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- Kidney Transplant Post Op Diary, Year One, Episode Four:Routine, Routine by Ron Steinman
- Dialysis Diaries, 14A, Letter to a Son by Ron Steinman
- The Egg Who Wanted to Be by Ron Steinman Here is a short fable based on the philosophical question that asks who we are and speculates where we come from. I do not have the answer to the dilemma I pose. If anyone who reads this thinks they do, they are welcome to complete my story. Though I will publish most of the results, if there are any, there is no reward, except knowing you opened your mind and imagination to realms where it might not usually travel. *** This is a story about an egg. There was nothing special about it, at least on its surface. It was a regular looking egg. Shaped like an average egg, elliptical not round, its color slightly off white with a few speckles here and there across its seemingly fragile exterior, so really an every day egg. Nothing about this egg was unusual. Nothing except what went on its budding mind. And, that is what bothered the egg as it sat cozy and comfortable inside its shell. The egg had no idea where it came from. It had no inkling if it had a mother or father. It worried a great deal if it had parents. It wondered if that was important. If the egg could, it would have cried large tears. Not knowing where it came from made it lonely. In its loneliness, it had many questions it wanted answered. Where did it come from? Was it a frog’s egg? Was it a chicken egg? Was it a platypus egg? Was it a duck egg? Could it be the egg of an elephant, assuming elephants had eggs? Could it be a hamburger egg? No. Impossible. Hamburgers came from cows. Clearly, cows do not have eggs. That much the egg believed. Maybe it was a pizza egg. Impossible. Pizzas are usually round and flat like a Frisbee and Frisbees come from shoe stores or sporting goods stores, neither of which have eggs. We all know that. Period. Was the egg from outer space? Possible. If true, why did it not crack wide open when it landed? Maybe it landed with the help of a parachute. But where was the parachute? The egg worried as it searched for answers. It was spring. The egg lay in grass starting to turn green near some early flower buds on the side of a road near a meadow. The egg originally found itself in the middle of the road until a strong wind came and rolled it onto the grass where it would be safe, if only for the moment. Yes, only for a moment. The egg felt cold. It wished the outside would warm up and warm it up. Somehow it understood it would not be lonely when it got warmer. It was also beginning to think that if the weather became hot, it would no longer be an egg. Would it crack and fall apart? What would it become? Did it have a future? So the egg lay there among the beautiful wild flowers as they were beginning to bloom and thought its thoughts. Not yet fully developed, it had no answers to its plight, and truthfully, no solution to its confusion. During the day, it was not too bad a life. Some light came through its tightly woven shell. The sun warmed its tiny heart. If you looked at the egg from the outside you could not tell if its heart was beating, if its brain was operating. After all, the shell was hard and not made of glass. Yet, there was part of the egg’s shell that allowed it to look out on the world, to actually see some of what surrounded it. That gave the egg a bit of hope that it might discover the world it was trying to become part of, the world it was trying to enter. The egg could see cars swiftly passing by. The egg could see the running feet of children. The egg could see carriage wheels and rapidly spinning bicycle wheels passing by his perch in the grass. Once a rabbit approached the egg and sniffed it. Out of curiosity, the rabbit got too close to the egg and with its wet, pulsating nose, pushed it along the grass. The egg rolled deeper down the embankment, the rabbit jumped in surprise and then ran away. The egg’s heart beat faster than it ever had but it knew for sure, it was not a rabbit egg. So, exactly what kind of egg was the egg? What would it turn out to be? Will it be it up to the egg to decide its fate or was its future in the hands of time, maybe even a greater purpose or simply, the end of an old order and the start of something new? Or had the egg’s fate already been decided. The choice is yours.
