'Some guy' saves a life

His favorite video games are still the ones where the knight saves the world and gets the girl. 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. Sometimes he stays up till 4 and sleeps the next day until noon.

Tonight, though, he has gone to bed at a reasonable hour and can't sleep. 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. So he is lying awake looking at the clock and thinking about tomorrow. He has already looked up "laparoscopy" on WebMD.com, and now he's trying to picture what his body will look like when they cut him open. He could die in surgery, he thinks, although mostly he's worried about the pain.

At 4 a.m. he gets up and goes online. There's just one e-mail, from his friend Chris. "Good luck, bro," it says.

"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. The music store where he's an assistant manager is closing. 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. Online, he calls himself "Some Guy."

No point in going back to bed, he thinks. Might as well play Kingdom Hearts. His name is Sora, and he is trying to save the universe from The Heartless. He is a man with a powerful spaceship that can travel to distant worlds. He is a warrior armed with magic spells and powerful abilities.

He is a man who took a powerful laxative and can't sleep. Soon he will get dressed and drive with his parents to Salt Lake City.

Lee Cook is sleeping like a baby. Beside him, though, his wife, Sandy, is wide awake, worried about tomorrow. She wishes she could see the outcome of the operation before it starts and know everything is going to be OK.

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.

They met in Boise, where both were in college. One weekend a friend dragged her to a skiing party, and two days later a guy named Lee Cook called. He'd seen her at the party, he said, and did she want to go out? Not really, she told him.