After a perfunctory breakfast of cereal and milk, my appetite nonexistent, Kurt and I mounted our bicycles and rode together through the chill morning.  We parted at the corner of Hopkins and Peralta.  He turned toward the North Berkeley BART station to catch the “Casual Carpool,” a semi-official hitch-hike spot and Berkeley’s socialist response to the Bay Bridge Toll and BART fares.  I headed west toward Fourth Street and the bike route to Emeryville. 

The crisp morning was starkly clear over the San Francisco Bay.  Canada geese waddled about on the grass beside the Berkeley Aquatic Park.  I only obliquely registered the twenty-minute ride to work.  My legs were cramping underneath the black denim of my Levis, my hands numb in the thin gloves as they braced against the handlebars.  I ignored the rancid taste flooding my mouth.  Instead, I focused on the day ahead and how much I had to do.

I arrived at the office at 8:30 a.m. and rushed back out to buy Cara a cup of coffee, payment for her having taken a 7 a.m. conference call for me.  Walking through the brisk sunny morning to the café, I tried to ignore my body and the symptoms that had wracked it for the past month--feeling chilled yet sweaty at the same time.  My client’s press release had gone out at 7:15 a.m., and I still had fifty follow-up emails to send.  I hurried back to the office with the coffee and began the press release follow-up.  Fifteen minutes into it, my doctor phoned.  I closed the door to my office as she began speaking.

"Lisa, you’ve got to get yourself to the hospital right away.  The lab results came back this morning, and--" she paused, clearing her throat, as if she had something terrible to say but couldn’t find the right words.

The floor dropped out from under me.  I sank into the chair and clutched the phone to my ear.  Doctors don’t call about routine lab results.

She resumed.  "They show something is wrong with your kidneys."

My kidneys?  But when I had gone to see her the Friday before, I told her I was depressed and that I thought it was the depression that was stealing my energy.  I explained that I had been feeling a bit off and that I had been taking St. John’s Wort for a few weeks with the hopes that it would improve my mood.  When I mentioned that I had noticed my pee looking foamy, like soap suds, she insisted we draw a lab panel before prescribing conventional antidepressants.

I tried to ask her to clarify what she meant about my kidneys, but she stopped me, her voice now urgent.

“Look, this is serious.  All I can tell you at this point is that your kidneys are in bad shape based on your lab values.  You need to go to the hospital as soon as possible so they can run further tests.  I’ve already called and made arrangements for your admission.  They’re expecting you.”

What was I to say, but OK?

The moment of transition stands strangely outside time.  One minute, you're doing what you always do, life moving forward in a succession of now-events, everything happening in the present.  Then, at the moment of crisis, everything stops.  All previous thoughts, habits, all the momentum of life abruptly ends.  This is followed by a cataclysmic wrenching, an instant when time splits into pieces.  My life split irrevocably in two: before and after.

I hung up the phone.  Jumping to my feet, I forced myself to focus on the logistics of getting to the hospital.  I couldn’t ride my bike, not if I was sick.  I needed my sister, Marla, to bring the car. 

She had arrived from Hawaii the weekend before Thanksgiving.  After eight years in paradise, she sought the exciting atmosphere of the Bay Area in 1998 with the Internet Boom taking off.  Kurt and I had volunteered our spare bedroom as a launching pad for her to start a new life, and she had been borrowing our car to look for work.  I hoped she would still be at home when I called her.  She answered on the first ring.

“Marly, I need you to come get me.”

She must have sensed my fear.  “Why? What’s wrong?”

“You need to take me to the hospital.”  When she made to interrupt, I rushed on, desperate.  “I’ll explain why when you get here, but you’ve got to come now, as fast as you can.”

As soon as I hung up with her, I called Kurt, but I consciously tried to keep my voice calm.  I didn’t want him to worry while he was at work, especially until we had a better idea of what was happening to me.  At the moment, I had enough anxiety for the both of us.

“Hi, my dear.  You won’t believe this, but the doctor called and my labs from last week came back a bit weird.  I’ve got to go to the hospital.  Marla’s on her way to come get me with the car.”

“What was weird? Did the doctor say?”

My tone had worked and he didn’t sound overly concerned.

“Something about my kidneys.  I’ll call you from the hospital as soon as we know more.  I love you.”  I fought to keep the fear from my voice and realized my body was shaking.

“I love you, too,” he said, and then we hung up.

I knew I had to tell my boss Helen what was going on, but for the moment, I stood paralyzed beside the desk, feeling sweat drench my armpits while chills and tremors shot through my body.  These symptoms had been going on for so long I couldn’t remember exactly when they had started.  The nauseating, sulphurous, vaguely metallic taste flooding my mouth was a different story.

The Saturday night before, Marla, Kurt and I had had sushi with Kurt’s cousin David in Japantown.  After dinner, while we sat in David’s apartment listening to him play guitar, a vile, sulphurous taste filled my mouth and I began burping revolting, nauseating burps.  I knew this new, sinister symptom signaled something terribly wrong with my body, but what did my kidneys have to do with it?
Granted, I didn’t know much about kidneys except that they made urine. None of my symptoms made sense to me.

I grabbed some strong mint gum from my backpack to camouflage the taste, took a deep breath, and left my office.
Heading past the other open office doors, I nodded and managed a tight smile at those of my co-workers who looked up.  Helen’s corner office door was open.  She had always intimidated me with her poker face, her unreadable manner, so different from my own.  As an underling at the agency, I had managed to avoid her most of the time and work with Cara, my direct superior.  Now, I had to face her.  I could see she was on the phone, and I tried to get a hold of myself.

