I hoped the girl didn’t feel the sweat on my skin when we shook hands. We stood inside the foyer of her parents’ McKinney home, and in four days, surgeons would take my kidney and make it hers.
I tried to smile naturally and make small talk. They didn’t say much beyond a polite greeting.
What do you say to the stranger who gives you or your loved one an organ out of the impossible blue?
For the girl and her parents, it started with a gift basket. Filled with Godiva dark chocolate truffles, ylang ylang lotion and a book of New York Times crossword puzzles, the family's welcome gift sat on the coffee table in their living room.
On the sofa rested Neelam Bohra, a 19-year-old University of Texas freshman, who discovered that an autoimmune disease had killed her kidneys and that she needed a new one.
There was Alyssa Boehringer, my friend and Neelam’s media adviser at McKinney High School, who had sent me the text that a former student needed a new kidney.
And me — a 30-year-old Frisco teacher, journalist, mom to a firecracker 4-year-old, and a perfect blood match to the girl across the room whose eyes were the color of wood in water. I sat at the edge of my seat, picking at my nails.
Her parents were too nervous to sit. Too many things could happen in four days that would keep their daughter from getting that kidney.
Her mom, Hema, offered to pour us drinks, make us samosas. She’s a doctor who understood all too well the physical reality of her daughter’s diagnosis and prognosis.
Her dad, Nick, is a good-humored accountant who cried when he read the email I sent his daughter telling her she was getting a kidney. On this afternoon, he made charming small talk from behind the couch.
The room, the moment, the arrangement — it all felt breakable.
Like if anyone spoke too loudly, too quickly, too wrongly, the whole thing would fall apart. I knew from where I sat on the couch, I’d never be able to ease the tension. So, with a sigh, I melted to the floor by the table and reached into the basket.
“Chocolate!” I said, shoving the cream-filled ball into my mouth.
Then I told the story from the beginning. And then some.
How I first heard about Neelam. What my medical tests showed. Why I was busy with my students and my work. Alyssa, Neelam and I tried to avoid talking too much about the surgery, so we spent time bonding over journalism, mutual friends, petty gossip and Game of Thrones.
I could see the stress and disbelief in her parents’ eyes. They must have thought I was crazy, or, at the very least, naive about the consequences of this decision.
I bet they saw a woman — little more than a decade older than their daughter — sitting on the floor with a mouthful of chocolate and questioned what kind of person would willingly undergo elective surgery to give their daughter a new organ.
Since the operation, some people have called me “hero” or “saint” when they hear what I’ve done. I just nod the way you do when you feel like an impostor.
It wasn’t until a few weeks after I gave my kidney to Neelam that anyone bothered to ask me why.
Side by side
Four days after we met, Neelam and I lay side by side on our rolling hospital beds minutes before surgery, tethered to IVs whose medicine would soon put us to sleep.
It was still dark on this morning in March, but the Medical City Fort Worth pre-op room bustled with people in blue and green scrubs, fast-walking among patients, giving instructions and asking questions.
Privacy curtains shielded us from the other patients, but I could hear that we weren’t the only ones about to get cut open. A thin, white curtain also hung between Neelam and me.
“Could you open the curtain just a little?” I asked my nurse.
I wanted to show Neelam that I was still there. That I wasn’t going anywhere.
The curtain opened, and my breath caught and stomach dropped, the way it does when I’m atop a roller coaster waiting for the fall. She gave me a shaky thumbs-up.
We attempted a few jokes. But I could see the anxiety in her wide brown eyes. Her mother held her hand. Her dad stood over her.
I did not see the smart, passionate young woman who loved to tell stories or hang out with her friends or eat a bag of chips whenever she wanted.
I saw the girl who spent the last six weeks learning to be a person with an incurable disease — IgA nephropathy, an autoimmune disorder that destroyed her kidneys’ ability to filter out waste, leaving her in a toxic haze of swollen discomfort.
