The Poem Taped to My Dialysis Machine
Four hours, three times a week, fourteen lines that make it bearable.
Chair nine has the best view of the parking lot, and for three years it has known the shape of my body better than my own bed does. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, six in the morning, four hours at a stretch: my kidneys quit at forty one, and a machine the size of a hotel minibar took over their job, and the first thing I learned about dialysis is that nobody tells you what to do with your mind while your blood is away.
Polycystic kidney disease. I inherited it from my father, along with his laugh and his inability to leave a party in under forty minutes. He did nine years on a machine like mine. I used to drive him to his sessions when I was in college, and I remember being impatient in the waiting room, actually impatient, as if my time were the scarce kind. The disease waited until he was gone to come for me, which I have decided was a courtesy.
The clinic gave me pamphlets when I started. Coping with chronic illness, one of them said, in a font the color of mouthwash, as if illness were a spill and coping were the roll of paper towels. The pamphlets suggested podcasts. They suggested gratitude.
They did not mention what actually happens at hour three, when the podcast ends and the gratitude runs out and you are lying very still under a heated blanket watching your own blood leave through a tube the color of cranberry juice, thinking: this is the rest of my life... in four hour installments.
The poem was an accident. Most rescues are.
I found it during a bad night of scrolling, on a page of profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, which I had landed on by the usual chain of insomniac clicking. One of the profiles belonged to a woman from a fishing town I will never visit, and her poem was fourteen lines about the tide going out. Not a metaphor pretending to be about tides. Actual tides: the mudflats, the stranded boats leaning on their keels, the smell, the certainty of return. The last line said the sea does not apologize for leaving, because it never once has failed to come back.
I read it maybe ten times. Then I printed it at the library, and on a Wednesday I taped it to the front of my machine with the surgical tape they leave lying around, at exactly the height where my eyes land when I am tilted back in chair nine.
Marisol, my dialysis tech, noticed it before the needles were in. She reads everything on her machines, alarms and labels and now, apparently, poetry. She read it all the way through with her head tilted, and then she said, huh, and taped down the corner that was lifting, and that was the entire ceremony by which the machine and the poem became one instrument.
The chair across the aisle, chair ten, belonged to Eddie. Retired ferry engineer, eighty one, forearms like dock rope, on the machine four years before me. Eddie could not see the poem from his chair and it drove him crazy for a week, I could tell, until one morning at hour two he finally said, loud over the hum: well, what's it say?
So I read it to him. Out loud, over the sound of both our bloods being cleaned, at six forty in the morning, to a man who had spent forty years on tide tables. When I finished the last line he was quiet for a moment... and then he said, that's correct, with the authority of a man verifying an engine spec. The sea never once has failed to come back. That's correct.
After that it was a ritual, and rituals are how you survive a schedule. Every few weeks I taped up a new poem, always short, always something that could be read aloud in under two minutes, and at some point in every session Eddie would say, all right, let's have it, and I would read to the aisle. Other patients started putting in requests like it was a radio show. Renata in chair seven, on the list for a kidney same as me, wanted poems about hope, but nothing sappy, she said, nothing with doves. The quiet man in chair twelve never requested anything, but once, after a poem about loneliness, he said, to no one in particular, that's the first time anybody's described my kitchen. Marisol timed her checks to the readings. The nurses said our corner had the best numbers in the unit, blood pressures, mood, all of it, and I am not claiming the poems did that, but I am not claiming they didn't.
Fourteen lines cannot clean your blood, but they can remind the blood why it should bother going back in.
People ask what dialysis feels like and I tell them about the poems instead, because the honest answer is that it feels like being a car up on a lift while you are still inside the car. The poems put a window in the garage. Four hours is unbearable as four hours. It is bearable as one poem, read twice, argued about once, and then dozed on.
Eddie missed a Friday in March.
Missing a session is not like missing a coffee date; the machine is not optional, and everyone in the unit knows it. Monday his chair had a folded blanket on it and a new patient scheduled for the afternoon block, and Marisol told me quietly, before the needles, so I would not hear it with my arm already committed.
His heart, not his kidneys, in his sleep, in his own bed. The ferry engineer got a calm crossing. It was the best of the available exits and I hated it anyway.
I did not tape up a poem that week... or the week after. Reading to an aisle is a ritual; reading to an empty chair is a wound, and I was not volunteering. But at hour three of a silent Friday, the old arithmetic came back, the rest of my life in four hour installments, and I understood that I was doing the exact thing the tide poem forbids: treating the going out as the whole story.
So the next Monday I brought the tide poem back, the original, gone soft at the folds, and I taped it up and read it out loud to chair ten, to the folded blanket, all fourteen lines.
My voice went at the last one. Marisol finished it from behind the machine, word for word. She had known it by heart for two years.
That's correct, she said.
The call came on a Tuesday at 2:47 in the morning, which is when those calls come.
There is a kidney. It is a good match. How fast can you get here.
I stood in my kitchen shaking, holding the phone with both hands, and I thought of Renata still in chair seven, and of my father, and of the mudflats and the stranded boats leaning on their keels, and the sea coming back... coming back... and I said, twenty minutes.
The transplant took.
I make my own urine now, which is the least poetic sentence I have ever been proud of. Somewhere in recovery I started writing fourteen lines of my own, about chair nine and dock rope forearms and cranberry colored tubing, and when it stopped changing every time I touched it, I entered it into a monthly poetry contest, because Eddie would have said, well, let's have it, and I have no intention of arguing with him now.
But before any of that, on my last morning in the unit, I did the thing I had been planning since 2:47 a.m. I laminated the tide poem, both sides, and I taped it to machine nine with fresh tape at the exact height where a tilted head lands. Under it I left a note, printed small.
For whoever sits here next. Read it out loud. The aisle listens.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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