The Decision
Go here to donate to my GoFundMe campaign, if you can: Michael's GoFundMe
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I have to make a decision. Right now, this moment, my life or death hang in the balance…and time is running out fast. Let me explain, but first, I need to issue you a challenge.
There has been much talk about the Internet Age’s short attention span. This is not all bad, and if I live long enough, I’ll write a piece explaining its benefits. But we must retain our capacity to pay attention at SOME times when it is important. And this is important. It may take a little effort to read this entire column if you’re only used to reading tweets, but I challenge you to do so. A lot of you say you care about life. This might be your literal chance to personally save one…and perhaps, just perhaps, a great many more.
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In 2012, I was diagnosed with kidney failure. Back then, now more than ten years ago, I was on dialysis for four months, and I decided then that I was not willing to do it for a long period of time. I made my peace with the fact that my life was likely to be shortened, and I was grateful for the fact that I had chosen to live my life in such a way that I could make such an acceptance.
But despite the doubts and bad advice of doctors, I was able to get off of dialysis and lived nine years of healthy, active life. I wish I could say I was filled with gratitude for that, but there have been many experiences in the past ten years that have left me questioning, like the children of Israel in the Sinai desert, if it might have been better to die in that hospital bed years ago. Earlier posts on this blog tell some of that story.
Last October, I moved to Las Vegas to finish my script Manifest Destiny. I did not finish it there, as shortly after my arrival, I became violently ill with an intestinal infection called Clostrioides difficile, commonly known as C. diff. The Spanish word “dificil” means difficult, and that similarity is APPROPRIATE.
This nasty infection, common and well-known in medicine, was misdiagnosed at a highly-rated Nevada hospital that committed multiple acts of medical malpractice, the worst of which was telling me I had colon cancer when I didn’t. The message that I had cancer was delivered to me by an intern standing over my hospital bed in the middle of the night. The appalling impropriety of this was lessened only by the fact that she was SMOKING HOT!
I was thereafter pressured to allow them to do emergency surgery to remove a tumor that wasn’t there, and part of my colon that WAS there with it. A team of surgeons came to my bedside daily telling me I might die immediately if I did not allow them to do this surgery. A less knowledgable or less headstrong person would have yielded, likely with disastrous results.
After two colonoscopies where no tumor was found, they turned their focus to my kidney problems, convinced that this was what was making me sick, and pressured me to resume dialysis, which I allowed. But I didn’t get better.
Finally, they properly diagnosed the source of my maladies as c dif, but by that point, I was terribly ill. Once they started antibiotics, I started to feel better, and they discharged me prematurely, before the infection was cleared. My health setback having thrown a wrench into my plans to look for work, my bank account was dwindling, a problem compounded by the fact that Vegas hotels now hold huge deposits for up to a week after you check out.
Shortly after I got out of the hospital, Vegas hotel rates skyrocketed to the highest I’d ever seen due to the confluence of a Raiders football game against the then league-leading Chiefs, a slate of NHL games and two large festivals. I couldn’t even afford to stay at the Excalibur.
I spent two nights sleeping in a rental car, which at over $150 a day was still half the price of any hotel room that weekend. After I ran out of money, I spent three nights homeless walking from casino to casino on the Strip. Or I should say from toilet to toilet as I still had C. diff diarrhea. Actually, I hardly slept at all those three days as Vegas police won’t let you sleep on the Strip day or night, even if you’re just sitting on a bench, clean and well-dressed, with no bags or anything (I’d left my luggage to be held at my last hotel). I would grab brief stints of sleep sitting on toilets in casinos.
I was finally able to get a loan to put myself back indoors, but I was getting sicker, and two weeks later, I was back in the hospital again.
This second Nevada hospital was as disappointing as the first. Even though I was able to move around independently, and had never had a fall, they put me on a strict bed confinement (complete with a bed alarm), and kept me confined to bed for two weeks. They never reminded me of the importance of turning, which would turn out to be a fateful mistake.
