Harry and The Luck of Friendship
I want to tell you about friendship, luck, both the bad and the good and mostly about my friend Harry.
Harry and I in pre-op at UCSF.
When I had the bad luck to be diagnosed with multiple myeloma in February 2016, it turned out that by the time the cancer was detected it had already released enough junk proteins into my system such that I was terribly anemic because my kidneys had started to fail. So, on top of the diagnosis of an incurable form of cancer, I also had to begin dialysis immediately, which, as anyone who’s had to have it will tell you, is a terribly draining process. Physically, dialysis machines keep you alive, but since they can’t precisely replicate all of the jobs your kidneys do, dialysis is awful for your body long term. Emotionally and mentally, spending three and half hours stuck in a chair in a fluorescent lit room with a bunch of much older patients wasn’t exactly conducive to staying positive, to put it mildly.
Luckily, I did meet my friend Dawn Smith there though and not only is she GenX like me, but she’s one of the most positive, sunny and wonderful people I’ve ever met. And the hell she’s been through over the last ten years or so makes my experience pale in comparison. She’s three months ahead of me in receiving her third(!) kidney transplant and despite the terrible depression and physical challenges we’ve commiserated about, she remains the good hearted, passionate person I believe she’s always been. Check her out on Instagram: @plantGirl500
One can get used to almost anything
But having to spend most of my time over the last almost four years driving back and forth to receive chemo shots in my belly fat twice a week, and to get dialysis three times a week, I got used to living within a haze of fatigue and a sort of resigned depression that this was now my life. Merely staying alive was effectively my only job.
After the bone marrow transplant I was lucky enough to receive at Stanford, my kidneys did regain some function since the cancer had been put into remission, so for the last almost two years I’d only been going to dialysis twice a week. This still meant two days a week being out of commission, because after returning home from my 10:30am - 2:30pm treatments I was always exhausted and had to take a nap, plus the veil of fatigue was still with me.
As my doctors always said, the hope and the goal was that I could get a kidney transplant, which depended somewhat upon whether I’d even be allowed to as a cancer patient, and of course as to my chances of finding a live donor, which is always preferable to a cadaver donation as live donated organs start working right away and tend to work better and last longer overall. So, once I did get approval from UCSF, my job was then to find a donor and much to my chagrin, I realized that despite my loathing of Facebook, it really was the only way to cast the widest net. Before I did that though, I just started talking to my family and friends and ended up garnering some interest from a handful of people, including my old friend Harry who happened to be one of the first I spoke with.
“As he told me recently, as soon as we’d hung up from that phone call, he’d pretty much decided he wanted to pursue being my donor.”
As he told me recently, as soon as we’d hung up from that phone call, he’d pretty much decided he wanted to pursue being my donor. Shortly thereafter he took it upon himself to do all the research, contact UCSF, have them send their test kit out to him in Seattle and got the process going without much in the way of deliberation. Incredibly, it turned out that Harry, being blood type 0+, meaning his blood is highly desirable for blood banks as it is widely compatible, and I being AB- being a universal recipient was already a good sign. Even more amazing our antibodies were compatible as well, so he was a perfect match for me!
Considering how dramatic and major kidney transplant surgery is, it was odd to experience how routine it was as well. Our surgeries began around 5pm on Tuesday March 12th and I didn’t get back to my hospital room until around 11:30pm. But at around 3:30am we were both awakened to stand up and be weighed, which was actually one of the most painful moments I’ve ever had. I realized the next day this was mostly just a way to get us up and on our feet, which did, as we were assured get easier every time we did it. Two days later we were both shuffling around, doing laps around the hospital floor and by the end of the week we’d both been sent home!
By the end of May, Harry had been back on his beloved SUP (Stand Up Paddle board) a few times already and even entered and completed SEVENTY48, a 70-mile open-water race from Tacoma to Port Townsend, WA! Since then, we’ve both happily fully recovered, and life has simply gone on.
