This week marked our official return to Louisville. To home. Arabella & I lived in our apartment for six months. We arrived in October as two weary souls, tired of the trek to Cincinnati and knowing that things were only going to get more intense. After placing a hemodialysis catheter, Arabella had to start doing hemodialysis 3 times a week with peritoneal dialysis the other four nights, initially for 12 hours a night. We couldn’t continue driving back and forth. We knew a transplant date was set for December, but with so many disappointments, we were focused on not getting our hopes up. Simultaneously, we were fully prepared for the immediate return of Arabella’s disease if we made it to transplant. We realized that the fight we had was nothing compared to the fight we were facing. Bringing in furniture was the lightest weight we carried on this move. The first night while we slept in our apartment, someone stole the car magnets that told of Arabella’s need for a kidney right off our car.
November brought Thanksgiving. With a big dinner planned, we learned that Jeff & AJ couldn’t join us because of sickness. They ate at Waffle House as we were separated as a family for our favorite holiday. In December, Arabella’s blood pressure continued to rise during dialysis and they increasingly kept her later and longer. She was frustrated and those days were tedious. But before we knew it, we were buying our first live Christmas tree and waiting for my sister and friend to arrive before surgery. Arabella spent Christmas in the hospital with the greatest gifts of bathroom breaks and NO DISEASE RETURN!! January gave us frequent visits with her team and a hospitalization where drug toxicity was identified. By February, Arabella’s spirits needed a boost, so we snuck away to Carmel, Indiana where she got to swim in a hotel pool…swimming for the first time in 20 months! March arrived quickly and the end of our days in our little haven was in sight.
It’s hard to articulate what our months in Cincinnati meant to us. Arabella has cried each night since we returned, missing our home-away-from home. During our six months, we literally never met a neighbor. We know the man across the porch from us loved to get DoorDash food delivery. And the lady down the hall would say hello if we spoke first. The bottom line is that we left without anyone knowing what was going on behind our door–no one knew there was a closet in our living room holding cases of medical supplies or that a child lived there who rarely slept after transplant because of steroids. No one knew that a mother was inside caring for her daughter while grieving the loss of time with her son 100 miles away. As I closed the door the last time, I thought about how Arabella had her final dialysis treatment inside that apartment and how we both healed from surgery within those walls. No one knows what happens behind a closed door, but chances are it’s both miraculous and mundane. Although we never met a neighbor, we knew during that time that we were never alone. Thanks for coming along on our journey.