During this time, my evil stepsister Anita, who I’d stopped speaking to over a year earlier, showed up unannounced and uninvited in my hospital room and started making medical decisions on my behalf. I was too sick to protest, as doctors had spent all their time focused on my kidneys and trying to get me back on dialysis instead of focusing on what was really making me sick—the intestinal infection.
During the two weeks of bed confinement, I had developed a pressure wound on my butt and nerve problems in my legs, feet and left arm that left them feeling severely numb and painful, like frostbite. When I protested the fact that the hospital’s (and my sister’s) only objective seemed to be to get me back on dialysis, while refusing to address my real problems, including the alarming problem with my legs, this hospital discharged me to the care of my sister, still infected with C. diff and in a state where I was unable to even stand on my own power. And little did I know, the wound on my butt was infected down to the bone.
Unable to even go to the toilet by myself, I had no choice but to check into the overpriced hotel where my sister was staying in the Las Vegas suburb of Summerlin, a city that had bad memories for me. My sister threatened repeatedly to leave me alone there if I didn’t follow her every order, even though I could not stand up on my own power or get up from the toilet without assistance.
I left the hospital on December 17. The C. diff infection causes a loss of bowel control and so I was wearing Depends diapers. But C. diff diarrhea is so voluminous that it would not just sometimes, but USUALLY overflow the Depends. Not too get too graphic, but at least in my case, C. diff diarrhea was worse than the normal sort. It was this thick, dark brown sludge that came out in unbelievable volumes.
The next day after my hospital discharge, I had an accident and shit the hotel bed. My sister accused me of being lazy and intentionally laying there and shitting myself! I couldn’t walk and, unbeknownst to either of us, I had a bone infection in my spine.
Never one to back down from any challenge, I was determined to show her that I wasn’t lazy. The next day, I got up and tried to walk on my numb feet and weakened legs. I fell and I couldn’t get up. My sister was in the room and left me sitting there on the floor five feet away for over an hour, in the middle of which she went out to get food (for herself, not for me).
At least five times a day, she yelled at me like a hysterical abusive parent yelling at a child. Finally, she declared she couldn’t afford to stay any longer and she had to go back to LA. This was fine as I’d never asked her to come. Her presence had only done me harm through the cost of the overpriced hotel and the fact that the hospital would not have been able to discharge me in the state that I was in if she wasn’t there.
I spent Christmas Week 2021 alone in a cheap motel room in Vegas, in a wheelchair, using a tiny bathroom with no accessibility features, vomiting regularly and filling six diapers a day with disgusting C. diff Mississippi mud.
My bank account having been decimated by the cost of the Summerlin hotel, and the expensive weekend of the Raiders game, my situation was growing desperate. I was getting sicker, couldn’t take care of myself, and so, afraid to visit another Nevada hospital, I finally accepted my sister’s offer to come back to California to stay with her in Inland Orange County. I checked into the hospital immediately upon arrival.
I was in the hospital for two weeks and finally got the C. diff under control, but by that point, my kidneys had almost completely shut down. I was back on dialysis.
My sister made it clear she didn’t want to be a caregiver, so after I left the hospital, I spent two weeks in a nursing home. There, I finally recovered the ability to walk reasonable distances, although my feet remained simultaneously numb and painful, as they are to this day.
Trying to live with my sister was a disaster. She constantly threatened to throw me out, was domineering to such an extent that she wanted to dictate what I ate (she wanted to force me onto her keto fad diet), and kept making comments that I wasn’t allowed to die in her living room. Almost anything I said, she would respond with hysterical yelling. It got so bad that we would sometimes go the entire day without speaking at all.
So I made the decision to move to Seattle, having failed to make the appropriate preparations because I was just so desperate to get away from my sister. I did not know that outpatient dialysis in Seattle was in the midst of a crisis. There was an indefinite waiting list for clinic placement. I spent over a month in the hospital waiting for a clinic spot to open.
Kidney disease has a marketing problem. Perhaps I can make my contribution to change it, and who knows, maybe celebrity kidney failure sufferers Selena Gomez, Alonzo Mourning and Sarah Hyland will chip in to help me.
If you say you have cancer, everybody gasps and weeps. People run to your bedside. Your appeals for help will likely be answered. You say you have kidney disease, people shrug. But after remarkable advancements in cancer treatment in the past few decades, end-stage kidney disease has a dimmer outlook than most cancers. Fifty percent of patients diagnosed with end-stage kidney disease die within five years, no matter what treatment option they choose.
In its later stages, kidney disease is profoundly destructive to an ordinary lifestyle. Because you lose the ability to eliminate fluids, you’re asked to severely limit your fluid intake to as little as one liter (about 33 ounces) each day and to learn to live with being chronically thirsty and dehydrated. I can’t do it.
You’re also asked to follow a highly restrictive diet that forbids everyday foods like bananas, oranges, tomatoes, avocado, potatoes, beans and spinach because these foods are high in potassium which failing kidneys can no longer eliminate and which will kill you at sufficient levels.
You’re also asked to eat a low-sodium, low-fiber, low-protein diet. You’re asked to limit another longer list of common foods including MILK because they are high in phosphorus. Basically, they want you to eat bread (but only white bread!), rice and canned peaches all the time. I can’t do that either.
Most people have heard of dialysis, but many don’t know what it actually entails. Imagine sitting for four hours, three days a week, watching your blood run through tubes into a machine, feeling cold in your bones like people describe when they’re dying. Dialysis can only be accomplished in one of three ways: by disfiguring the blood vessels of your arm, cutting a port into your stomach, or inserting a permanent catheter into your chest or neck.
The dialysis process leaves you chronically dehydrated and fatigued (at best), and causes as many problems as it solves. Dialysis patients deal with chronic anemia, protein deficiencies, bone health problems and a high risk of blood-borne infections. If you visit a dialysis center, most of the people you’ll see look like they have one foot in the grave.
Before the pandemic, traveling on dialysis was at least somewhat possible, as long as you were going somewhere that had clinics, but you had to make sure to have appointments booked in advance. But since many nurses quit during the pandemic, clinics are short staffed and getting guest dialysis appointments is impossible in many places. Dialysis is not a cure. It’s another slightly less deadly disease.
Transplants, for those who can get them, are better than dialysis, but still bring issues. An organ transplant is not like changing the transmission in your car. It is a dramatic, high-risk medical procedure that, even if successful, requires remaining on a cocktail of immunosuppressive drugs to prevent organ rejection. And a transplant does not restore your full lifespan. Generally, a transplanted kidney only lasts 10-15 years.
In the 80s, who’d have thunk you’d ever say this, but I’d rather have HIV than kidney disease. These days, for HIV you take one pill a day and you’re fine. But HIV and kidney disease have one thing in common: Without some medical intervention, you will surely die.
In the early days of my kidney disease diagnosis, I made a firm decision against transplantation. Why? Organs are scarce, a problem that could be easily solved if we made a rule that people who have been registered organ donors for at least ten years go first on the transplant list after children. But there are children on the waiting list now. I could not in good conscience take a kidney.
It’s different for someone like Selena Gomez or Alonzo Mourning. They are in positions of influence and lots of people depend on them and admire them. I would NOT have advised them to make the choice I’ve made. A person who has a family, I understand. But in my case? I can’t justify it.
The last decade has been hell, but I’ve lived a very good life. I wouldn’t be able to live a day with that kidney in my body without thinking about the child that had died in my place. But I am reconsidering my stance on transplantation, under one condition that I will arrive at shortly.
Since October of last year, I’ve spent a combined three months in six hospitals in four cities in three states. I’ve talked to 111 doctors. I’ve had 47 x-rays, 17 IVs, 12 EKGs, 10 ultrasounds, 4 dialysis catheter surgeries, 3 colonoscopies, 3 CT scans, 2 MRIs, and an enema. I’ve had my blood pressure taken—I’m not kidding—probably a thousand times.
I was in a wheelchair for a month (Merry Christmas!). I spent a week being fed through a tube attached to a dialysis catheter in my neck.
I am now totally estranged from the entirety of my selfish, toxic, dysfunctional family. My social network has been decimated by life changes and misunderstandings, moves and marriages. I have no work friends as I haven’t worked in ten years.
I want to work, but I can’t spend fifty hours a week sitting in an office chair anymore. Any work I do will need significant accommodation. I’ve been trying to cultivate a career as a writer for twenty years and I just can’t gain any traction. I went to Stanford, I worked for some of the smartest people in the world for fifteen years, but apparently nobody thinks my brain is worth a respectable paycheck.
So I’m now reduced to trying to live on my paltry disability and Medicare benefits. And some of you young folks seem not to know this, but Medicare is nowhere near free. I pay a $170 a month premium, and I have a stack of medical bills four inches high from the last year. But Medicare is great because I don’t have to deal with insurance company care-denial fraud (and that’s what it is—fraud).
We all deal with problems in life, but there is a point where it is too much to ask one person to handle. You think I’m not trying? Through all that you’ve just read about, there have been 52 days since last October that I’ve walked two miles or more—and I was in hospitals almost half that time and couldn’t walk for a month! Some days when I could barely stand up, I was in my sister’s kitchen washing dishes to show that I was a grateful house guest (and she was charging me over-market rent!). Through all that, finished a movie screenplay, and it’s great. Don’t believe me? Go read it: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CPwxw6TYii4UBvoIw8eI0H9tKxe_Rzya/view
I can deal with all of the above—I was born STRONG. But I’m now facing the prospect of trying to deal with all these health issues, being back on dialysis, with chronic pain in my feet in a medical system where pain relievers are practically illegal now as the Richard Nixon Drug War has come to your hospital room rebranded as the “opioid crisis”. Hell, the New York Times is taking it back to Reefer Madness.
With the rising cost of everything, I’ll be facing a constant threat of homelessness, living in poverty on an inadequate Social Security check, with no practical or emotional support network, having actually become the person who has to choose between food and medication, when I very well may have helped the pharmaceutical companies to obtain their patents on the very same medications I now can’t afford.
I will not accept this. If it comes to it, I’ll die in the street first. And I know America is not afraid to let that happen. But are you?
I am writing this from a hospital bed in Seattle on my third try this year at moving to this beautiful city I love to live, or possibly to die. They have finally found a dialysis placement location for me. The hospital will be discharging me in a few days. The problem is, I don’t receive my next Social Security check until September 14th. I don’t know how I’m going to keep a roof over my head until then.
But with the cost of things, I’ll be facing this again and again month after month, as I’ve been doing for the past three years. I have to find a way to change my circumstances, and I can only do that if I can find some help and support.
Given all the challenges that I mentioned, if no help comes, I am still debating whether I should just stop dialysis now, go to a hospice care facility, and accept that sometimes a good movie has a terrible ending. I won’t be unique. In this society, we let people die in pitiful circumstances all the time. We’re proud of it. But as it stands I can’t even afford to die with dignity—Medicare will pay for end-of-life medical care, but they won’t pay for a place for you to receive it.
There are people in the world who are valued, loved and respected, who would never be allowed to come to this pass. I have no evidence that I am one of those people. I’m not looking for any outpourings of internet support. I can’t pay rent with thoughts and prayers, and Instagram likes aren’t going to get my kidney function up. I need real-world help, even if it is just sharing this, until it gets around to the people who can do something, and know they should.
My favorite teacher in high school introduced me to The Fountainhead, and there will always be an Ayn Rand streak in me. But what I figured out is, most of these mega-billionaires and right-wing politicians who talk like they’re John Galts are actually Wesley Mouches. I’m the real thing, a true to life trader. Even now, I won’t ask for something for nothing. I have a lot to offer, and right now, I’m in the position capitalists love: vulnerable for exploitation.
First of all, if I can find an interested party, I am prepared to sell the rights to my entire writing catalog, including my highly marketable life story, at a fire-sale value price. Dead writers sell better than living ones, so this could be a real investment coup.
My Manifest Destiny screenplay alone, if it sold, would likely be worth over a million dollars. What are its chances of selling? Well, I’m a good enough writer that the agent for Shonda Rhimes, the creator of Grey’s Anatomy, requested a meeting with me after he read the first screenplay I ever wrote. And Manifest Destiny is way better than that one. But that one is available again now as well and would be included in the package.
