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On the morning of June 26, I woke up at 5, a few minutes before the alarm. I got out of bed, put on a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt, took the dog out and carried the garbage cans to the curb. The morning air felt warm and humid. My bag was packed, I was ready and there was nothing else to do, so I sat on the front step and waited for the cab.
The cab was early too. The driver drove quickly, as though keeping time with the South Asian rock 'n' roll playing on his radio. The streets were empty and every light seemed to turn green as we approached. I walked into Toronto General Hospital at a quarter to 6 and took an elevator up to the surgery admissions office on the second floor.
I was in the hospital because I was donating my left kidney to my 26-year-old granddaughter, Amelia. My last encounter with a surgeon had been in 1965, when I was 12 and had my appendix removed. But I wasn't scared or nervous. I felt intensely alive and full of purpose.
For five months, the drama of the transplant and the anticipation of how it might change our lives had filled my heart. If at that moment someone had asked me why I was there, I would have burst into tears.
Amelia Bruce and Stephen Gauer pose for a portrait at Bruce's home in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Organ notes
The Kidney: There are two, located at the back of the abdomen on each side of the spine; the one on the right just below the liver, the left just below the diaphragm. They are bean-shaped, the size of a fist and weigh on average 150 grams (about a third of a pound). When blood flows through the kidneys, wastes and water are removed and excreted as urine. Kidneys also produce hormones that regulate blood volume, blood pressure and the body’s acid-base balance.
The procedure: The first documented kidney transplant was performed in 1950 in Chicago. Even without anti-rejection drugs, the recipient lived for five years. The first transplant using a live donor at Toronto General Hospital was in 1966; since then, more than 1,000 have been performed (about five a month) at the hospital, and no one has died donating a kidney.
The odds: At any given time, more than 2,700 people are waiting for kidney transplants in Canada. A typical wait is six to 10 years, and every year about 2 per cent of those waiting die. At TGH, the one-year survival rate of recipients is 95 per cent from a living donor transplant; the five-year survival rate is 87 per cent.
Sources: Toronto General Hospital, Wikipedia. (Deborah Baic/The Globe and Mail)
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There were 15 of us waiting in the admissions office, all middle-aged or older. A young clerk took our health cards and then called us, in two and threes, so we could be led to yet another waiting room. Then my name was called and I changed into a hospital gown and put blue cloth booties on my bare feet. I handed my bag to someone, walked to the prep room and got on one of the 20 or so beds.
A nurse brought me a warm blanket. "How are you this morning?" she asked.
"Actually," I said, "I feel very excited."
She smiled and said: "Oh, that's a bit different."
How could I even begin to explain what I was feeling? Lines from a poem kept running through my mind, I wake to sleep and take my waking slow/ I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. How could I explain that to her?
The nurse took my temperature and blood pressure. The junior surgeon appeared and introduced himself and smiled, and then carefully raised my gown and took out a pen and wrote his initials on my skin under my bottom left rib. He made a small arrow above his initials.
"Just so there's no mistake," he said.
More people showed up to ask about allergies and how I was feeling and to reassure me that everything would be fine. Then they left. I lay there very comfortably under the hot blanket. The lines of poetry ran through my head again.
Then suddenly I was in motion. The clock on the wall said two minutes to 8 and there was no time to waste. They wheeled me down one hall, around a corner and down the next hall. A fierce headwind was blowing in my face. Then a door opened and I was in an operating room lit brilliantly by a constellation of overhead lights. A nurse appeared and helped me move from the gurney to a narrow table covered with a turquoise foam pad. The anesthesiologist put an IV into my left arm. He asked me if I was comfortable and I said yes and we talked and then suddenly, with no warning, no countdown from 100, everything went black.
'HE'S NOT MY DAD! HE'S MY THIRD GRANDFATHER'
Amelia Bruce came into my life 25 years ago because I met and fell in love with her grandmother, Judith, at a pyjama party in Toronto. We danced until 4 a.m. She told me she had once been a nurse but now ran a luxury-wool store in Yorkville and I thought she was rich and she told me later that she thought I was gay, and as it turned out we were both wrong. A week after we met, she told me that she had a son named David and a daughter named Alison and that Alison had a two-year-old daughter named Amelia. All of this seemed sophisticated and interesting, exotic even. I was 30. Judith was 42.
I met Amelia a few months later when Alison brought her to Judith's apartment. I was painting the baseboard a bright pink when they arrived. Alison said hi. I said hi. Amelia said something like "Garble garble Googie garble," Googie being her version of "Judy."
"I don't remember any of this!" Amelia says now. "What I do remember is that you were always there. You were always my grandfather."
In Pictures:
