Daru Smith is in a hospital bed at the University of Chicago and his organs are failing. Specifically, three of his organs are failing—his heart, his liver, and his kidneys.
“Daru—excuse the language,” Daru tells me, snapping out of recounting his out-of-body experience. “Daru, this is the shit they say happens when you die! . . . I’m at peace, I’m walking towards the light, I’m gonna fucking die!”
The heart, liver, kidney triple crown is something of a specialty for UChicago medicine. The two procedures made the institution the most prolific in the world; seeing as how UChicago’s record number of these surgeries performed is now six, one understands the rarity of the procedure. Usually incorporating three organs from one donor—it’s easier for the body to accept new tissues from one source—the surgery requires balletic timing, steady hands, and mental preparedness for anything that could happen on the table.
Daru had been diagnosed with diabetes a few years earlier. While shooting the medications into his arm he had an epiphany: he did not want to do this for the rest of his life. He began to eat in moderation and work out, and felt his health improve. So having already faced one chronic disease, he redoubled his efforts to change his lifestyle to fight the sarcoidosis. He used his mandatory half-hour breaks while his truck was being loaded or unloaded to walk around, jog, stretch, and do push-ups. He ditched the truck-stop burgers, chicken, and french fries and opted for vegetarian Subway sandwiches at rest stops, sometimes with herb and cheese bread when he wanted to splurge a bit.
“All I could do is leave [my son] some sort of financial stability,” Daru says. He began working as hard as he could again that spring. The driving itself was fairly straightforward, but the manual labor—opening and closing the heavy trailer doors, strapping down his cargo, hopping in and out of the high cab, sliding the tandem axles, refueling in the cold—that worried him. He would tell loved ones that if he did not get in touch with them by a certain point on his route, they needed to call 911.
But what had changed things was pneumonia. Daru had been hospitalized November 8 when an upper respiratory infection had taken a turn for the worse. “You imagine somebody who already has really bad heart failure and is super sick, and you add pneumonia on top of that?” Bryan Smith, one of Daru’s intensive care cardiologists, says. “You’re body doesn’t have much reserve.” He was admitted to the intensive care unit. “When I first met him, he wasn’t really responding much. He was a little delirious.”