I want to try to re-enter the work force. Stop and think about that. i went to STANFORD. I have fifteen years of quality professional work experience. But I’m unemployed. You keep hearing about all these jobs. They’re low-wage labor jobs.
When I read postings for good-paying jobs, these companies are on fantasy island. They’ve got a list a mile long of all the things they require. They’re asking for master’s degrees and years of specific experience for entry-level jobs (LOL). I know the culture of America—you’re supposed to just lie. But my ethics won’t allow me to do that. Plus, I believe my actual true history should be good enough.
I WANT to work even though I can’t feel my feet and I’ve spent nearly half the last year in the hospital or in a state where I should be. My body has some limitations but my mind is top-notch. The average starting salary for a Stanford alum (and this is including people like me who did not graduate) is over $97,000 per year. I come equipped with fifteen years of work experience and twenty-five years of life experience. I think at least the salary of a kid leaving Stanford now is a fair ask. The people I went to Stanford with are making way more than that now. I’m a bargain. I’d rather work than beg for help. But it has to be a job where the terms are fair and the working conditions are reasonable and it has to start NOW.
Another proposal I will put forth is this. I recently saw a headline about a trend of people selling stock in themselves. I couldn’t read it because it was behind a paywall, but I would do this if I couldn’t find a buyer for my complete portfolio. A small chunk of change would get you a piece of my future earnings, and a piece of my estate. If Scarlett Johansson decides she wants to make Manifest Destiny, you’d turn a profit just from that.
Even though I hate to do it, I’m going to start a GoFundMe if you want to contribute that way, but that is not a long-term solution. I’m looking for steps to self-sufficiency. But I have some immediate needs that won’t wait.
I know that many people will have suggestions that I should try this or I should try that. But you don’t understand. I’ve tried a thousand things, probably including what you’re thinking of. Part of my problem is that I’m too exhausted to do the things I know I can do. Remember Michael Jordan on that night when Scottie Pippen had to help him to the bench? That’s where I am right now.
I’ve already poured in my 38 points. Earlier posts on this blog detail only some of what I’ve been through. Over these last ten years, I’ve been fighting relentlessly, trying one thing after another, mostly all on my own, only to see things just keep getting worse. Begging for help is just the last thing other than crime that I haven’t tried. My rugged individualism has reached its furthest end. I’ve done all that I can on my own.
Apparently, these girls in Hollywood I’ve been writing about so glowingly on this blog aren’t going to help me. My dysfunctional, toxic family is not going to help me. The government is not going to help me (very much). And it seems that God is not going to help me either. So it’s up to you. When I say “you”, if you’ve taken the time to read this, I mean YOU. You may say, “I can’t do anything.”. You’re wrong.
I know that if you’re like most Americans right now, you probably don’t have a dime to spare. But while money is the ultimate solution to most material problems, there are many other things you can do for me.
You can share this in hope that it will make its way around to someone who does have the financial means and willingness to help, or get this blog enough traffic that I can monetize it. Hell, you can start a movement to help me get enough followers on my Instagram (@michaeldavidmodern) so I can start making money pitching products I love like all these hot girls on IG are doing. That’s the ticket—let corporate America (that I helped to profit BILLIONS through my work in patent law) pick up the tab now.
There’s more you can do. If you’re in the Seattle area, or know people here, you can spread the word to help me find decent housing under some arrangement that I can afford comfortably. A spare bedroom or even a couch that I could surf for a couple of months and pay for helping out around the house would help tremendously.
My father owned a real estate and construction company. If you own an empty rental property, and you are in the real estate business, making a work-for-rent arrangement with me would be the best decision you could ever make.
And you’re smart. If you really want to help, you can probably come up with a way to do it that I haven’t thought of.
At any rate, it’s too late to play the superhero and conceal the fact that I’m desperate. I soldiered through two years of homelessness, but I was healthy then. In my present state, it would be impossible. I’d die in the street. No big deal—thousands of homeless Americans die in street every year.