She suffered sleepless nights, panic attacks, constant hunger, weight gain and mood swings. She quit writing because she simply could not fight the toxins building up in her brain.
And for me, it was an interminable period of blood and urine tests, donor education, consent forms, clinic appointments, CT scans, X-rays and a flood of ludicrous but necessary questions to make sure I wasn’t bribed or coerced into giving up my organ.
It felt like the longest six weeks of my life, because I knew it was the most helpless six weeks of hers.
I knew this family’s anxiety would end — and maybe not even then — when Neelam’s body welcomed its new waste-filtering organ.
I saw worry behind the curtain. A part of me thought I should feel afraid, too. I had never had surgery, didn’t love needles and hated hospitals.
And yet I breathed easy now, moments before our operation, and felt a relief that only doing something can give.
Not once did I worry about dying. Not once did I ask myself why I was doing it. I just knew it had to be done.
Sitting in our beds in matching blue and white hospital gowns, I told Neelam something I wanted to believe but couldn’t guarantee.
“It’s all going to be OK.”
From the first cut to the glued-up, 5-inch incision in my stomach, it took only an hour and a half to take out my kidney. Neelam’s surgery took three hours.
Before the surgery, she had 9% kidney function. After, it functioned at 98%.
It’s all going to be OK. At least that’s what I thought at the time.
The question of why
Four days after surgery, I felt a persistent itch in my throat. I lay in bed wrapped in a fuzzy pink blanket Alyssa and another friend had given me for my recovery.
With one hand cradling my incision, the other masking my mouth, I coughed.
That’s all it took — just one deep cough — to set me off. I tried cough drops, DayQuil, hot tea. Nothing could keep my body from seizing up in fits of hacking.
Coughing after surgery felt about what I imagine getting stabbed feels like.
Not even the kidney-shaped pillow they gave me at the hospital — pushed as hard as I could against my stomach — could stop the feeling of being torn in two from the inside out.
I took all the drugs I could then and slept to escape the world. A few days later, the cough was gone, as was most of the pain.
I felt like a person again — one who could put on real pants, cook a meal and drive to work.
A week later, a friend — who couldn’t fathom why someone would donate an organ to a stranger — asked me if this was the same compulsion as, say, grabbing a gun from someone to stop a mass shooting, or running into a burning building to rescue someone.
I hesitated, because I had never asked myself why I gave up my kidney. But now, two weeks post-transplant, I thought of little else.
When my doctors finally cleared me for work, I was glad I could get back to normal. Back to my students, the growing pile of emails and paperwork, meal prep, loads of laundry and nights out with my friends.
But normal never came.
I felt tired constantly but struggled to sleep. I knew I should be eating more but had no appetite.
Teaching my students felt like a chore to be endured until I could go home and lie in bed, awake and in a daze.
I was a robot with flesh. A machine with a zapped hard drive. I felt a sudden and disorienting loss of purpose.
“What is wrong with me?” I asked myself, staring into the mirror and not recognizing the hollow eyes staring back.
I stopped returning phone calls, paying bills on time, giving timely feedback to my students, devouring books weekly and baking cookies from scratch.
Every afternoon, one of my student editors, a perceptive junior, would ask me a question, one I’d come to expect.
"Did you do great things today, Waters?"
I would flash a grin, quick but convincing.
"So many things," I'd lie.
The month after surgery was a grand performance. Very few people saw through the act.
Every forced laugh and empty conversation was a charade meant to fool people into believing I was OK.
I did not want to burden anyone with their worry for me. Especially not Neelam.
I did not want her to hear the things I said to myself. Things like how worthless my life was, now that I had given her a new shot at hers. Things like how selfish I was to think that helping someone would right all the wrongs I've done.
I did not want her to know I drank whiskey until the room spun.
Or that, one night on a long walk in Uptown, I stopped at a bridge, looked over the side and contemplated the drop.
