Addendum to Yesterday’s Entry

Yesterday TraumaMama wrote to me:

Please don’t dismiss the living donor option! Instead why not have lunch with them separately to explain some of the conditions you tried to bring up? It sounds like your younger sister is making medical assumptions and needs to be straightened out. I bet both your sisters want very much to donate and might be very hurt with your change of mind.

How do I explain this … one does not do lunch with my sisters. Well, at least this one doesn’t. Here’s the way it’s been in my family:

Although my younger sister and I are closest in age (fifteen months apart), since adulthood it has always been the youngest and oldest who were close. They took vacations together that I was not invited to, they went on shopping sprees together that I was excluded from, they’d have parties that I’d not find out about until after the fact. When I was in my twenties I let this bother me a lot. I then sat myself down and had a good long talk with myself. “Self,” I said. “There are plenty of people who DO invite you to join them in activities and who DO seem to enjoy your company. Why beat your head against a brick wall? If you aren’t wanted in one place, there are other places that do want you.” So I’ve pretty much left my sisters to their own devices, and did my own thing.

The first time I ever became interesting to my sisters is when I was hospitalized for cardiomyopathy during veterinary school. There was a good chance I wasn’t going to live during the first week, and all of a sudden I was interesting again. They visited daily, brought an embarrassment of balloons, stuffed animals, food and toys, and kept the nurses and staff entertained with their antics. This newfound interest in me waned as soon as I was discharged though, and within a few months I virtually stopped hearing from them again. Every once in a while I’d phone one of them and ask if they wanted to come over to dinner or go shopping, but I never once got “yes” for an answer.

Then I was again diagnosed with a life threatening illness last summer. And almost immediately I was a cause celeb again. Then they found out about the living donor program. This was even better than the last time I was sick, because now they had a chance to fully participate in the illness. They’ve been annoyed at my reluctance to whole-heartedly embrace the idea of living donor. They don’t listen to my feelings on the priority this should or should not be given over a cadaver-origin transplant (which my surgeons have said would be best). They won’t let me be part in even a peripheral way in the decision-making process regarding living donor. They won’t even willingly talk about it with me in the same room most of the time.

Sorry guys. I’m the one dying here (said without any particular recrimination or remorse). I will not permit certain decisions and rights of participation be taken away from me. I haven’t asked to be the one to choose which of my sisters gets tested first. That’s for them to decide. But I’m not going to let this little melodrama play out like some damned soap opera. I will not have one sister crying in the bathroom while the other takes me aside and attempts to get my approval while refusing to tell me what the hell the argument was about anyhow.

If those two learn to behave decently towards each other, and grant me the courtesy of at least listening to my input (they aren’t, after all, obligated to follow my opinions), then we’ll talk living donor. But if this living donor program is only going to get everybody fighting among themselves, I choose the traditional waiting list instead. If I die, the only family those two will have is each other. There are no other brothers or sisters, no neices nor nephews, no cousins, aunts, uncles. There is nothing else to our family. I will not be the wedge that drives them apart. As for inviting them to lunch to discuss this … the proverbial snowball stands a better chance in Hades than I do of getting one of them to accept an offer to go to lunch.

Unrelated note:

Congratulations to ##.##.##.# at *****, whoever you are. You were my 12,000th visitor. I must admit, I’m surprised that over the year and a half Salamander/Palimpsest has been around that there have been so many visits to these pages. It’s enough to really humble a person.