Ailing Johnson still as talkative as ever
It is 3:40 a.m. Saturday, a few hours before the MAACO Bowl Las Vegas tailgate party, and I am sitting in the back row of chairs in the waiting room at the Fresenius Medical Care Center at 6330 South Pecos Road.
I am sitting in the back because it is the row farthest from the automatic sliding glass door in front, and it is cold outside. Every few seconds, the glass door automatically slides open, letting in a cold blast of air. Another person shuffles in from the night, carrying a pillow and a blanket.
These people look tired. In the harsh light of the waiting room, their skin tone looks gray.
These people are kidney dialysis patients.
At 3:46, someone calls from beyond the waiting room, breaking the silence. The tired-looking people with the gray skin trudge off, carrying their pillows. I am now sitting alone in the back row of chairs. I say a silent thank-you that I am here by choice, and that my skin tone does not appear gray.
The sliding glass door opens only intermittently now.
At a couple of minutes before 4 a.m., Martrel Johnson shuffles in from the cold, and then the sliding glass door will stop opening for a while.
---
Martrel Johnson was a basketball star at Durango High. During his junior year, he averaged 21 points and 12 rebounds. During his senior year, he averaged 18 points and around 10 boards. That was after he started getting tired.
He played one season at Montana State. Then he started getting really tired.
Then he had heart bypass surgery.
Problem solved? Not exactly. His kidneys stopped working. So Martrel Johnson underwent a kidney transplant. It took five years before the antibodies in his system rejected the transplanted kidney he had received from his father.
(His Facebook page has the details. If you want to help or leave a word of encouragement, you can do it there, because Martrel has gobs of time to catch up with Facebook friends during his dialysis treatments.)
It was not long after he went back on the beeping machine that I spoke to him on the phone. He was living in Wisconsin, where his wife has family, but he was thinking about moving to Florida. He wasn't in the real estate business anymore, mostly because he was so tired again.
He moved to Florida three months ago, to put his name on another kidney transplant waiting list. Nothing seemed to be happening at University of Wisconsin Health. Plus, the thought of spending another winter in Wisconsin sent icicles down his backbone.
And so when I heard he was coming home for Christmas, I wanted to meet him. I told him I had this crazy idea: That I wanted to hang out with him at dialysis, because I wanted to see what it was like to be him, at least for around 4 hours and 15 minutes.
Martrel Johnson actually looked better than every other patient hooked up to those 36 machines that kept making whooshing sounds and beep ... beep ... beeping. It's probably because he just turned 29, whereas most of the others looked to be in their sixties.
Johnson stands 6 feet, 4½ inches and weighs around 250 pounds. His playing weight was around 230, but you try working out while hooked to one of those machines.
So for the next four hours we talked. We talked about how his AAU team once beat Chris Bosh's AAU team, the Texas Blue Chips. We talked about the three B's - basketball, books and babes - of his high school coach, Al La Rocque, and how La Rocque said most guys had to settle for being good at two of the three B's. Martrel said he was good at all three. And then he smiled.
As the other dialysis patients slept, we talked about all kinds of stuff. I learned that on top of his medical problems, Martrel Johnson is a Chicago Cubs fan. More pain and suffering.
He said he used to have this dialysis friend, George, and they would talk about other stuff, too. But they would mostly talk about making money, because George was an investment banker. And when George became despondent, he said he was going to stop coming to dialysis.
And then Martrel didn't see him anymore.
As frosty night turned to frosty day, one of the technicians brought him a paper sack with breakfast inside - a sausage biscuit and a little container of cinnamon flavored applesauce, the kind moms put in lunchboxes. They also handed out complimentary thin blue blankets with the name of some health company stamped in the fleece.
I asked Martrel Johnson if a sausage biscuit and applesauce comes with dialysis. No, he said. Only on special occasions.
And as his tainted blood continued to circulate through the tubes in his leg into a filter on the dialysis machine and then back again, no longer tainted, through another set of tubes, I heard a faint but somewhat familiar voice over the whooshing sounds and the beep ... beep ... beeping.
It was Andy Williams' voice, singing a Christmas carol through a distant speaker.
Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.