Despite my desperate circumstances, I have refrained from taking the step of publicly shaming rich people from my past by name, or revealing dirty secrets of my ambitious fellow Stanford alums and business colleagues. But who knows what I might say or do if I see the end of my life imminent. The Skull and Bones gives you $40,000 per year for life if you need it (and I bet they’ve increased that for inflation). I guess that club is more powerful than the club of Stanford alumni or any of the multibillion-dollar transnational corporations I helped make money for. Maybe I should have gone to Yale.
Not long ago, I read a great article by Umair Haque where he argues that America is a uniquely cruel society. He is absolutely right. If you ask for help in America, it won’t be five minutes before someone calls you a lazy bum. This is in evidence right now with the outcry surrounding the forgiveness of student loam debt when there was no outcry about the multi-million dollar PPP loans that were forgiven, and the TRILLIONS in handouts to bankers and large corporations. There is no criticism for that because they didn’t actually NEED the money. But if you’re in need, America thinks you’re a loser and it’s your fault. I submit to you, that if you care about this hypocrisy, I am the singular best example in the nation that this thinking is wrong and you should want to help publicize my story. Allow me to present my evidence…
I’ve been working my entire life. That is, if you accept the argument I’m prepared to make that getting an education is a job. The world must have educated people. We would not have doctors, or engineers, chemists or architects, nor even plumbers and bus drivers, if we did not have people willing to do the WORK of learning how to perform those tasks.
Yes, some people are just sitting through K-12 education (and even college) as a social ritual without actually seeking out an education. Not me. From my earliest memories as a five year old, I was determined to make a positive impact on the world, and I believed that if I wanted to do so, I had to work to learn as much as I could. Learning was my JOB.
I took my first industrial job at 19, washing cars at Budget Rent-A-Car for $5.50 an hour. Within a few months, I got a promotion…and a pay cut. I regularly worked 80 hour weeks as the overtime-exempt service manager…for $18,000 per year. This wasn’t in the Sixties. As much as I talk about JFK, I’m not THAT old. It was in 1995. And I was still washing cars, but now had to manage a staff of twenty on top of that.
I went on to better jobs, most of my career spent working in intellectual property for biotechnology, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies. Though I worked for their law firms, not for them directly, I’ve done work for Pfizer, Amgen, Johnson & Johnson, Pharmacia, Sony, General Atomics, the National Institutes of Health, the US Navy and many other corporate and governmental heavyweights.
I was a supremely dedicated employee. I rarely took vacation days. Apart from when I had the chicken pox at 21, I never called in sick. I was always willing to work late and my friends during those years can attest to often waiting for me because I was still at work. Unless it was more than an hour, I usually didn’t even submit overtime forms.
I was so dedicated that even on the day that I went to the hospital almost dead from kidney failure, I worked my full day. I will confess, however, I did take a lot of breaks that day. About once an hour, I would go to the bathroom to vomit up green bile and lay on the bathroom floor for fifteen minutes to gather the strength to go back to my desk. I was almost blind from uremia and had to identify my co-workers by their voices. I couldn’t do much, but I was still trying to do my job.
We can never know for sure, but it may be my relentless dedication to studying and working that burned out my body and led to my kidneys failing at 36. The disability checks I receive now are not a hand-out. They are insurance that I paid for. And in this country where fraud and unfairness are expected, the disability benefits I receive are less than half of the salary I earned through the bulk of my career, and since it is highly unlikely that I’ll live to collect Social Security, the government’s going to come out a winner on me.
Corporate America is an even bigger winner. The inventions that I worked to protect have generated billions of dollars for corporations, not to mention saving countless lives. I may have played only small roles in many of these enterprises, but they were important ones. Go check out my LinkedIn page (Michael David Boyd), look at the places I worked, and ask some of the highly successful (and very rich) people that I worked for about the value of my contributions. I’m like the Steve Buscemi of corporate America…except I think Steve gets paid pretty good.
I was a National Merit Scholar. I went to Stanford. And I was NOT one of the dumber people there. I passed classes that I only went to once or twice. So I dropped out of an elite university. So did all the richest guys in the world.