- Kidney Post Op Diary: Year One, Episode 1 by Ron Steinman For those of you who have been following my journey for the last two and half years, here is an update of where I am after successful kidney transplant surgery. A live donor kidney transplant is rare. There were only 5700 live kidney transplants in 2020, not a big number considering how many people want a new kidney, not only to stay alive but to have a better quality of life than they now have. I am one of the lucky ones. My transplant occurred April 13, 2021 and it is working beautifully. Just getting the transplant is not enough. There is much work needed for now, and then, for the rest of what I anticipate will be a long life. In the first weeks of post op, the regimen is strict and precise. I must follow the medications I take every day and the time I take them. My post op team notes every detail of how my body is functioning as my new kidney settles in, slowly becoming an indispensible part of my body. Here then, is something of a guided tour of my daily routine. The first rules will be in effect for three months and include my not using public transportation in that time and staying away from crowds. It is a strict quarantine. Even if there had been no pandemic, the same restrictions would apply. During each visit to the clinic, I sit with either a Nurse Practioner or Nurse Assistant and we go through my weight, my urine output, my blood pressure, and pulse rate, numbers that we record at home each day. A nurse or a tech draws my blood, gets my latest vitals, mainly my blood pressure and pulse. At home I note my urine output and my blood pressure twice a day. I take certain pills in the morning and early afternoon. I take others in the morning and early evening. I drink more than a liter of water each day. My only problem is that I do not drink enough. During dialysis I drank less, and consequently I urinated less. But now I have to drink more and give my bladder the ability to handle more urine than it most recently did. I am in the process of actually learning how to drink more because the kidney needs as much liquid as I can provide it. So far, so good. I also see my nephrologist on clinic days and we leisurely go through much the same material as I did with the nurses. We talk about how I feel, how my body is reacting to the new kidney, and do I have any problems with the transplant not evident on the surface, that is psychological not physical. I will be talking about what goes on in my mind during further installments. Everyone at the clinic is interested in attitude, meaning how the transplant affects my mental state. A kidney transplant is not something that happens every day. Every one of us treats it as something special. Here are some details of my post op life. For the first month I visited the clinic twice a week. For the next two months I will visit the clinic once a week. At four months, I will visit the transplant center once a month and then see my original nephrologist every other week. From 6 to 12 months I will visit the clinic every 3 months and see my own doctor once a month. After that it is a clinic visit once every three months for the next three years. Importantly it is the story of my medications that I want to relate. A transplant is not easy. But if I follow directions, especially with the help I have from Eileen, it begins to work like a well-oiled machine. I take a variety of medications all day. I have to cut down coffee to one cup a day because it does not work well with my new kidney. I usually have soup for lunch. At 9 o’ clock in the morning and evening I take three pills, two of which I will take the rest of my life. These are immunosuppressant’s, created to provide a very high level of protection against rejection of the kidney. I also take a pill to protect against certain bacterial infections. A number of the meds I am on will end after three months another after one year. In mid-morning I take my blood pressure and temperature. For now, I take an iron pill. In the early evening I take my blood pressure again. At nine I have a light snack. Then I take my three main pills, and my normal medication for my afib, my cholesterol and my heart. I watch TV read and eventually go to bed. There you have it. It is a day in the life of a transplant patient. As I am quarantined I use a car service or a cab to get me to the hospital clinic. I stay mostly in my apartment, something I learned to do during the pandemic, another positive on my road to recovery. I aim to file something fresh every two weeks or sooner depending on events. So there will be more to come.
