Too Pee or Not To Pee

by Dennis Green

Enormous, nondescript building at the foot of Piedmont Ave in Oakland, the Clinic. Inside, an empty reception room, two elderly people, both black, in wheelchairs, smiling and talking. No receptionist in sight.

We’d come in through the small parking lot, me with no idea what to expect. Diane had been here earlier this morning, to sign me up. Now she indicates that I should sit in a small chair at the window off to one side. I sit.

The place feels clean, but still neglected somehow, as if no one wants to be there. Custodians, security guards, the occasional staffer getting off shift come and go. I sit and wait, my energy level dropping by the minute, until I can barely concentrate.

A little after one p.m., a young Filipino woman comes out of the security door and sits behind the reception window. She looks at me askance, until Diane intervenes. “This is Dennis Green,” she says. “You have some papers for him to sign…”

She nods and pushes toward me a thick pile of official-looking papers. Consent forms, release forms, acknowledgement of my rights under Medicare, etc. Each time, the young lady indicates where I should sign and tells me whether or not to include the date. I must have signed 36 times before I’m through, and also initialed many lines as well before I’m through.

Then, when I am done, Diane indicates another chair where I can sit and watch TV if I am so inclined. Freddie Mercury singing “Mama..?” Nope. Afternoon soaps and talk shows. But I’m only one white boy in this waiting lounge, so let it be.

Finally, just past one-thirty, my name is called and Diane and a staffer escort me into the big open clinic room. Larger than any gymnasium, with ceilings a good 60 feet high, the room is configured with little stations of grief, one machine shared by every two patients, in front of each patient chair a small TV on an adjustable arm, the chair itself adjustable too, and as I settle into mine, the young girl attending me, who tells me her name, which I immediately forget, eases me back into a reclining position.

She fiddles with the catheter at my carotid artery, then puts on a face mask, and also fits one over my mouth. She attaches the little hose from the machine to the catheter in my artery, and soon a dark red flow of blood is running through the little hose. “This will take about three hours now,” she says.

Seems simple enough. Something I’ve been doing all me life. And then I stopped. So there I was on the 9^th Floor, trying to pee in a plastic container, and nothing is happening. They check my vital signs, and only this one is missing in action.

“Put in a Foley,” says the doc. A Foley, in this instance, is a catheter, a plastic tube inserted into the penis that allows the bladder to drain without any effort or around some obstruction. And immediately, several hundred liters of urine come bursting out. Such a relief…and yet..?

So here I am three days later, in Clinic. A very young, hip black kid wearing his baseball cap on regulation style, the bill set front and center, with a big bling-bling silver chain around his neck, checks my blood pressure, adjusts the dialysis machine, and I feel utter safety in his presence.

“Thank you,” I tell him, “Thank you for your help and your kindness. I feel so safe here!”

“That’s what I’m here for,” the lad says, and I know that he means it.

And then Freddy Mercury comes on the TV, strutting around, singing, “Another one bites the dust!” in his white cut-off shorts, looking so athletic. “We will, we will ROCK YOU!” And you’d never know he was dying of AIDs at the time…And I think to myself, another one bites the dust…And yet..they sing on...

“We are the Champions of the World!”

©2010 Dennis Green