I Went on a Date. Then I Gave Her My Kidney

The first time I met Gladys, she was sitting in a 24-hour café on Market Street, wearing a gauzy red blouse. She'd been eating a triple-decker sandwich, but stopped when she saw me watching her.

"You make me nervous," she said.

"I'm sorry," I said, not understanding then that the Spanish word nerviosa has different connotations than the English word nervous; it suggests a pleasurable, even sexual state of tension.

As we talked, it grew clear that we had nothing in common. Gladys was a hefty Puerto Rican who conversed as easily with the dead as with the living. I was a skinny little rational white girl.

Gladys drank instant coffee, collected teddy bears and videotapes, and always arrived early. I was a tea person who wrote poetry, rarely watched movies, and ran late. No, we had nothing in common.

Still, when she invited me back to her house for a cup of coffee, something twisted in my stomach, and on impulse I followed the taillights of her car up over the hill.

It wasn't just a line. She made instant coffee for us, strong and sweet, and we sipped it politely for several hours. Finally, sitting stiffly next to her on her couch with a cold cup of coffee in my hands, I realized that if anyone was going to make a move, it had to be me.

"I never know quite what to do in these situations," I confessed.

"Just be yourself," said Gladys, sitting very still.

I set my cup down on the table, then gently take Gladys' cup from her hands and set it down, too. Then I reached for her gauzy red shoulder as if reaching across a cliff.

Together, we leapt.

At 1 a.m. she offered to let me spend the night on her couch rather than driving all the way back across the bridge to Oakland.

"Why would I stay here if I'm just going to sleep on the couch?" I asked.

"Well then," Gladys said cautiously, "You could share my bed with me..."

That night, we didn't sleep.

I was 27 years old, and I had never been made love to. Oh, I'd had lovers—male and female, ardent and self-absorbed, skilled and clumsy—but none of them were like Gladys.

She touched me even without touching me. She knew the words to all the Gipsy Kings' songs and sang them to me, serenading me, until her voice and gaze made me sink helplessly onto the floor.

Once when we were coming home from a weekend away, she sang to me in heavy traffic, dancing beside me in the passenger seat, and I got so distracted that I spent an hour driving in a gigantic circle through an unfamiliar town.

She also helped me learn the dance move she called entrega, surrender. "Mia," she'd say fiercely when she held me. "Mia. Mine. Mine." And, when my hands and lips were on her, "Tuya. Yours. Yours."

I learned quickly that Gladys wasn't just Puerto Rican; she was island Puerto Rican, born and bred in that tropical landscape of passionfruit, papayas and singing treefrogs.

The first in her family to go to college, she admitted to a psych professor that she "had a friend" who was a lesbian.

"Your friend should go to San Francisco," Gladys' professor told her kindly. "She'll have a better life there."

So as soon as she could, Gladys packed up her guitar and went.

Six months after we met, Gladys had her first angina attack. The terrifying, clutching pain in her arm and chest quickly turned her from a stocky, vital woman into someone who could no longer take care of herself.

A few years later, after we'd bought a house together and painted the living room walls a rich salmon color, her nephrologist gave her the bad news: her kidneys were close to failing.

"I'll give you a kidney if you need it," I offered blithely, never thinking it would come to that; after all, she had a big family back in Puerto Rico. But soon it turned out that none of them could donate, since they all shared similar risk factors for kidney disease.

As Gladys grew sicker, the body aches made it hard for her to dress herself. I bought loaf after loaf of the round, grayish sourdough-walnut bread which was all she could stomach.

It took months of testing before the doctors declared me a fit donor—months in which Gladys endured hemodialysis, slumped in a vinyl recliner while a huge machine cycled her blood through a medical tangle of Crazy Straws.

The room was full of other patients, all equally slumped. One man wailed aloud through the process.

And so, when transplant day finally arrived, we thought the hard part was over. It wasn't. It had just begun.

Although post-transplant life brought new challenges, Gladys lived for seventeen and a half years with my right kidney inside her.

She took ferocious care of "Rinita," her name for the kidney—taken from the Spanish riñón.

She took fistfuls of pills every day, went through rejection episodes, and struggled with other long-term effects of diabetes. At times, she had to use a wheelchair.

At other times, we found natural remedies that helped her in ways the doctors couldn't. She also went back to grad school, bought a new car with a sunroof, and sang loudly to the Spanish romantica music she loved.

Ruth Schwartz, Ph.D. is the director of the Conscious Girlfriend Academy. Above is an adapted extract from her upcoming memoir.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.

Do you have a unique experience or personal story to share? Email the My Turn team at myturn@newsweek.com.