- Transplant Diary 10: Dream Becomes Reality by Ron Steinman
- Dialysis Diaries Part 5, Non-revision, Revised by Ron Steinman
- Dialysis Diaries Part 4: Emergency Repair Revised by Ron Steinman
- Dialysis Diaries, Emergency Repair: Part 4 Revised by Ron Steinman An important reminder: This is National Kidney Month. One in seven persons have kidney disease. My Dialysis Diaries published on Linkedin and my blogs, describe how I, who has kidney disease, live with it daily. Note: Normally I would end this entry with the update that follows, but to understand what happened to me, I am placing it here at the start. In the original post, I described my first radiation intervention, a procedure that took place in a special unit at a major hospital –a procedure that is quite common, according to my doctor — to clear the blood clots in my graft that were not allowing me to have the necessary flow of blood for dialysis. Despite the procedure, at my next session I still had blood clots that were in the way of the blood exchange necessary for my treatment. To my dismay and the medical staff, the first radiation intervention failed. After cancelling the third day of dialysis on the following Monday morning, I had a second radiation intervention: same place, almost the same time, same doctor, and the same turkey sandwich on white bread when finished. Though called a minor procedure, the after effect was as debilitating as the first time the doctors worked on me. Recovery was slow but it was enough for my treatments to continue. Dialysis has now been working but with difficulty. I say all this to make sure that readers understand that dialysis is not that easy. After several months I realize dialysis is not as benign as I thought. It is a difficult path that I am on, one that I will explore further in the series. Just when I thought all was going well with dialysis, it collapsed. Friday afternoon, on the day my session came apart, I did everything I was supposed to do. I had watched my water intake, I ate a hearty lunch after having a good breakfast, and I did some writing. I worked out on my new stationary bike. I showered, dressed and arrived at the center on my scheduled time. But after I weighed myself, went to my assigned chair, placed my phone, my tablet, my glasses and book on my side platform, sat in my chair and waited for the technician to do her job, nothing went right. When the technician went to work on my arm everything she did failed. But it was not her fault. She found the proper openings in my graft, inserted the needles, but, to her surprise, she found it did not work. The needles she inserted did not do their job. For some reason the flow they were supposed to generate clogged with blood, meaning that blood clots took over. I am not usually what they call “a bleeder” but I was bleeding. It was slow, inexorable, and not good. The flow was not good. My blood was clotting. Clear and simple. The flow was not consistent, and not quietly, effortlessly streaming, as it should have been doing. I have every faith in the technicians during my treatment. The tech working on me knew what she was doing but she could not get the procedure going. She tried several times to insert the needles into my arm. The pain was minor. It was a skin-prick into my upper arm, fleeting and not long lasting. I did not know something serious was going on until the technician decided she could not make the connection she required and decided to call a more experienced technician to help and a nurse to observe the procedure. The most experienced technician in the unit arrived at my chair. She put on purple plastic gloves, pulled a chair closer to my left side, and immediately stared to work on my arm. She had no luck either. The problem prevailed. The blood did not flow. Instead, it clotted. She showed me the clot and it was not pleasant to look at: a thick, dark mess on a sea of thinner blood resting on white gauze. I could see the clotted blood and it was upsetting. Is that my blood, I wondered? Even when shaken vigorously it remained clotted, meaning it was not uniform, rather it was cloudy looking like red and white melted butter. She tried several times to insert the needles but she kept shaking her head. She told me that maybe she should stop because it was not working. The clotting was more serious than she originally thought. To alleviate the minor pain and the time it was taking to get me started in dialysis that day, I agreed that we should stop. After a consultation with other technicians and nurses, the decision was made that I would need to go to another facility to get the graft looked at and fixed. People at the center told me that it was typical. It happens frequently, they told me. It is nothing new. They had ways to fix the problem and they were aiming to get me to another facility as quickly as possible, a place where they had the equipment to take care of the setback I had experienced. They were setting that up for the following, morning. Sent home, I would receive a phone call telling me where to go and what time to be there, I arrived home in a state of mild shock and great disappointment. I worried that without the now frequent and accepted (by me) dialysis treatment I might suffer what I was trying to avoid when I started it. A technician assured me that I would be dialyzed when everything was back to normal. At home, I received two phone calls that clarified the next step that I hoped would fix my graft and make it accessible for the treatment. The procedure to unclog the graft would take place at a hospital Monday morning, not Saturday as I expected. A nurse gave me instructions where to go at the hospital and to arrive at 9 a.m. for check in. Bring your insurance cards and a list of current meds, she said, and eat nothing from midnight Sunday. All easy enough, except that the two-day wait would not be easy. Early Monday morning, without four days of dialysis, we (Eileen and I) made our way to the hospital for radiation intervention therapy, a procedure designed to clean the clots from my blood. Once the clots were gone, dialysis could proceed as usual. I will not regale you with all the details of the surgery because they are many, varied