A new birthday?
Birthdays are kind of my thing. I mean, they’re everyone’s thing, but they’re, you know, my thing. I don’t tout my birthday (most colleagues would never know the date), and I don’t demand lavish gifts (your presence is my present!), but I always do exactly what I want to do, a practice that spans back in time to my earliest memories.
I believe in a birthday month. One-twelfth of the year seems a reasonable amount of time to claim for celebration.
I believe in birthday parties, birthday trips, birthday dinners, the occasional but not over-the-top birthday indulgence for bad jokes or bad behaviors, birthday questions and birthday resolutions. I believe in these things for both myself and others, and I will gladly purchase a birthday crown for a friend or sing a birthday song for a stranger.
The most thrilling hour of my birthday growing up took place not on the day itself, but a couple weeks beforehand, perched on the gray-carpeted steps of the Party Favors store in Brookline. There, my mother and I would flip through laminated photographs of cake designs -- Disney characters and superheroes, Barbie dolls and florals. They seemed to burst from the flat pages in three-dimensional decadence.
My mom took me there to choose a cake each year. The book itself was merely a springboard for a child’s wildest cake-based fantasies. Any type of cake could be described and ordered on demand.
One year, I asked for a swimming pool cake, and it arrived festooned with frosted sunbathers. The year I turned ten and changed my AIM screen name to “Supersmiley1,” my cake was covered with round yellow smiley-faces.
I was, if there is such a thing, a Birthday-zilla. At six, I cried when my mother let a friend make the first cut into the cake. The year of the smiley cake, I became outraged when a small dollop of frosting was removed from one of the smileys’ faces, maiming its features. (My sister later confessed to the crime.)
So I was of two minds when I found, in my frantic google searching before my bone marrow transplant for Aplastic Anemia, that some people like to celebrate the day they receive their transplant as a new birthday.
This ritual is fitting, as a bone marrow transplant represents a sort of rebirth. Chemotherapy and radiation obliterate the patient’s immune system. Foreign bone marrow delivered through a chest tube delivers a brand new one. Once it engrafts, the patient is rewarded with a new, functioning immune system. Happy birthday!
At the same time, I associate my birthday with choices, with freedom. This procedure, while necessary and life-saving, did not feel like a choice.
The day of my transplant, July 12, bright sun pushed through the window in the morning. By afternoon, it had faded, as it always did, behind the gray concrete rooftops. I had no concept of which direction it was coming from or why or how, but by the afternoon, the light was dull and the air was frigid, no matter how sweaty or sunbaked my visitors upon arrival. I nestled under the covers, my skin glowing an unhealthy golden, a tan of bile.
Although there was a large chair in the room, it was usually occupied by a visitor; and anyway, I preferred to be horizontal. The pillows were hard, the sheets starchy and the blankets woefully insufficient, but if I pulled them up to my neck and didn’t crane, I could relax into what almost felt like a comfortable position.
My dad wanted to document the moment so there’s one photo of me, holding a big bag of blood, sporting the world’s most unconvincing smile. The day I had been waiting for. The beginning of the rest of my life.
But it didn’t feel like that. It felt like fear, rushing through all my brain’s defenses, making pulp of my innards. Fear was constant, always with me; I learned to trust it more than I trusted anything else. I only experienced brief moments of relief when a particular fear was dispelled, only for another fear to grow a fanged head, hydra-like, growling, hysterical.
Transplant day in my memory blends into other hospital days, a fluorescently lit, betiled stew of hospital time.
I fell asleep to the sound of Graceland filtering through spotify. Oh, so this is what she means…
I pretended to close my eyes rather than make small talk.
I tried to watch a movie.
Perhaps that’s why I never wanted to declare July 12, 2016, another birthday.
I celebrate the willingness of a stranger to share his marrow with me, but I also mourn the experience. I can’t unremember the cold feeling of blood entering my chest lines, the sweet vomit taste of hospital mouthwash, the way it felt to be alone at night when everyone else had gone home. For some, celebrating transplant-iversary is a joyous symbol of reclamation and hope; for me, it would be dishonest.
Birthdays, though, I’ll never stop celebrating. What incredible, stupefying, unbelievable cosmic luck to have been born, and to keep on living. To swim in cold waters, devour ice cream cones, savor the warm look in a beloved’s eyes. And yes, to gag violently into hospital toilets, to lie in radiation rooms, to wake up in a white-walled room, alone and terrified.
For me, the transplant was not a new birthday but a key moment on the way to another birthday, another marker of the years going by, the chance to keep on living. There have been eight more of them, now, since the transplant.