I had never felt so helpless in my life. Except, no, that wasn't quite true. When I was younger, when girls started dating boys and driving cars, I felt like this, too.
I hadn't thought about that time, even when a social worker evaluating my mental wellness asked me questions during the donor evaluation process. I answered them without hesitation.
"Have you ever had suicidal thoughts or actions? Have you ever been diagnosed with depression?"
"No, ma'am."
But I think some part of me knew that if I had said yes or hesitated in some way — admitting I had once needed help — the doctors would have never let me give Neelam my kidney.
I had been glad to forget the past.
The shelves we keep
In every family, there are some things no one talks about. Topics that never pass across the dinner table. Dark, unspeakable things that would follow you to your grave if you let them. They sit on a shelf in your mind, pushed back by the present until you nearly forget they’re there. I have a not-small shelf on which I hide the things that haunt me.
Things like how my uncle Scott — who taught me how to tie my shoes and throw a punch — lives with anxiety and depression so debilitating he’s been on disability for years. How my sister Casi — who would brush my hair and choreograph dances with me — was once overwhelmed by rage and anguish because of untreated bipolar disorder.
And how, when I was 17, my uncle Michael — who made me laugh like no one else — killed himself to avoid prison.
I have a shelf just for my mother — who sang Shania Twain with me in the car with the windows down.
When I was 8, my mom, stepfather, sister and I lived in a quiet, woodsy suburb of Birmingham. Casi and I took swimming lessons after school together at the apartment pool.
Holding our breath underwater was our favorite game.
One day, mom yelled at us to get out of the pool, a request we must have ignored.
Before we took our next breath, our mother flipped the patio table, its glass shattering into pieces. That and her shouts drove us, crying and screaming, from the pool and to our apartment, where my sister called my dad to come pick us up.
Hours later, he was there. Mom was taken away to the hospital after she took too many pills and lost custody of her daughters.
For most of my life, I’ve tried and mostly succeeded convincing myself that because I moved far, far away with my dad, I had escaped the part of my family that often scared and confused little me.
But mental illnesses aren't like lice. You can't purge them from your head and never think of them again. They cling to you. And you spend most waking hours praying no one else will see them. These are the things that — when no one talks about them when you're a kid — you think should remain hidden, stored with other things on a shelf.
When I was 16, I started collecting pills. Every time things would get bad, I'd drop a few more in the Melatonin bottle I filled with over-the-counter painkillers I'd siphon without raising suspicion.
One particularly bad day when my teenage brain could find no other escape, I felt relief knowing I had that bottle tucked under my bed. When I reached for it, I could not have told you why. In the cold light of day, it would not have made sense to a healthy mind.
A clawing pain in my stomach woke me during the night. My screams roused my parents. Rolling on the floor like I was on fire, I cried over and over, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
I crawled into the bathroom, hugged the toilet and emptied my insides. Frantic and pacing, my parents called Poison Control. I suppose they realized I would not die after all.
They left me alone then. I fell asleep again with my cheek against the cold tile and did not stir until my dad and stepmother woke me, telling me to get ready for school.
I dressed, rode to school, and walked to class in a daze. It was my 17th birthday.
My shelves are unbearably heavy sometimes. But over the years, I've learned something that's healing: One at a time, I take down these things and call them by name.
"This is my anxiety and depression," I say to friends whose things look a lot like mine. To my son, who notices his mom is sad sometimes and asks why.
I look into his wide eyes, a gray-blue like my mother's, like mine, and tell him.
I do not want to be a person who makes him build a shelf where he puts me someday. I do not want him to bury the things that haunt him, to believe he's the only person in the world who could know how hard it is to carry unspeakable things.
A month after giving a girl my kidney, I discovered she had a shelf of sorts, too.
A friendship
Neelam and I sat barefoot in her house, nearly a month after surgeries that left us both with one healthy kidney. Her grandfather handed us steaming cups of chai.
We ate pizza and talked about our incision pain, how it still hurt when we laughed or sneezed, how she was going stir-crazy with the post-transplant house arrest.
