Happy Birthday Samuel!

Can you believe we met 19 years ago? That’s 6,935 days we’ve known each other. Or 166,440 hours. Or 9,986,400 seconds. But who’s counting?

Well, to be honest, I am. Every one of them.

I never told you what the doctors told me before they introduced us. They said that most organ transplants are a short-term lease. On average, they said, a transplanted organ lasts an average of seven years before a rejection. They told me that average was dragged down by patients who foolishly thought thought they were cured with the surgery, to the point they would stop taking their immunosuppresants.

So be diligent, they said. Take them religiously, they said.

Screw religion. I’m a born again Samuelist. This is the proudest achievement of my life, and I say that without reservation or hesitation: I have prayed at your altar every day since our bittersweet introduction. I have not missed a single day of taking the meds that keep you in my body, in my heart. Show me an evangelist with that track record.

There’s something else a doctor told me, only this year. Did you know that pancreas transplants didn’t become a recognized, routine operation until 2008? Every doctor I meet gives me a double take when I tell him we joined forces in 2000. Only three months ago, an emergency room nurse told me she had never even heard of a pancreas transplant, that she didn’t know the surgery exists.

I wanted to report her to the AMA to get her license revoked. Instead, I did what I thought you would do: I held no malice. Instead I took the bright path, as everything I’ve read about you said  you did. Instead, I simply held this notion, gripped this epiphany:

We’re pioneers, brother. You want to be Lewis or Clark?

I’ll be honest: It wasn’t a year without hiccups, Sam. The surgery came freighted with nausea a year after our coupling. I got to know the inside of a toilet bowl more intimately than Mr. Clean.

I tried everything the past year. Juggling a half dozen nausea meds. Avoided eating before any occasion of significance (I even had a term for it, “carving widows” of nausea-free moments). Smoked weed like the burnouts I disdained in high school.

But on my last hospital visit (the one with Nurse Ratched), a doctor told me, for the first time, that blood tests indicated some signs of rejection.

You can’t imagine the chill that went through my body at that word, rejection. No doctor ever uttered it to me (other than as warning at our surgery). Then, as my blood test results began to improve, he said goodbye with a single sentence. “More water, less weed.”

When I got home that day, I took every flake of weed, every pipe, every stoner’s tool of choice, chucked them in bins and stored them under the sink and in the rafters of the garage, never to be touched again. Then I went to the grocery store and bought literally dozens of Gatorade, Powerade, every beverage the docs said would keep you hydrated, keep your potassium and magnesium levels at proper measure.

This is what my fridge looks like now. I guzzle ades  like a linebacker in the fourth quarter of a television commercial. 

And you know what? The nausea disappeared like a Vegas magic trick. Mom would be pissed if I didn’t knock on wood at that utterance. So I’m rapping my forehead now.

But I feel stronger now, tougher now, smarter now. Who could dare claim credit except you?

A final admission before I wrap up this blathering. Whenever someone asks me whether I’m up to a daunting task, I like to act tough. I say, “Are you kidding? I carry the dead.”

That’s a bald faced lie. In truth, I carry the living.

Here’s  to 10 million seconds and ticking.