and complicated — beyond my ability to describe clearly what happened in the operating room where the procedure took place. I will say this, though the methods are surprisingly technical, and complex, performed by exceptionally well-trained doctors. Initially I thought the process would be simple, would take little time and easily clean up the mess happening with my blood. But that was not the case. On the table in a well-equipped operating theater, I realized nothing is easy in modern medicine. Using sophisticated instruments and radiation imagery, the doctors performed an operation on my tiniest veins and arteries to rid me of the blood clots. The surgeons inserted a miniscule stent and fixed my problem. After almost two hours on the table, I spent a short time in recovery. In a warm touch, a nurse provided Eileen and me with cranberry juice and a turkey sandwiches, though without dressing. My doctor then sent me on my way to continue dialysis without interruption, I hoped. I say hoped, because my doctor told me that I might experience the same problem in the future. Unfortunately, returning to dialysis has not been easy. There is a new difficulty. My arm is still healing. The entry points for the needles are still recovering and might be for some time. There is a bit of pain when the technicans inserts the two needles. No doubt it will be weeks before my arm and the graft with its new stent will return to normal for easy dialysis. I am dependent on careful, talented technicians and nurses to do the best they can until my arm heals. Though it sounds mildly pessimistic, I am sure I will be fine, yet I know there are no guarantees of permanent success. I have to live with that idea. From where I am now, that is good enough.
- Dialysis Diaries Part Three: Geography and More Revised by Ron Steinman
- Dialysis Diaries Part Three: Geography and More Revised by Ron Steinman
- Dialysis Diaries Part One:Opening Day Revised by Ron Steinman
- Dialysis Diaries 29: Revisions and Updates Going Forward by Ron Steinman When February arrives, I will have been in dialysis two years. In that time I wrote 28 Dialysis Diaries and 10 Transplant Diaries for a rough count of perhaps 30,000 words, about a third of an average book. As I continue to write I am revising each of the episodes to reflect what I have learned that is new over these past 24 months. Over the last two years I created a false deadline by posting a new episode every two or thee weeks depending on when I thought I had enough material to fill a column. It was a self-imposed deadline. Being a journalist, deadlines were not new and it was a way I worked best. I hoped what I wrote in all those postings was honest in my pursuit of truth. By updating and annotating all the columns, I know I will be even closer to the truth than my original writing. It is my truth. In many ways it is the only truth I know and that I live with daily. Now I ask my readers to indulge me as I try to enter more deeply the recesses of my mind to give you a better sense of who I am through my actions. I may be asking too much to think that as I try to define myself, perhaps it will trigger something in you to help you find something of yourself that you perhaps did not previously recognize. I learned a great deal about nurses, and the technicians I interact with three times a week, and, of course, my surroundings and myself. I will change every column to be more honest and open about what I now see and feel as the elaborate computerized machine cleans the toxins in my blood during my three days a week treatment. If you have been with me this long, I hope you can stick around a bit longer, actually for the long term however long it may last. I know it is time I opened up more about who I am, to go more deeply into how I feel, how I live. I wonder if I have enough information about myself to give a minute-by-minute account of where I am and what I am doing from the time I get up in the morning until the time I go to sleep. I hope you will be surprised. I plan to take you on that journey with me from dawn when I usually wake from a restless sleep to those first hours of the night when I seem to get my best sleep. Many of the episodes I recorded were more about reporting events, things that I saw or experienced rather than deeper emotions and feelings. They were not always intimate, meaning that I gave you, my reader, insight into who I am, exposing my heart and soul. I have fear, issues of how do I cope, and what I do to get through the day I am living through or the next day, a different day, the day to come that I must face squarely for survival. Obviously, each piece I did was a reflection of who I am and how I think and feel, but there is more, so much more that I want to reveal about living with dialysis. Where do I begin? That is always the question with a writer, the first thing I face when starting a piece. Begin at the beginning is often a misused refrain. Finding the beginning is the test. Pass it and as a writer I am on my way. I am sure, though, that much of what I write from now on will not be that much different from what I have written in the past. It makes what I would like to do more difficult, more challenging, and more interesting. Here, then is start of something new. Let me choose a day. Call it Wednesday. It is midweek, rather than the start of the week coming off two days away from dialysis when we have a long weekend o recover and refuel. I am writing this during the Covid-19 pandemic, a condition with its own problems. I will start this way: It is 6 a.m. on a Tuesday. Truthfully it is often earlier in the realm of 5 in the morning when in winter it is still dark. It is starting to get light. It has been raining. It is midwinter. I live on the 15th floor. The windows in my living room look out over a side street and onto a wider avenue. Still early there is very little traffic. Buses traffic their routes. Trucks are delivering supplies to those stores that are still open for business. The CVS across from where I live is open around the clock. Its neon lights are flashing. Bicycle riders rushing over the near empty streets are already at work carrying food. And so on. There will be more to come.
