She had seen polycystic disease race through Lee's family, and the realization hit her hard that one of her kids might need a kidney someday. No one doubted that Sandy, devoted wife, mother of Lee's six children, would donate a kidney. "Well, there you go," the doctor told Lee. Lee's children weren't good candidates because the disease might have been passed down to them, too.Īt an appointment in April, Lee's doctor asked Sandy: What's your blood type? O-positive, she said. Lee's brother and sister wouldn't work as donors since both had the disease, as did several cousins. So in the spring of 2003 he and Sandy started thinking about a kidney transplant. Maybe Dad was just unlucky, he thought, but Lee didn't want anything to do with it. His dad also had five surgeries in a year when his dialysis shunt plugged up. He'd have to drive 65 miles each way several times a week to spend hours hooked up to a dialysis machine, and he'd seen what his dad had gone through: treatment, depression, then a day of feeling better, then time to go back for more. He wouldn't be able to farm or teach on dialysis, he told himself, because dialysis would be his full-time job. He'd watched both his brother's and his father's kidneys fail, and saw them struggle with dialysis. The kidneys were getting bigger and bigger and doing less day by day, poison circulating through his body. When he finally went to the doctor it turned out that the cysts on his kidneys were growing. He'd sit on the couch, exhausted and freezing. After school, he'd be too tired even to go fly-fishing with one of the boys, much less tend to the farm he loved. It wasn't until the spring of 2002 that his energy started to wane. Still, for all his problems, Lee felt pretty good. When doctors examined him further they discovered he also had cysts growing on his kidneys. He wasn't the kind of guy who needed a vacation, anyway.Īnd then, in 1998, as he was driving down I-15 with the family, headed toward Salt Lake City, Lee had a heart attack. Everything was pretty much perfect then: Lee loved sports and he loved raising alfalfa and cows, and he didn't mind working 14 hours a day. Things got tight when the babies started coming, so Lee took a second job as a coach and health teacher in the town's only school. Eighteen months after they met, she was a farmer's wife in tiny Carey, Idaho, another farm family trying to make a go of it out there among the sagebrush. He pursued her with the single-mindedness he'd later bring to his efforts to avoid dialysis when his kidneys started to fail. He'd seen her at the party, he said, and did she want to go out? Not really, she told him. One weekend a friend dragged her to a skiing party, and two days later a guy named Lee Cook called. They met in Boise, where both were in college. When she married Lee nearly 29 years ago, she didn't know that she had also married polycystic kidney disease, passed down from Lee's great-grandmother Ainsworth to so many different relatives it was hard to keep track. She wishes she could see the outcome of the operation before it starts and know everything is going to be OK. Beside him, though, his wife, Sandy, is wide awake, worried about tomorrow. Soon he will get dressed and drive with his parents to Salt Lake City. He is a man who took a powerful laxative and can't sleep. He is a warrior armed with magic spells and powerful abilities. He is a man with a powerful spaceship that can travel to distant worlds. His name is Sora, and he is trying to save the universe from The Heartless. No point in going back to bed, he thinks. His relationship with his girlfriend, which he had hoped would lead to marriage, ended last winter, and at 22 he still lives at his parents' home in Layton. The music store where he's an assistant manager is closing. "Progressing the story" is what Ethan likes about role-playing video games, but sometimes it seems to him that his own life isn't going anywhere, despite his efforts. There's just one e-mail, from his friend Chris. He could die in surgery, he thinks, although mostly he's worried about the pain.Īt 4 a.m. He has already looked up "laparoscopy" on, and now he's trying to picture what his body will look like when they cut him open. So he is lying awake looking at the clock and thinking about tomorrow. Every time he starts to doze off he has to get up and go to the bathroom, which is what happens when your doctor has told you to drink a bottle of laxative. Tonight, though, he has gone to bed at a reasonable hour and can't sleep. Sometimes he stays up till 4 and sleeps the next day until noon. Late at night, when his parents are sleeping, Ethan Jensen likes to play games like Final Fantasy, where a guy who's smart and brave can prevail over ogres and rogues. His favorite video games are still the ones where the knight saves the world and gets the girl.