No one who has done all that I have done should ever, under any circumstances, be reduced to sleeping on a park bench. I think it’s injustice enough to make God say “Screw the rainbow. Here comes another flood!”. And it’s not even the worst injustice I’ve endured.
Somebody should stick a microphone in Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg’s faces and ask them if they are so much smarter than me that they should be two of the richest guys in the world and I should be living on the street. I like Bill and Mark and I think they would give the right answer: No. It’s unconscionable.
So, I think that is overwhelming proof of the case that I’m not a lazy bum looking for a handout. Sometimes, people ask for help and they DESERVE it. But we should be civilized, and give it anyway even when perhaps they don’t.
I mentioned earlier that I would consider getting a kidney transplant under one condition. My primary goal in life has always been to make some contribution to make the world a better place. All my life, I’ve prepared for that, and my deepest pain now is that I’ve never been given that opportunity to do it. For forty years, I’ve spent nearly all my time thinking about the world’s problems. If I die, an Alexandrian library of ideas will be lost, only a few scattered notes left behind.
But what if that changed? What if I was given a real chance to put my purported genius to the test, on my terms? What if I were finally afforded the resources and opportunity to make the positive impact I’ve been preparing for my entire life? Well, that would change everything.
We can start with the fact that over these past ten years, I’ve approached my kidney disease like a scientist, treating myself as a test subject, and I’ve learned a lot, including things that I believe can get thousands of people off dialysis like I did. I’ve also learned things that I think can help those with no alternative to dialysis stay healthier. Would I take a kidney to live to possibly help millions of kidney disease sufferers? Yes.
But how have things actually been? I sent a long e-mail to a professor at MY ALMA MATER Stanford. This professor was part of a team that published research on kidney regeneration. I told him my story and that I wanted to connect with him. He didn’t reply, even to say “no thanks. I’m too busy”. I copied his assistant, so SOMEBODY should have seen it. That’s the sort of shit that has to change.
I’m a writer. I don’t write to try to make money. I write because writers inspired me with great ideas and I know that great books and great movies have changed the lives of millions of people, and changed the world. Everything I write is with this in mind. My writing is not aimless. It has a message, though I’ve yet to successfully distill it into a single digestible work. If I had an audience, would I take a kidney to work to produce books and movies to change lives? Yes.
But how have things actually been? I started a website almost twenty years ago. Since then, I’ve posted hundreds of columns and lengthy blog posts, half a dozen short stories, a whole novel, three complete movie screenplays, and a collection of poems. These weren’t things I dashed off in the middle of the night. I approached them as professional works, completed over the course of weeks, months and sometimes years of soul-wrenching effort. And the result? None got more than a hundred or so views, and if internet statistics are believed, most weren’t read at all. That’s the sort of shit that has to change.
I love teaching. Probably the only thing that kept me from considering a career as a teacher (or professor, more likely) is that they want you to stay in school forever before they’ll let you do it, and then what you can teach and how you can teach it is always somewhat controlled. I want to be more along the lines of a spiritual teacher, except I want to teach FACTS (and some theories and philosophies).
If I had a group of students, perhaps even just one who was excited to learn all I have to teach and who I felt had the patience to follow through and the promise of the ability to build on what I’ve learned, would I get a transplant and stick around to teach them? Yes.
But how have things actually been? Since the internet, everybody thinks they are the smartest person in the world. People who flunked out of high school argue with me about shit until I have to fire up Google and prove them wrong. Without humility and submission, you can learn but you cannot be educated. That’s the sort of shit that has to change.
If I finally met THE girl who showed that I was everything to her that the girls I loved were to me, I’d DEFINITELY get a transplant and stick around for that. But that’ll NEVER happen, so I best stick to saving the world.
The transplanted me would be a problem-solving MACHINE. That’s all I’ve been thinking about for forty years. I’d put a picture of the child who died of kidney failure on the date nearest to my transplant up on my wall, and I’d wake up every day determined to justify the second life that I’d taken.
