“Gimmie a sock,” I said.

“What?”

“Gimmie a sock.”

“A sock?” asked my boyfriend, Jason.

“Yes, a sock.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to stick it down my pants,” I said.

“What?” he asked, eyebrows raised, grin lop-sized.

“I’m going to stick it down my pants, come on now.”

“This sock?” he asked, pulling a slightly used woolen from the floor.

“No.”

He opened the nearby sock drawer and began pulling out various options — black and gray, baby blue with a Pink Panther decal, plain white.

“No... no... no... here, just give me the first one.”

“Here you go.”

I rolled the knee-length sock into a tight tube then wedged it between my skin and underwear next to my hipbone. A late night call to the hospital had determined that I was suffering mild internal bleeding near the site where a catheter had been inserted into my groin during an arteriogram — or dye test for short — 36 hours prior.

If the plum colored bruise that had suddenly developed got any bigger, I was ordered to go the ER. In the meantime, I was lying flat on my back, applying pressure to the wound and trying my damnedest not to freak out.

The situation is this: recently I was diagnosed with a rare, congenital defect of sorts, a catch made by my local general practitioner. The artery leading to my left kidney is narrowed — more than 90 percent — and two of the three arteries leading to my intestines bear the blockages of an 89-year-old. I am 24.

The defect results in high blood pressure and an abnormal digestive process, respectively. They don’t quite know what causes this. It affects 6 in 100,000. It appears that I am special.

“Indeed you are... special,” said my radiologist, his eyes glued to my medical charts.

The vascular surgeon told me I have something “odd” and he hoped to “salvage” my kidney, which has been silently suffering from decreased blood flood for years now. The surgeon’s philosophy about this possible loss: “You’ve got two.” His language has been characteristically scary, but non-committal — preparing me for the worst, so that I’ll throw a parade when I get out of this thing with some angioplasty and a few shunts. My only hope has been that I am blowing this way out of proportion.

But the truth of the matter is that I’m terrified.

I was throwing a tremendously successful dinner party, when all of a sudden, in the middle of the soup course, Death walked in the door, pulled up a chair and started picking his teeth with my fork. I’m eyeballing him, he’s eyeballing his plaque. He hasn’t said anything yet, but it’s his self-assured silence that makes him so disconcerting. Does he eat chicken and for that matter, do I even have enough to go around?

Last Thursday I headed over to the surgeon’s office to discuss my “options” and the results of my dye test, a procedure from which two weeks later I still have a bruise the size of a naval orange and the color of a rotting eggplant. The news was mixed.

My left kidney has shrunk to about three-quarters the size of my right. They can shunt my renal artery, which should, for all intents and purposes, reduce my blood pressure. The kidney itself is expected to perk back up once blood flow is restored.

However, my celiac and mesenteric arteries — the two leading to my intestines — present a problem. Their blockages are total, and approximately two centimeters deep. No blood is getting through. None. Nadda. As a result, my body has tried to adapt.

What should be a minor artery about the width of No. 2 pencil lead instead has grown to the width of the pencil itself. The surgeon called it a “hog.” It snakes and twists through my abdominal cavity like a Formula 1 racetrack.

My surgeon presented the films from my dye-test at a vascular conference a day before my consultation. En masse the conference decided that they didn’t quite know what to make of it all. So now, we’re going to Bowman Gray.

What it boils down to is that this defect doesn’t look like it’s going to kill me. Bypass surgery to correct it may even be optional. That means I’ve got to decide — me, alone, all by myself — whether have surgery it would improve my quality of life enough to endure a procedure more difficult than heart surgery.

No pressure.

The story, I believe, has a moral, as every good story should. Death is not here for me, nay, this experience is designed only to be a yank of my chain, a jerk of my mortal coil — an opportunity, premature as though it may be, to reevaluate what is and is not important.

I don’t know what’s what yet. But I do know that today, and tomorrow, and the next day, I’m happy to be here and I’m happy to see you. And yes, that is a sock in my pants.

(Sarah Kucharski can be reached at sarah@smokymountainnews.com.)