Chapter 1: stronger cough medicine

This is an excerpt from my book, A Transplanted Life: My Story and Guide on Transplant Success. 

Chapter 1

Stronger Cough Medicine 

“The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

-Thomas Paine

Although I didn’t get to spend much time with my father, I credit much of my success to values he instilled into me as a young boy. As I have grown, it has been a joy to discover many of the things we have in common. And many of the things I know of him today, I still hope to infuse into my character.My father enjoyed working with his hands and he wasn’t afraid to get dirty. He loved his family and led us well. His strength ran deep–physically, mentally, and spiritually. I’ve been able to see some of his patience and kind spirit in my older brother’s personality according to those who knew my father best. In a conversation I once had with one of his closest friends, he described my father as being pound for pound the strongest man he knew.My mom had a picture she used to keep in her Bible of a man hugging Jesus; one of those pictures you find in a bookstore that makes you feel nice and warm inside. In the picture, the man hugging Jesus has his back to you and from what I could tell it is what my father would have looked like from behind. In fact, for a long time, I thought it was my father. Similar to the street artists at Disneyland, I figured Saint Peter was sitting at heaven’s gate capturing these moments as people walked into Glory.My father was an accountant for Winnebago, the big RV company based out of Iowa. He often spoke at our church when the pastor was away. Unfortunately, I received neither my father’s way with numbers nor his ability to speak in front of a crowd. I assume he was a little more left-brain than I could ever be. Shortly after my father passed away, my mother had my siblings and myself tested to make sure we didn’t have the same disease that my father had. Both my brother and sister’s tests came back negative, but mine came back a little abnormal. Different enough that it caused the doctors to want to re-run the test. However, the second time the test was run everything seemed to look fine. So, I guess, that was that. I didn’t have the disease my father had. I’m sure my mom was happy to know that of all the things that I did not share in common with my father that this was one of them.I never really gave much thought to the sickness that took my father away from me during the early years of my life. Until I stepped through the doorway of my teen years I hadn’t experienced much sickness. But when I was thirteen I caught a cold that just would not go away. At first, I blamed it on allergies and assumed that with time it would clear up. By the time I gave it the attention it deserved, the cold had been lingering like an uninvited guest for nearly three months. We were about to go away for the weekend to my aunt and uncle’s lake house, and my mom decided if nothing else, it at least called for a stronger cough medicine.Before leaving for the weekend, she demanded I see our family doctor. I assured her that it was not necessary to see a doctor for a cold, but decided to go along with the idea to appease her motherly concern. It’s just a cold, I remember saying to myself.Reluctantly, I took my seat in the waiting room and began thumbing through the pages of the nearest magazine while my mom checked me in. Three magazines and half of a soap opera later, a nurse came through the door as she had done several times before. Sitting in a doctor’s office against my will during summer break was not my idea of a good time. Thankfully, this time as she looked up from her clipboard called out, “Noah Swanson.” Following her through the maze of hallways that made up the back half of the clinic she led me into an exam room. After placing a Popsicle stick on my tongue and jabbing her needlepoint flashlight in my ear, she asked me to describe the reason for my doctor appointment. I probably pointed to parental concern as my reason for being there. Making a few notes in a file, she walked towards the door and assured me that my doctor would be in momentarily to see me.It was one of the things I had always appreciated about this doctor; he did not seem to keep his patients waiting long. Shortly after walking through the door he began to run his own diagnostics, feeling my neck and stomach, and checking my reflexes. He had removed allergies from the possible contributing factors. The doctor then ordered a few blood tests to be run, followed by an x-ray of my chest. As a teenage boy, the minutes seemed to drag by like years as I waited in the doctor’s office. I wanted to be at my aunt and uncle’s lake house with a cold, sugary drink in my hand soaking up the heat of another Midwest summer. As far as I was concerned, this time I was spending with the doctor was only eating away at the time I could have been swimming in the lake. With a weekend full of fun in the sun ahead of