- Transplant Diary/Dialysis Diary 10/26. Comment Challenge: Are You Out There? by Ron Steinman
- Transplant Diaries 9: Testing Never Ends by Ron Steinman
- Transplant Diaries 8: The Opening Narrows by Ron Steinman
- Dialysis Diaries, Part 24: Sounds of Dialysis by Ron Steinman
- Dialysis Diaries 23: Tale of the Broken Tooth by Ron Steinman
- Dialysis Diaries 22: Fear and Covid-19 by Ron Steinman
- Dialysis Diaries 21: Vulnerability and Covid-19
- Dialysis Diaries Part 18, Covin-19 and Sedentary by Ron Steinman
- Dialysis Diaries Part 15: I Want to Say No by Ron Steinman Dialysis Diaries Part 15: I Want to Say No by Ron Steinman There is no escape from reality. Dialysis three times a week is the major reality of my life. It is inescapable. Everyone who knows what I am going through knows the truth of that statement. There are days when I do not want to go to dialysis. This has been one of them. They come more frequently than I want to admit. I cannot say why this day is different from any other day. I am not depressed. I feel strong. My head is clear. Although I did not sleep well during a night that was the same as most nights for me, it is not the reason why this day dialysis seems such a difficult prospect. The weather is cold but dry. It is a near perfect winter’s day. The sky is blue and mostly cloudless. There is a light wind. It’s not the weather affecting my mood. I worked out on my bike. I showered and shaved. I had breakfast. I made fresh coffee. I am presentable. Periodically, days such as this are at the center of my life. My unhappy mood does not last long. Eileen says I live in cycles that have a way of returning when I least expect them. I am prone at times for a dark mood to dominate my very being. Living with that mood makes me to clench my teeth, to feel jumpy, to snap at Eileen as I feel more edgy than I have lately been. Dialysis is a two headed sword rarely discussed as such by recipients who undergo treatment or the professionals who administer it. It dominates my life and will continue to do so until I get the transplant. I know that the recovery period from a transplant is difficult and long but the result is important, only the result. My goal is normalcy, or what passes for it in most lives, especially at my advanced age. It is all I seek: Nothing more, nothing less. As a foreign news bureau chief for many years I lived and traveled extensively in foreign lands for NBC News. My life, that is my choice for my life, has never been what other people describe as normal, especially for my family. In some ways I am seeking redemption for all the time I missed while on the road covering stories around the world for sometimes nothing more than my own pleasure and joy. That may seem like I am using my guilt but I am not feeling guilty for pursuing a rich and varied career. Never for a moment did I ever believe that those of us who covered the world outside the United States did it only for the story we were reporting. There is a decided thrill being in the middle of the action in the streets and inner circles of a breaking story far from home. Being where no one else has access is special. All of that is true but this bit of confession is not why I want to have a day without dialysis. I seek empathy, not pity. I want no one to feel sorry for me. Neither empathy nor pity has ever been on my list, anyway. Earlier on I did not take the time to develop an inner life to define who I was or what I had been doing with that life. I compartmentalize rather easily. It allowed me to separate reality from fiction and then to cycle back to reality without harm to my psyche. With so much going on in the world outside myself, it was more important for me to watch the world and report on its vicissitudes than for me to delve inside for answers that would probably be nothing more than transitory anyway. Some person might say that I choose the quasi-life of adventure that led to this time in my existence where I have no other choice but to accept where I am. They would be right. I did. But I did not choose to have kidney failure, still a puzzle as to why, not only to me but my doctors. In truth, I had no alternative but to start dialysis. We are not yet at the stage where we can control what our body does. We barely understand why the body does what it does. I, as a layman, understand even less. I have neither the skill nor the learning to define my status. Dialysis partly fixes that problem through modern medicine and the patient’s time. I must contribute my cooperation and time to getting better and staying alive. People might say tough it out friend. It is