At the dialysis center some of the day patients brought in a Christmas tree. Someone wrote “Christmas is just around the corner” on the green chalkboard at the well-lit entryway. Dixie Platte picked up a piece of chalk before a treatment and added, “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas!”

Dixie is one year and seven months older than me, like that makes her the final word on subjective topics. Dixie is a lap dancer at the Zebra Club. She says the dialysis fistula planted under her wrist looks like a 1965 portable phone from Botswana. Dixie gets by on a cadre of older customers who don’t look at her wrists.

A dialysis fistula is a special tract placed under the skin of the forearm connecting an artery and vein to provide access to a dialysis machine. Without the surgically created fistula, a patient’s blood vessels would quickly break down altogether.

A few people on the midnight-to-four-A.M. shift still have jobs. They will sleep, read, or maybe engage in a little lighthearted banter while the techs hook us up. Occasionally someone will have a mini-nervous breakdown. Some of the dementia patients are screamers. There is an adjunct room in the back, but you can hear them anyhow. You wonder why they never get hoarse.

Mickey and I used to drive to the hospital emergency room on Friday and Saturday nights as well as nights of the full moon, since there are so many drunken automobile and motorcycle accidents, and drive-by shootings, random shootings, knifings, etc.

This is how Mickey got his new pancreas and kidney, from a twenty-five-year-old man, blood type O, cause of death unknown. Mickey wanted me to get them but the man’s organs were too big, or I’m just a little shrimp. I didn’t know it at the time but a donated organ has to fit or it won’t work right. Mickey takes prednisone so his immune system doesn’t destroy the new kidney and pancreas. He’s got a swollen face, but apart from the pills, he’s cured. He tells me over and over that he wishes I got the cure, not him. He said he would die to save me. He said he will protect me from any harm that might befall me and that I’m the only person he can trust.

When I turn seventeen we are driving to South Carolina and getting married. Dixie helped me pick out lingerie to wear on my wedding night. When we were at the laundromat she told me that my underwear was too “utilitarian.” Personally I think her thongs, bustiers, and other sexy garments are uncomfortable-looking. She badgered me into buying a black ruffled petticoat. It’s not the kind of thing any girl in Ulaanbaatar would ever put on.