Here’s Harry talking about his Team Kidney experience in 2019
On behalf of both of us, I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank the UCSF Transplant team. All our doctors and surgeons, the nurses and support staff. All of them, to a person made our experience from pre-op to post op as positive as possible. Neither of us quite knew what to expect, but once we’d been checked into the pre-op room and we realized we’d be in adjoining, curtained areas to get into our matching gowns and blue “Smurf” bonnets, a kind of roiling, hilarious euphoria set in as our surgeons, doctors and nurses came to visit us both, exchange jokes, put us at ease and snap photos of us together. And I think we both felt that given the diversity of accents and ethnicities coming and going within that room, UCSF was wonderfully representative of San Francisco and the Bay Area in general.
A Little Lucky History
Harry and I met in a rather unique class studying Art and Architecture in 8th grade, in Newton, MA in 1982. He’d just moved to town and it was on a field trip to Newport Rhode Island to see the infamous robber baron mansions that we really bonded, not so much over the mansions, though they were impressive in their ridiculous opulence, but really more over our extended lunch break playing Zaxxon together!
“Harry stuck out in our school. He was a super nice and incredibly talkative guy with a remarkably unique backstory. ”
Harry stuck out in our school. He was a super nice and incredibly talkative guy with a remarkably unique backstory. He lived with his older sister Sue, who was only in her twenties at the time. His parents weren’t around as his mom had died quite recently back in Spokane, Washington, and his dad had run off years ago with a much younger woman. He and his little friend had accidentally burned down his family’s huge old house where he lived as part of a sort of loose hippie commune. He had a really cool wardrobe, which at the time I didn’t realize was all thrift stuff that his sister could afford, including his “wicked awesome”, “X” jacket. It was a red jacket with a big white “X” on it. I can’t recall exactly which side, but it was on the front, perhaps even going down the middle. Doesn’t matter. It was unique and singular like Harry.
In the interest of clarity and because I shared this with him before publishing, and Harry added necessary punctuation and edited my run on sentences here and there, I had to include at least one of Harry’s comments about this whole post, so as he said: “Point of clarification (DO NOT EDIT YOUR RECOLLECTIONS, I LOVE THAT PART) the X jacket had a big one on the back and a small one over the heart. I think it came from stock car racing and was used so drivers could identify their pit crew from a distance.”
“Or there was the day that Harry “ghost rode” a bike off the roof of the library in the courtyard where he, most of our friends and I all hung out, being the subversives we were, smoking cigarettes and lots of mostly seedy, brown weed. This was the ’80s in Massachusetts after all.”
One of the things that stuck out about him was that Harry was super generous to his friends. And gentle, despite his edginess and the trouble he got in relatively frequently. Nothing thuggish, just kind of flirting with disaster kinds of things, like going into some of the more tony neighborhoods in Newton just to see who’d left their keys in their Beemers and taking them for joyrides. There was also the time he’d grabbed a suitcase from someone’s car, took it to school and Eden, a girl who at least I can attest I had a major crush on, noticed it was her father’s and told Harry, but didn’t bother telling her dad or reporting him. I think she kind of got a kick out of it. Or there was the day that Harry “ghost rode” a bike off the roof of the library in the courtyard where he, most of our friends and I all hung out, being the subversives we were, smoking cigarettes and lots of mostly seedy, brown weed. This was the ’80s in Massachusetts after all.
There was a whole audience of us kind of looking up at the roof, right before Harry basically just rode the bike till right before the edge and jumped off at the last minute and we all cheered when it flew into the air and hung there for a second before crashing to the ground. Someone must have reported the incident because immediately afterwards out came the principal, who for some reason demanded to know from me just what was going on. I don’t really remember what I said to him, but it was likely some version of “I dunno…”. I mean, honestly I’m not sure what he really expected.
There are more similar Harry stories, like the day he got hit by a car and broke his arm trying to cross at a convenient, but terribly dangerous part of Route 9. He and many of us had done it a million times before. Freshman year of high school, I broke my arm too, but pathetically I was within about 300ft from my house and my neighbor hit me in his car because I miscalculated which way he was going to go. I had one arm holding a gallon of milk and a bag of Cheetos and the one brake I managed to pull on my ten speed just wasn’t enough to stop myself from slamming into the side of his car. Not cool at all.