me and a junior high sized attention span, my mind had all but checked out.By the time the doctor walked back into the room, my impatience had begun to transform into concern. From the look on my mom’s face, I could sense the worry growing inside her mind. After what felt like an entire summer’s worth of waiting, the doctor came back into the room and asked us to come look at the x-rays with him. I didn’t know what I was looking at, I had never seen an x-ray, but I sensed something was not right. As the doctor began to explain what we were seeing, my thoughts began to turn into frustration and despair. My hopes for a weekend in the sun soon sunk down into the pit of my stomach as the doctor explained to me that all of the clusters of white dots revealed a bad case of pneumonia, accompanied by what looked like mono.Even still, my doctor wasn’t satisfied with the prognosis. Something didn’t add up and he wanted me to see a specialist as soon as possible. As I continued to stare at the white spots on the x-ray, the thought circled in my mind, this type of thing doesn’t happen to me! In these moments my mind wavered between “what if” and denial. What if the doctors find something worse than pneumonia? And then my mind wandered further down that path… what if they find something terribly wrong? What if it is cancer? What if it’s something even worse than that? Is there something worse than that? It is the type of thought process that leaves you with your jaw wide open and your hand clasped over your mouth as if you’ve seen a terrible vision.In spite of all these dramatic conclusions my mind began to draw, I quickly shook it off and convinced myself it was no big deal. I reassured myself with these-types-of-things-only-happen-to-other-people kind of thinking. I kept my chin up knowing that most likely it would all end up becoming a crazy story to share the next year of school.As we walked out of the clinic, back into the light of the late morning sun, I self-medicated myself with a dose of positive thinking: It could be worse, I thought. Most likely just a one-day setback. It’s a mistake… just a big misunderstanding. It will all end in a sigh of relief… I’m sure of it, I convinced myself. After all, it is most likely just pneumonia. So I’ll probably have to get some antibiotics, take it easy for a week, and miss a day at the lake. Life will carry on. My mom made the call to my aunt to tell her we wouldn’t make it that night. A summer to remember On the way home from the doctor’s office, as I sat alone in my thoughts, again, my mind began to flood with worry, irritation, and anxiety. I feared the “what if” but what if what? I didn’t know exactly what I should be worried about. Is this what the beginning of the road looks like for a cancer patient? I couldn’t help but wonder. No one in my family had ever had cancer. I had never gone to see the doctor and left without an answer. Other than the week I spent in the hospital for a ruptured spleen, the only time I visited the doctor was for an annual sports physical. I had never even broken a bone for that matter. I was active, I loved playing sports, and I had always been healthy but for the occasional cold.The next day my mom took me to see the specialist. As we walked across the parking lot through the sweltering summer heat, beads of sweat quickly began to form on my brow. The layer of blacktop covering the parking lot made it feel like I was walking through an oven. We made our way towards the front doors and found our way to the front desk.I took my seat in the waiting area and immediately felt out of place. I’m not sick–I feel great! Sick kids belong here, not me. The thought went around and around in my mind like a scrolling banner. That thought coupled with the fact I was sitting in a “children’s” hospital made me feel even more out of place. I was less than three months away from entering my freshman year in high school; I was a thirteen-year-old man as far as I was concerned. Instead of Sports Center on the TV and Sports Illustrated scattered across the table, there were cartoon shows, grade school magazines, and children’s building blocks strewn about. I was already irritated by the lack of answers from the previous day’s appointment, so all I wanted, at this point, was to see this specialist, for him to tell me everything looked okay, and to move on with my summer plans.Sooner than I expected a nurse came to get my mother and me. She recorded my temperature, height, weight, and blood pressure, then led me into a colorful room with smiling animal cartoons covering the walls. I hate to admit, but if I was going to be stuck in a hospital, the bright colors and happy animals seemed to help a little. Shortly after finding my seat atop the exam table the doctor walked in. After a few moments of small talk, the doctor asked me to explain, in my own words, what was going on, and how I had been feeling. He then gave us a brief synopsis from the notes that he had received explaining the situation to make sure we were all on the same page.Once it was confirmed we were all tracking together, he pulled out my file and began to talk me through its contents. He thumbed through the pages almost as if he was looking at everything for the first time. As he looked up at me I noticed his eyes were void of the certainty that usually exists before a doctor issues a diagnosis. I was used to a doctor looking at me and saying something like, “Yep, it’s a cold. Take this prescription to your pharmacy to get it filled, take it easy, and come back in two weeks if you aren’t feeling any better.” But his eyes did not display that type of confidence.