either dialysis or nothing until you get your new kidney. Live with it. And I do, really. Writing about dialysis as those of you who read me regularly know, helps me better handle my moods and better adjust to my thrice-weekly reality of the transfer of my blood and the removal of evil toxins. Remember, dialysis is not easy. Essential, yes. Without it, the consequences are dire. All my life I have been a doer, someone who acts decisively to get things done. That is why I loved practicing action-oriented journalism. I am still very strong in mind and body and that is the reality I face daily. How do I maintain the being that I am when so many things seem to work against who I really want to be? Despite everything, until my transplant, believe me, I am ready. I will tough it out. If anyone gets this far please go to my author’s page on Amazon and perhaps you will try one or another of my books: “The Soldiers Story,” “The Bureau,” or “My Commonplace Book.” If you do indulge, enjoy the books. They are good reads. Thanks. Steinman
- Dialysis Diaries Part 14: Pedal On by Ron Steinman Normally, riding an exercise bicycle as I do most days does not seem to warrant a full episode of the Dialysis Diaries. But it does and here is why. I ride my bike an average of 14 plus miles every day. I am on my bike about 40 minutes for each session. I burn more than 500 calories for each ride. On dialysis treatment days I ride in the morning. On off days, I ride in the late afternoon. I think when I ride. I often write when I ride. I never count the minutes. The machine does that for me. It seems I feel stronger late in the day. In my old building, I had a gym on the main floor. I worked out every day, which made me something of a gym rat. I used lightweights for my legs and upper body. I used several different aerobic machines for my heart and lungs. My workouts usually lasted an hour or more. I did not talk to anyone. The gym was just that, a gym, not a clubhouse, not a social gathering place. Anyway, sometimes being a loner, there really was no one I wanted to talk to. I moved from machine to machine with purpose and alacrity. Often I thought the hour went too fast. At the end of my time in the gym my lungs and heart felt good. My legs and arms seemed stronger. My helpmate was ice-cold water that I made in my apartment that I drank during my workout. There is nothing better to sooth me, even though I hardly sweat, than ice-cold water when my mouth is dry. My kidneys had been in trouble for years. When they really started to fail in December 2018, my workouts became harder. I was short of breath. My edema ballooned my weight more than 25 pounds of what I normally carried. Reluctantly, I went in for a stint in case I needed dialysis. While on the operating table, the stent proved impossible so the surgeon created a graft instead. After my kidneys failed and I entered dialysis, I had to find another way to work out to keep in shape. I did not want to lose my edge, especially at my age. But there were complications. The graft made access to my arteries and veins easy but there were still problems. Over my months on dialysis I would undergo 4 radiation interventions to keep the graft open to allow the needles easy access. My nephrologist warned me not to do any weight lifting, no matter how light the weights might be because he was afraid I might harm the graft by stretching it or pulling it apart. I had to be extra careful not to tear the graft from its moorings. So, weights were not longer a part of my daily routine. I could not to sleep on my left side for the same reason. Everything I did with my left arm was to protect the graft. My solution to exercise would have to be a substantial indoor bike. There are many pluses to my bike. I can ride in rain or shine, never getting too hot, never wet, staying dry. Maintenance is almost non- existent. I don’t have to change the tires because there are none. There are no wheels so I don’t worry about damaging and then replacing the spokes. I set the speed I want. I set the difficulty I want. I then start pedaling and away I go, never moving from my seat, not ever worrying about bumps in the road, oncoming traffic, vehicles behind me trying to get me out of the way or pass me for going at my speed, not how fast another driver may want. I pedal away, happy to be going someplace but actually nowhere. At 14 plus miles a day for seven days I average probably 90 miles a week, not bad for going someplace without really moving. It means that since February 2019, I have ridden about 4300 miles of so on my road to nowhere. A stationary bike is not