Harry and I are both lucky
in that we’d both become a part of a close group of friends, most of whom are equally close to this day. Throughout the years our friendship and the individual friendships and group dynamics have waxed, waned, shifted and evolved, yet essentially all of these wonderful people are pretty much the same and there’s a bottomless well of love between all of us. I certainly felt this love and support going through cancer and it’s one of the most crucial ways in which I feel that my good luck has more or less outweighed the bad.
I can’t recall exactly when Harry moved to Seattle, but I’m guessing it was around 1990 or so and I know it had something to do with being closer to his brother who’d lived there for a while. In 1992(3?) I went on a long road trip from Boston with my friend and college roommate Andy, the goal being to check out California, but along the way we made a two month pit stop in Seattle and it gave me a chance to hang out with Harry and get to know Seattle a bit. As he’d be the first to tell you, he wasn’t in such a great situation at the time and was pretty depressed. Driving a cab and with an old USPS truck as his personal car. It was cool, but I know he’s glad to have that period of his life behind him. Too many drugs and sketchy living arrangements with even sketchier people. Which brings up another of the wonderful aspects of who Harry is. A survivor and an adept navigator of tough situations, but despite what I know he considers his mistakes, ultimately an empathetic and deeply positive soul.
At some point Harry got involved with the Sousa Mendes Foundation: http://sousamendesfoundation.org because as he discovered when he received a letter from them confirming that his father’s family, the Oesterreichers, were one of the lucky relative handful that this brave Portuguese diplomat saved from Nazi Germany. Harry seemed to throw himself into the work of helping the foundation with their website, fundraising, organizing events, etc. As he talks about in this podcast, his realization of the profundity of his connection with Sousa Mendes’ life itself was so full of probabilities and luck.
“I mean, if Sousa Mendes hadn’t saved Harry’s paternal grandparents, obviously he wouldn’t have existed and therefore I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of calling him my friend”
I mean, if Sousa Mendes hadn’t saved Harry’s paternal grandparents, obviously he wouldn’t have existed and therefore I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of calling him my friend, or the honor and infinite, indescribable gift he has given me of a quality and length of life I may have found with someone else’s kidney, but never would have had the poetic experience of it being his. Or perhaps more importantly the now legit ability of claiming not just the sort of unspoken honorary status of being one of the chosen people within our group of friends, and not just one of my favorite dumb jokes that as an Italian, I’m just a happy Jew, but full on, whatever percentage I can claim being as Harry put it, his kidney’s baby daddy now!
So, all of these words
are really just to announce to the world, to our friends (they know who they are) and mostly to Harry, that whenever I think of him, I’m filled with awe, admiration, the appreciation of my incredible luck and mostly love. Harry is the epitome of love. In his love of his friends, his love of music, all the connections he’s made around the world with fellow “Rusties” as a super fan of Neil Young, the love between he, his brother and remaining sisters. His community in his unique living space in Ballard, WA – a former retail space, that’s his apartment and when he feels like it becomes Harry’s Haven, an informal house concert venue.
Harry’s Haven
When he spins one of his many yarns of his adventures, or simply ruminates upon any subject with deep, autodidactic intelligence, you can hear and feel the love in his voice. The love of simply connecting with people. His love of life, art and the art of being alive.
“I love you Harry and though I’ll never be able to thank you enough, I also know that this very notion is somewhat embarrassing to you because you never did this for endless accolades or gratitude. You did it because you just feel you wanted to, out of love.”
People have told me on many occasions how heroic they feel I’ve been throughout my recent ordeal, but the truth is I’m no hero. Anyone given the same level of wonderful support and world class medical treatments I’ve been lucky enough to have had throughout could’ve come through and survived. Considering the alternative, simply having the will to live is a justifiably selfish impulse, but I do have a true hero in Harry. His was a truly selfless act. As he’d say, “well not completely ‘cause it does make me feel good to have helped you” which of course is true, but still donating an organ isn’t something just anyone would do.
Sorry Harry. You’re still my hero!
Addendum: Just yesterday it was Harry’s Birthday and continuing his yen for adventure and being a “waterman”, he took himself out for a paddle and made a new friend.
I don’t know anyone else who could’ve done this or captured it as well and that’s cause there’s really no one else quite like Harry :-)