“Well, you don’t have mono… but you do have pneumonia. However, I am not sure what the underlying issue is.”It was not the response I was hoping for. I had come into this doctor’s office fully expecting to get a black and white diagnosis of what was going on, along with the remedy of how to fix it. As he continued to talk with us, he spoke of what he did know and the possibilities of what could be going on in order to prepare.This was the first time in my journey that I felt my curiosity turn into something more than anxiety or frustration. This was the first time in the culmination of these two seemingly inconclusive appointments that I felt fear. Until now, the hopeful curiosity had kept me anxiously waiting for the answer to what was going on. I sat listening as he talked us through some of the things that could be causing the symptoms and the possible outcomes.I can still remember the one I heard the loudest. I didn’t just hear the word; I felt the word fly through the air and explode against my chest, cutting through me like a surgeon’s scalpel. Although the doctor was mild-mannered and soft-spoken, the word dropped out of his mouth like a grenade: cancer!“There is the possibility that this could be cancer. It’s something we have to be prepared for.”Cancer? This was my first big dose of reality that rattled my world. A reality I swallowed like a spoon full of the most bitter cough medicine imaginable. I hardly heard the qualifying words “slight possibility” before the doctor had mentioned cancer. In that moment, I might as well have been given a death sentence. For the first time in my short life, I knew what it meant to see my life flash before my eyes.At the end of the appointment, a wave of nervous frustration washed over me. I realized I hadn’t taken any steps closer in discovering what was going on inside my body. I didn’t understand what was happening to me, my parents didn’t understand, my doctor didn’t understand, and now even the specialist couldn’t understand what was happening.I don’t know if it was an act of despair or an exercise in positive thinking, but I quickly lost myself inside my imagination. As silly as it may sound, I found myself conjuring up the idea of an undiscovered super power. As a thirteen-year-old boy with a comic book collection and a wild imagination, I hoped I was experiencing something similar to Peter Parker when he was bitten by the spider in the Spider Man comic. Maybe this was just a super-human, genetic-altering event going on inside my body. Of course, it was not one of the possibilities that the doctor had discussed with me. But I liked to think that maybe the idea was not so far off.In my limited life-experience, I tried to keep a grasp of what was going on around me. I was fighting to keep my mind and my emotions from unraveling. If it meant escaping reality but for a moment, then that was what I had to do. But, in that moment I do not know if I would say I felt super-human. Uneasy? Yes. Frustrated? Yes. But in spite of my nervous frustration, I could not help but think that maybe the doctors had it wrong. Maybe those were someone else’s X-rays; maybe those blood work results were someone else’s too. Maybe they misread the results. And maybe this is all a big misunderstanding.I was sure didn’t feel sick. Especially not sick enough to have two doctors already in this process and still have no clear answer. As my mind desperately raced to make sense of what was happening, I could not help but continue to entertain such thoughts. All the while my mind toed a line between fear and doubt. I feared what lay ahead. I feared what the doctors would discover was making me sick. Maybe it was my teenage naivety, but I couldn’t help but doubt as well. I doubted that this was even happening. My world as I knew it, at that moment, was being rocked in a way I never knew possible. At this early stage in my journey, I was still ignorant to the severity of what lay ahead.The specialist decided to transfer me on to a different specialist within the same hospital. And this was not much comfort to me. As we left the doctor’s office I began to wonder if they would ever find what was going on. Now two doctors could not figure out what was going on inside of my body. Does that even happen? I wondered. One doctor, maybe, but now two?