for everyone. It takes time get used to pedaling without getting anywhere. But once you cross the line of reality versus imagination, knowing that you have not traveled far but have worked hard to get there, being on the bike is worth every minute. You will understand there is no limit, except in your mind as to how far you can go. Not all my rides are good. There are days when my body aches. There are nights I slept badly. My legs are sometimes stiff. My muscles tight. My heart beats too fast, or at least I think it does. My lungs are operating on high. The other day my normal 40-minute ride took 44 minutes with no additional calorie burn. I was sluggish, yet almost breathless. But I completed my journey anyway and finished satisfied. Try it sometime but be patient. You may not think you are getting anywhere, but you are. Get tuned into your imagination. Let your deepest thoughts play out. Let yourself fly. You just may be going on an unforgettable trip.
- Covering Space– Life at the Cape by Ron Steinman Covering Space — Life at the Cape by Ron Steinman In coming days over the next several weeks you will read and see stories about the wonders of the past space program and America’s many trips to the moon. Having covered space there are many things I could tell you about the space program though I can tell you almost nothing about space flight itself. The mechanics of rocketry have always eluded me. NBC News had three terrific reporters covering space at that time. Frank McGee was the anchor of our coverage: calm, collected and very knowledgeable. Roy Neal and Jay Barbree were the two principal reporters who did admirable work. I and the other writers and producers left it to them to explain what was going on. If not at the Cape for a launch, McGee worked out of huge mockup of a space capsule that took up a whole wing of a major studio in the NBC Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Jim Kitchell was our executive producer and he knew space as well as anyone alive. In the early 1960s I spent time with the NBC News space unit in New York. My first assignment was to write introductions to almost 200 prepared pieces that we would use during preparations for a flight, during lulls in coverage, when we went to a commercial and returned to the live broadcast. It may have been the dullest assignment I ever had. But I did what I had to do and wrote thirty and forty-five second intros to all those pieces, then filed them away until we needed them. In time, I covered Gemini flights, Challenger, the space shuttle Columbia. And had a lot of fun doing it despite the primitiveness of the conditions we had to endure. In Florida we worked out of barely serviceable aluminum trailers that had white asbestos siding and no air conditioning. We kept the small windows closed to keep out the bugs, sand flies and sand in general. Our working conditions were terrible but it hardly mattered considering the story we were covering. We used manual and electric typewriters. Computers and smart phones did not exist. We wrote our notes with ballpoint pens and Number 2 pencils and kept those notes on legal size lined yellow pads or in stenographer notebooks. When we typed our stories, we hoped the ribbons would not tear or snap because replacements were near impossible to find. There were no hardware stores near the space center to buy needed supplies. The mostly men and the few women who ran things for NASA lived and worked under similar conditions as we did, in the same motels, eating the same food in the few restaurants on the Cape. At work, they sat at rows of plain desks with TV screens and the basic computers they needed to calculate the flight, manned or not, they would direct on the day of a launch. Men wore either short sleeve white shirts or long sleeve shirts with dark ties pulled as tight as possible against their close shaven necks. Their upper left hand pocket usually had a plastic pen and pencil holder filled with more pens and pencils than one could count. Remember in this time before smart phones and our ubiquitous pocket computers, they did their calculations by a slide rule in its own leather case attached to the belt on the engineer’s waist. A plastic holder with their nametag hung around their neck. The low level buzz at mission control sounded as if it was coming from a moderately active hive. It was as if the Stepford husbands were in charge. Their genius was that these engineers conducted their work under the most trying of conditions and succeeded marvelously. We had dial phones that were off the scrap heap. Every ring sounded the same. We did not have