It was the second time we’d met, the first time after surgery, and even though we’d texted a few times in the past month, I wanted to see for myself that the sick girl I met a month ago was truly getting better.
Some of my friends and family said I didn’t owe her that, or anything for that matter. I had just given her a kidney, they said. I didn’t owe her a friendship.
I told them I didn’t owe her a kidney, either, but I gave it anyway.
I stared into my teacup, stirred the milk and sugar and watched it swirl like a storm. I also didn’t owe her an explanation for why I gave her my kidney.
But I was there that day to give one.
“It’s like there was this kid out there in the ocean drowning, and there I was, the only one on the shore at the time,” I said to her, hands outstretched and pleading.
I told her how someone else might have come along. Eventually. Maybe.
But if everyone thought that way, I said, a kid would drown before someone could get to them.
I took another long sip of chai and we leaned our heads close together. I didn’t want anyone else to hear me.
I wanted to tell Neelam about my shelf — the things I hid there.
I was afraid that the woman who peered over bridges and ate pills wanted to help others not because they needed it, but because she wanted to prove her life was worth something.
A question had been nagging me: Had I given Neelam my kidney because she needed it to live — or because I needed that act to redeem my life? It is another thing that haunts me, the not knowing all of the why.
With a deep breath and unsteady voice, I whispered to her about a 16-year-old girl who needed help but never asked for it. I shared how hard it is to talk about things that terrify and shame you in equal measure.
I saw something like recognition shift in her eyes. Then she said something that should’ve surprised me but didn’t.
“It’s funny you’re telling me all this, because ... me, too.”
She told me about the things on her shelf, some that looked like mine, others wholly her own.
I told her that answers to life’s questions aren’t always black and white, good and evil, heaven and hell.
And I’ve discovered there is something more important than knowing why.
We spent the next several hours talking about her health and mine. I had good days where I felt like myself again. Then I had ones where dark thoughts sat in a corner, quiet but alive. Thoughts that had been there long before we met and would probably never fully disappear.
She was feeling good, taking her meds and eating chips whenever she wanted.
She still had germ rules that kept her homebound, away from crowded places and with a somewhat restrictive diet.
We talked about our futures and friendships. When she told me she planned to return to UT in the fall, her eyes danced with hope.
We talked into the night, mostly about stories, the ones we hated and the ones we loved. The ones we wrote as kids, full of ideas and bad grammar.
And the ones we hoped to write someday. Stories about people with shelves.
Stories about people who needed help, and yet could offer it, too.
Leah Waters is a journalism teacher at Frisco Heritage High School and a part-time multiplatform editor at The Dallas Morning News.
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Resources
Here is a partial list of hotlines and websites that offer counseling and resources to help prevent suicide:
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255. Confidential online chat is also available at suicidepreventionlifeline.org.
NorthStar/North Texas Behavioral Health Authority: 9441 LBJ Freeway #350, Dallas, TX 75243. The 24-hour crisis hotline is 1-866-260-8000, or go to ntbha.org.
The Suicide and Crisis Center of North Texas: Call the 24-hour hotline at 214-828-1000 to speak to a trained counselor, or go to sccenter.org.
Dallas Metrocare Services: 1-877-283-2121
Grace and Brian Loncar Foundation: The Loncar family set up this foundation to help teenagers and families minimize loss and suffering from youth mental illness and suicide. graceloncarfoundation.com
American Foundation for Suicide Prevention: Funds research and education programs and provides resources for survivors of suicide loss and people at risk. afsp.org
National Alliance on Mental Illness: National grassroots mental health organization for people and families affected by mental illness. Resources and information at nami.org.
Be a kidney donor
National Kidney Foundation: Learn more about how to donate a kidney at kidney.org.
Medical City Fort Worth Transplant Institute: Apply to be a kidney donor at the same clinic Leah and Neelam used for their transplant.
