The Ring

THE RING

It is my anniversary — A year ago today I woke up to the vampiric April Fool’s day prank. Amusingly it is also Friday, so I have a normal dialysis session before my weekend off, although Sunday is a ‘home dialysis’ day. We have finally reached twelve people, all of whom are homeless, do dialysis, have Type-O blood, and know Lana. She gets the commission for all of them. I visit homeless people fairly often, but I am not part of the tribe and they do not trust me enough to even provide the information we need to include them in the program. They do trust Lana: besides being homeless herself she does provide medical assistance to other homeless people. A doctor without borders of sorts, except the border is between the haves and the have-nots vs. geographical.

I built out a fairly nice ‘medical space’ within the Pico Pico House building. Other people help me sporadically with building houses, but no one but me has keys, so no one else can open the ‘iron door’ that holds thirteen comfortable chairs and a lot of tubing connecting them all together.

The space looks like a discussion ring — twelve chairs ring around a single chair in the center. They are spaced about two feet apart for easy access to the left and right arm of a participant. The chairs themselves are quite wide and deep: almost three feet in both directions when not reclined. They are about five feet deep when reclined. So the total perimeter is around 60 feet where the seats are seven feet from the center. The space is thirty by thirty, so supporting this layout isn’t a problem. We could probably pack twice as many in the space if we slid chairs after wiring up the patient, kind of like sliding library shelves.

But space is not a problem and with 12 people in the room, this represents $6K per session. If we could run eight shifts (MWF and THS at 6AM, 10AM, 2PM, and 6PM) totaling 24 sessions per week, we would make $150K a week, or over $7M a year. The rent would not be a problem. It would require eight vampires and the costs for consumables, but vampires are actually pretty inexpensive: they don’t work for peanuts, but a few pints will do nicely. Anything

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beyond that is fun money.

I don’t actually charge the 12 people anything: this is still just once a month so the costs are not prohibitive. The patients are happy to have a possible backup for dialysis and it actually turns out that we are doing a better job of cleaning their blood than the clinic technology does. Plus they actually know each other reasonably well, and without the noise of the machines they can talk and get to know each other even better. Or maybe it is just we don’t have televisions for them to zone-out with.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark L. Fussell lives (or lived) with his wife Rebecca, and two daughters Maya and Katrina, in Palo Alto, California. He makes a living through consulting for companies including Apple, Intel, Sony, and HP. He makes a life through the loving relationships he has with family, friends, and even mere acquaintances. He was a little strange before this adventure, and now he is even more so.