the option of choosing our own ring tone. Our tape editing equipment flown in from New York surprised us when it did not crash because of the heat and sand, our common enemy. Using razor blades, a magnifying glass, and store bought Scotch tape and sometimes prayer, we edited pieces slowly, carefully and hoped the tape we joined the edits with would stick when we fed material into a network program for broadcast. Wastebaskets overflowed with discarded newspapers (remember them) empty paper coffee cups, and various iterations of scripts that never made it on the air. People shared battered desks and chairs in seriously overcrowded conditions but it did not matter. The story mattered more. But what also mattered were the good times that went with what we did for a living. Part of being at the Cape or any other venue as a journalist was what happened after we finished working for the day. Most rocket launches took place in the very early morning, usually in the dark before sunup. As a Today Show producer, I was there along with other early morning staff. Bleary eyed from lack of sleep because we played hard the night before — too many drinks, too little decent food — we always arrived on time for the launch. We prepared for our broadcast, sipped bad, mostly tasteless coffee, chewed on a roll or an uninteresting Danish and allowed the caffeine in the coffee to cascade through our systems. Set and ready to go, we waited patiently, because that was all we could do, for the launch to take place. Dawn rose slowly. The bright orange sun dominated the sky. The astronauts made their way to the capsule that would carry them into outer space. With little fanfare, they entered their home away from home, and settled into their cramped quarters. The countdown began. Then, usually on a tight, computerized and targeted schedule the rocket launched with a thunderous sound and bright yellow-orange light. The earth beneath our feet shook and rumbled, as if an earthquake had struck the sands at Cape Canaveral, as the space ship made its way into the sky above. The big crowds, many of whom had slept overnight in campers, in the backs of their cars or in sleeping bags on the ground, and who numbered in the thousands outside the perimeter of the launch site cheered, applauded and yelled encouragement. Soon the rocket was out of sight. An announcement told us the flight had been successful and Cape Canaveral control then moved onto mission control in Houston. Our work done for the day, it was time to head home. Our bags packed and loaded into our cars, we made our way from the NASA launch site and into heavy traffic crowded with the people who had just witnessed the launch. Many of us were on the same road leading to the highway and to the Orlando airport across the state. There we would make our flight home, me to New York, others to the city where they lived. For all the excitement I had covering the many launches I witnessed at Cape Canaveral and, later, after it was renamed Cape Kennedy, one of biggest thrills was more mundane. There were days when life was boring on the Cape when we had little to do but wait for the perfect weather a launch required. Then we played touch football. Usually it was Nightly News versus the Today Show. The sand at the Cape was rocky, not soft and almost silky like the sand I grew up with in Brighton Beach and Coney Island. Walking on the ground was not easy and often the rocks and shale cut into the bottoms of our sneakers. But we played touch football with fury. Usually the Today Show lost because we had more women on the team who were not good at the game, especially roughhouse touch football. We had played a few hours in the hot sun in our usual desultory fashion drinking water — no beer permitted — until we on the Today side of things had one series of plays remaining. I lined up in the backfield and sprinted for all I had into what was our end zone. I turned and saw the football floating to me and I thought it beyond where I could catch it. I looked over my shoulder again, and to my eternal surprise there was the ball. I reached out, grabbed the ball going away into the end zone for the winning touchdown. I bent over, breathing hard, sweating and panting. At first, only silence followed the catch. But, no. Soon came cheering. And through the cheers, a voice rang out above all the other voices: “I didn’t know he had it in him.” That was the perfect end to my day. For one brief moment in time, life did not get better than that.
- Transplant Diary: Breaking News-Kidney Transplant by Ron Steinman
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