She noticed me standing outside her office and gestured for me to enter.  I closed the door behind me.  Attempting to maintain my composure, I bit my lip, but as soon as I saw the unusual concern dawning in her eyes, I lost it.  I bowed my head to hide the tears running down my face.  She immediately hung up.

“What’s wrong?”

I wanted to appear strong, in control of myself, in charge of the situation, the persona I had worked so hard to develop as her employee, but I couldn’t do it.

“I’ve got to go to the hospital right away.  Something is wrong with my kidneys.”  I couldn’t continue.  My words and her atypical sympathy were making the gravity of the situation real.

She came forward with a box of tissues.

“Of course.  Do you need a ride? What do you need from me?”

“My sister’s coming with the car.  She should be here any minute.  I’ll call you from the hospital once I know what’s going on.”

“No problem, Lisa.  Do what you need to do.  Take care of yourself.”  Her phone began ringing, and she picked up.

Marla was waiting for me in the reception area, talking to Cara.

“What’s this about you having to go to the hospital?” Cara looked at me in disbelief.

I shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant, but with my red eyes and nose I didn’t succeed.  “There’s something going on with my kidneys, so they need to check it out.”

“But you don’t look sick. I mean, come on, you just rode your bike here this morning!  It doesn’t make any sense.  And what about the run we did last week?”

I remembered that run.  Cara and I had agreed that during the holiday season we would take breaks at lunch to exercise off the extra calories.  High tech public relations is a job that is fun in its intensity but all-consuming, and we typically worked through lunch, never stopping to take time out from the whirlwind.  The run was a flat one, only about a mile around the Emeryville marina and back.  It had been one of those spectacularly clear coastal California winter days, the landforms magnified by the lack of an inversion layer and the colors enhanced by the crystalline quality of the pristine air.  San Francisco rose tall and surreal from the glittering steel blue bay, like Oz above the poppy fields.  The Golden Gate Bridge glowed red.  Mount Tam loomed dark, unconquered and uncivilized to the north. 

But I registered these sights only obliquely, as I ruthlessly pushed through the fatigue and pain to keep pace with Cara.
By the end of the run, my legs were cramping, and by the time we got to the last flight of stairs to the agency, I could barely walk.  I masked the pain with a laugh and told Cara to go on ahead, that I needed time to stretch.  Once she had left, I struggled up the stairs, grasping the banister to pull myself along.  With each step, my legs cramped furiously and I panted for breath. My body shook with a chill, my armpits drenched with sweat.  When I finally reached my office, I could do nothing but close the door and lie under my desk, cold, cramping, sweaty, and hoping that no one would notice.  It was as I lay there that I suspected that what was wrong might not just be in my mind.  Even in high school, when I was forty pounds heavier and completely out of shape, I could have run that short, flat distance.  I called the doctor for an appointment that same afternoon.

“I agree, none of it makes sense,” I now replied to Cara.  “But the doctor said not to waste any time, so Marla and I have to go now.  What should I do about my bike?”

“Just leave it here.  I’ll keep an eye on it,” Cara said.

The drive to the hospital was tense.  Marla focused on navigating through the thick Berkeley morning traffic and I rattled on in a meaningless frenzy of words, hoping to keep her from worrying and trying to keep my own terror at bay.  When the words ran out, I stared blankly ahead, the tangle of emotions and memory threatening to overwhelm me.

Something was wrong, really wrong.  Was I dying?  Just the thought of the hospital brought back memories of fatal disease, of death, and of my friend, Dom.

Dom had been one of my best friends since my graduate school days at UC Santa Barbara, when we shared a house for a year.  Though I knew he had lost most of his immediate circle of gay friends to AIDS, he had always insisted that his being fat "saved him" from contracting HIV.  No one wanted to sleep with a fat man, he used to say.  He was a dynamo, a tornado of energetic fun and wild good times.  For more than eight years, we had partied together.

In January, he was hospitalized suddenly.  When I went to visit him at the hospital in San Jose, he said he had something mysterious and the doctors did not know what was wrong.  He had lost a great deal of weight and was running a high fever.  Immediately, I suspected AIDS, but he denied it.  I believed him, and when I heard he was released from the hospital in February, I assumed he would be OK.  Events in my own life swept me along, and Kurt’s and my hectic schedule distracted me from Dom. 

I did not take the time to see him again until late April, when I went to visit him at his parents’ home in the South Bay.  I didn’t realize it would be the last time.  He looked like the other people with AIDS I had seen, his large frame shrunken to bone, his eyes and nose now too big for his face.  He lay in a big metal hospital bed in the room where he had grown up.  His own apartment had been rented, his prized gold Toyota Corolla with the sporty sunroof sold.  It was obvious he didn’t have much longer.  Only then, finally, and after eight years of friendship, did he tell me the truth.  He had known he was HIV+ since he was nineteen, for more than thirteen years, but had never told anyone but his mother. 

With Kurt and me moving to Berkeley, it wasn’t until two weeks after the visit that I took the time to call his mom and check on him.  Two weeks had been too long.  He had died the week after my visit and had been buried just three days before my phone call.  His mom hadn’t been able to reach me about the funeral, because she didn’t have our new phone number.

He died May 2, 1998, less than five months since his first hospitalization.  Would my end come like his, so swift, so horribly abrupt?
Marla’s voice broke into my memories.

“It looks like finding parking is going to be a real drag.  I’ll drop you off here so you can start checking in.”