minute they opened the door and piled into the room: Their pallor and somber posture said it all. The kidney was coming out, and I was going to have to go on dialysis.

  “We’re going to take this one day at a time,” Dr. Jordan told me. He went into positivity overdrive: “We’re going to take out this kidney. We’re going to put you on dialysis and get you better. As soon as the polyomavirus is cleaned out of your system, in the next few months, we can start to look for a new transplant.”

  I didn’t hear him, because I was too busy shrieking and hyperventilating. I felt like I’d been struck by the Gods: Not only was I losing a loved one’s gift, but I was going to have to be kept alive by a machine. I was hyperventilating as the doctors explained to me what dialysis would mean: Four hours of blood filtering, three times a week, to clear out all the toxins that would build up in my blood when I had no kidneys anymore. I’d already heard stories about dialysis, about how after a session you feel drained of all life. No wonder I feared it to the marrow: I couldn’t even say the word. It was only to be referred to as the Big D, just like the hospital was only to be called The Hotel.

  The quiet rage rose up in me. “I can’t take this right now,” I said, with a hiss. “I’m done with all this kidney stuff. I’m done. Can all of you just leave me alone for a while? Please, just get out of here.”

  As soon as they left, when the coast was clear and their clicking heels had faded off into the distance, I threw a party. I was the only guest: It was an all-night pity party. I repeated Dr. Jordan’s words over and over in my brain. If I didn’t have the kidney removed, if I didn’t go on dialysis, I would die. It was black and white. I couldn’t do that to my parents. The sensible adult inside me gave me a lecture: You can be petulant or stubborn, it said, but this hold-your-breath-till-your face-turns-blue thing just isn’t working. You’re not ready to die by any stretch of the imagination. You have to stay alive. That’s it. That’s all.

  I picked up the phone and called Shari. It was 2:00 a.m. The minute I heard her voice, everything broke and I started gutturally sobbing. “It’s just been a terrible day,” I cried. “I am so scared and so alone.”

  The next morning, I called my parents and told them that it was Tragedy, the Sequel. They had to fly down to Los Angeles so they could be with me and mourn the passing of the hope that we had nourished with all our hearts. The kidney was coming out. I was going on dialysis.

  CHAPTER 10

  Diva Does Dialysis

  This is what my day planner says for the last week of June 2005. Tuesday, June 21—Pick up Vicodin; Call Regina to set up dialysis. Call Dr. Jordan. Wednesday, June 22—Order antiobiotics. Call agent. Jimmy Choo party at the Cartier boutique. Thursday, June 23—Party at Teddys at the Roosevelt Hotel. Friday, June 24: Pick up Vicodin.

  On Monday, June 27, there is only a blank page. That day, I had my new kidney taken out.

  I had to go back to the hospital, on dialysis the morning after my doctors delivered the bad news—a few days before my nephrectomy (the medical term for the removal of a kidney). I was completely by myself. I could have reached out to numerous people, but there was no way anyone was going to see me at one of the ugliest moments of my life. I could never face the humiliation of friends seeing me this downed, this felled. The only people I wanted around me were my parents, but they were still on an airplane en route to me.

  I stayed up all night before my first dialysis session, growing more and more furious that this was happening to me as the hour approached. I felt like I was waiting for my own execution. The machine was rolled into my room at Cedars-Sinai at the break of dawn: it was so enormous that it could barely fit through the door. It was creaky and ancient, with flaking metal and old knobs, and it looked like the first dialysis machine ever invented. I practically thought the nurse was going to jump on a bicycle to generate it’s power.

  The nurse went through a long series of preparations, taking out tools and needles and tubes, while I stared daggers at her. “They’ve made a mistake,” I spit at her. “Stop. Get the hell out of here.” I’ve never hated anyone as much in my life.

  She smiled through her teeth; mine wasn’t the first bedside horror movie she’d watched before. She was Miss Tough Love 2005. “Well,” she said. “If I don’t do it now, I’ll have to come back later. Your choice.”

  This enraged me even more. I was semi-psychotic, wild-eyed, and fuming. In my head, I was battling the desire to be violent, throw fits and tantrums like a child; but reluctantly the adult voice said Get over yourself. Just do it, and grit your teeth.

  I looked at her, feeling utterly defeated. “All right,” I said.

  Hemodialysis works by withdrawing the blood very slowly out of your body through a catheter in your neck that works like a direct plug into your veins. The blood flows into the dialysis machine, where a special filter filled with a spongelike fluid takes out all the wastes and extra liquids from the bloo
d and then returns it slowly to your body through another tube. The machine monitors your blood pressure and maintains healthy levels of chemicals like potassium and sodium. It is, basically, a giant electronic kidney.

  For the next four hours, as I did my first dialysis treatment, bile oozed from my pores. My loathing for the nurse and for the world at large didn’t let up for one second. You would think with my blood being cleansed I would have felt like life was being put back into me; but it was quite the contrary. It was more like the life was being sucked out of me. I lay there fading in and out of consciousness; but every time I opened up my eyes and saw the nurse with that machine, my jaw would clench and I would come alive again: Her! She was the focal point for my venom. As each hour passed in the abyss, my body may have been physically weakening, but my mind, fueled by hatred, was sharp as a tack. Nothing could stop me from plotting her slow, hideous demise: I imagined snakes slithering out of the machine, biting her with their fangs, their poison sucking away at her central nervous system.

  My parents arrived breathless from the airport two days later, clutching the Samsonite luggage that they’d gotten for a sexy weekend tryst in Niagara Falls in the early 1970s. When they walked in the room to find me hooked up to the dialysis machine, their faces froze. I watched as they tried to gain their composure, but it was too much. My mother caressed my forehead with her hand, and my father kept asking, “How are you doing?” but their eyes couldn’t help darting back to the machine.

  We sat there, all afternoon, going through the motions. My mother couldn’t bake a chocolate-chip cake to fix this one. Finally, we began to talk about the reality that my kidney was going to be removed in two days. It was over. And we began to go through the mourning process—we were sitting shiva for Annabelle.