Daniel Rose - Larry's Kidney, Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China

“You must have a gazillion question,” Cherry says.

Larry raises a hand. “Where is the little boys’ room?”

I help him to a bathroom that has extra-fancy bidets with automatic drying features on one side, but on the other loose rocks around the shower stall to keep water in. It’s like we’re in a time bubble somewhere between Stone Age and Space Age. When we’re all reassembled in the Family Crush Room, Cherry reinvites our questions while a nurse draws a blood sample from Larry’s arm and the residents take scrupulous notes.

“Have you had Western patients before for kidney replacement?” I ask.

“Oh, yes, many-many from Middle East: businessman, tycoon, such and such.”

“What about Westerners from, like, the West?”

“Just last year before Restriction, a seventy-five-year-old who was also from Florida like you,” Cherry says.

“What a coincidence,” Larry says, “Not only do we come from the same state, but I feel seventy-five.”

“But after surgery, eighteen!” Cherry says. We all laugh. Beneath his hangdog expression, Larry has a million-dollar smile when he lays it on.

“I’ve never had anyone in America get my vein on the first try,” Larry says, amazed as the nurse deftly holds two Q-tips to his vein for a minute, making it stop bleeding without a bandage. “This is certainly a positive sign.”

“Oh, yes, everything positive,” Cherry confirms. “Flying color for everyone!”

“I know there are a lot of variables,” Larry says with a beam that everyone in the room mirrors, “and I won’t hold anyone to anything that would hold water in a court of law, not that I’m even thinking that direction, but can you give some sense of how much this might set me back cash-wise, because I am not a rich man, despite my esteemed title of professor.”

Despite our best efforts, we cannot get the barest glimpse of how much a transplant might cost or when it might become available. The attempt goes on long enough for a couple of patients’ relatives to come into the room, slip off their shoes, stretch out barefoot on a plastic couch, and fall asleep. The one thing Cherry is unreserved about is that the hospital’s track record with this surgery is exceptional. “Hundred percent success rate so far.”

“Is that possible?” I ask, skeptical. It hurts my eyes to widen them.

“Oh, yes, we do over four hundred surgery last year, not so many this year because of Restriction, but many notable patients, including Saudi prince two months ago, Korean diplomat, also a very famous Chinese film star, but it is pity she is gone.”

“Well, that seventy-five-year-old from Florida, for instance,” I ask. “Would it be terribly unethical to give an idea of what he paid?”

“Oh, not the sort of question at this juncture,” Cherry says. “But in this particular field of organ transplants, we are considered one of finest hospital in all region.”

“Really?” I ask. “By whom?”

“This is the track record,” she says matter-of-factly. “First job now is to see about the patient’s condition. Already I can report from blood tests, he is viable candidate for surgery. During last hour I have been in consult with Dr. X over phone, and he say all system go. Hip hooray! So later when Dr. X assess situation with own eyes, then we discuss financial arrangement, so forth so on.”

“Cherry, this is a city of nine million people,” Larry interrupts, cutting to the chase. “I assume you have some good food here?”

“Oh, yes, we are renown for our fried scorpion dumplings.”

“What I’m really asking is if you have any fast-food franchises?”

In a minute the whole group of us has piled into a cab, and we are on our way downtown to a local Kentucky Fried Chicken. Larry is so buoyed by the prospect of an American meal, and a captive audience, that he takes the opportunity to unburden himself on various subjects: the American moon landing (never happened), health clubs (he’d visit them if they had couches to lie on), how to solve the organ-donation problem. On this last he suggests two options: (1) adopt the Spanish approach and make donating the default, so if you don’t officially opt out, you’re automatically an organ donor. With the proper incentives, “lifetime movie passes or what have you,” the problem of kidney donations would be licked within five years. And (2) make motorcycle helmets optional.

Two traffic jams later, our high-spirited group wades through a grove of eighty bicycles to gain entry to a KFC, the hottest spot in town. We wait in line to get served, and just as we’re about to order, a group of secretaries nonchalantly cuts in front and beats us to it. No one seems perturbed, not even Larry, who’s soon tucking into his mashed potatoes, reviving even more with tender memories of his first job ever at a KFC in Everett, Mass.

“This was a part-time job?” Cherry asks. She puts a small chicken wing in her mouth and doesn’t take it out until everything that’s edible is gone and the bones are whistle clean. Despite her elegance and efficiency, she eats KFC the way the Chinese used to eat chicken twenty-five years ago, except for spitting the remains on the floor.

“Goodness gracious yes, I was all of fifteen at the time,” Larry replies.

I don’t remember him being underage, but I do recollect-and I assume it’s a good part of the tenderness he’s manifesting-that it was the locus of his first lawsuit. Slipping on water from a defective freezer case, he managed to spill hot chicken oil on his forearm and ended up suing the establishment, inaugurating him into a lifetime of litigation that has been a lucrative sideline ever since. “How much did you clear on that first one?” I ask him.

“Around nine hundred dollars, as I recall. Not bad for a fourteen-year-old in the sixties.”

“I thought you said you were fifteen.”

“I’m cognitively impaired,” Larry shoots back. “I’m fuzzy on my details, but on my general outline? A hundred percent.”

“Like our hospital record!” Cherry says.

Neither of these boasts does much to allay my qualms, so I privately put the overriding question to Larry. Check in at this hospital or bounce to the Philippines?

“It’s really all the same to me,” he says. “The motel you found in the Philippines is thirty-five dollars a day, and my room in Beijing is forty-four dollars, so it’s a difference of nine. I can’t go wrong either way.”

This strikes me as an imperfect way to choose life-and-death medical care, so while Larry begins regaling the table with a description of how good American coleslaw tastes-and what a travesty it is that Chinese KFC swaps it out for bamboo shoots and lotus roots-I go to join Cherry at the communal washbasin outside the bathrooms, where she’s rinsing her hands.

“Sorry for being pushy about this,” I begin.

“No problem, I will talk hard balls to you.”

“Great, because we’re at a crucial juncture right now. We have to make a decision tonight whether to cancel our flight to the Philippines tomorrow and entrust you with his survival.”

“But impossible to know answers to your questions,” she says. “Every case different. The first important thing is healthy for Larry.”

“Agreed, but is it at least possible to tell me if the price here is roughly comparable to the price in the Philippines? Because the only hard figure we’ve been able to get is that it’s around eighty-five thousand dollars in the Philippines. Is that ballpark?”

“Maybe ballpark,” Cherry says.

“Okay, thank you. Can you also give me an idea of where the kidneys come from? Because we hear all kinds of things in the West about prisoners and religious sects and-”

Cherry cuts me off with a general answer about the condition of the kidneys, which, she assures me, will be top-notch. Dr. X is renowned for this sort of transplant. Medical colleagues all over the Third World send him their relatives to do.