I submit to you that I can at least start us on the path to a solution for any problem mankind has. Give me the Pepsi Challenge. If there is a problem, personal, local, national or global, I’ll tell you how much I can solve it for, and if you think its worth it, give me the funding and let me try. A lot of these problems, I can solve for free.
Society has given Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk and all these dudes countless bullions. Not only that, every jackass leaving Stanford, Harvard, Yale or Princeton has got venture capitalists tripping over their dicks to hand them millions. So you think these guys are all so much smarter than me that I don’t even deserve a tryout? Have they been so much better than me that they should be exempted from ever worrying about basic needs and I should be living on the street? Check my background. The only fucking reason you would think that’s true is…I dunno…’Cause I grew up in Kansas?
Listen, I am a firm believer in taking responsibility. I’ve never shied away from it, to the point that I’ve often accepted responsibility when I wasn’t to blame. So I don’t want it to appear that I think only others are to blame for my predicament. There have been times in my life that I have been a real jerk, and I’ve missed opportunities due to immaturity or miscalculation.
But this is not a proportional penalty for those failures, not when I look at the lifestyles of the rich and powerful and some of the stuff they’ve gotten away with. Whatever my sins or crimes, as Andy Dufresne said, I’ve paid for them long ago.
So that’s my condition: I’ll get a transplant if you’ll LET me help you. Doesn’t EVERYONE by now realize you need it? Perhaps the world is in the state that its in because one of the greatest minds of this generation has been left sitting on the sidelines. Yes, I said that and I will repeat it. I am one of the greatest minds of this generation. The people who worked with me and went to school with me know that’s true. You can give me the Pepsi Challenge on THAT.
But I need not get a transplant. I could live with dialysis for a while if I had a mission, and people beside me—not behind me—to offer support. I don’t need a mansion or Bentley or a yacht (although Steve Jobs’ yacht Venus really is spectacular). I just need a comfortable place to live and work, and if I could get my old CLK back, that would be great. I’m not against having more, but I don’t NEED it.
I’m sure there is some nerve doctor out there who can fix my feet. And I still believe that if I could find a kidney doctor willing to work with me, I could defy the medical establishment again, and walk out of the dialysis center free once more. In the last year, I’ve had seven blood transfusions. On November 20th of last year, I walked over twenty miles. If I can just get a little life transfusion, I’ve got miles to go before I sleep.
I’m going to share something I’ve never talked about before. Back in 2012, when I was on dialysis, I offered a bargain to God. As I’ve written about here and elsewhere, while I do have some spiritual views, I have my doubts as to whether a God that can be bargained with exists. But nonetheless, I didn’t think it could do any harm.
The bargain I offered was this: That if God would permit me to get off of dialysis and return to health, I would continue my crusade for truth and justice and fight to the end without giving up. I cannot know for sure if my getting off dialysis was attributable to divine intervention, or my own diligent research and steadfast resistance to bad medical advice, but I considered myself bound by the bargain, and I emerged from the dialysis center with renewed determination.
Almost as if the sincerity of my pledge was being tested, or like God was a tricky genie, my life fell apart soon after that. I had that magical encounter in Las Vegas, ten years ago today, and since then it has been hell. I have actually contemplated the possibly that I died on the night I went to the hospital back in 2012, and when judged didn’t cut the mustard. But I didn’t quit.
When I found myself back on dialysis, I felt like God had either broken her end of the bargain, or considered it completed, or was never there to begin with.
For me to stop now wouldn’t be quitting; it would be collapsing. I’ve spent all the energy I had—I’m down from 375 pounds to 190. The fat is gone—I’ve been burning my soul to keep going. There isn’t any fuel left. I can’t go any further without help.
If you’ve stayed with me this far, THANK YOU, at least for that. I know it’s a lot to ask. I know you have a million problems of your own to deal with, but if you can only do the tiniest little thing, that might be the thing that makes the difference.
And so it is, that my life or death will be decided here. There is no more time to waste. There is nothing more I can say. I have done all I can on my own. A decision must be made, and as it turns out, the choice is YOURS.
Michael David Boyd
August 31, 2022
Seattle, Washington, USA
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