I chose life three times….
The Story
For more than two decades, I lived with congestive heart failure. I managed it through diet, discipline, and stubbornness—and for a long time, that was enough. Then it wasn’t.
In the fall of 2024, I arrived at a hospital unable to walk more than ten feet on my own. My ejection fraction was 5%. Death came to my bedside more than once. More than once, I told it no.
On November 9th, 2024, a surgeon removed my heart and replaced it with someone else’s. This is the story of what led to that moment, what happened in the OR, and what life looks like on the other side of it.
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Dignity
There is a transaction that occurs the moment you are admitted to a hospital for a serious, extended stay. Nobody explains it to you in advance. Nobody sits down and walks you through the terms. It simply happens, quietly and completely, from the first hour. You surrender agency over your own body. Not partially. Not
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Standing On Your Own…With Assistance
The room at 7am looked the same every day. Lines in, lines out. The Impella running its quiet mechanical rhythm in my chest. The monitor glowing green behind my head, numbers I had learned to read the way you learn to read a dashboard—not alarming anymore, just information. The ward coming to life outside the
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Out of the Frying Pan
The listing came through on a Friday afternoon. October 11th, 4:02 in the afternoon, Niles in the room. I had been officially listed for transplant—Status 2 at The Christ Hospital in Cincinnati, on an Impella heart pump, waiting. I posted to Facebook from the hospital bed. I HAVE BEEN OFFICIALLY LISTED. Three days of relative stability followed.
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The Bug Zapper
The nightmare woke me at 1:44 in the morning. I felt the kick first—a jolt to my left side, electrical charge coursing through my chest, my arm, my head. I came up out of sleep certain it had happened. Certain the ICD had fired. It hadn’t. The nurses pulled several minutes of EKG records to
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The Grand Parade
The Impella went in on October 3rd. It is a small device—a catheter-mounted pump, surgically implanted through the chest into the left ventricle—and what it does is deceptively simple: it pulls blood from the heart and pushes it into the aorta, taking over a portion of the work the ventricle can no longer do on
About James Nerlinger
I’m a writer, developer, and home cook living in Cincinnati, Ohio. I spent twenty-two years managing congestive heart failure before receiving a donor heart on November 9th, 2024. This blog is the story of that journey — and everything that comes after it.
Choosing life, one beat at a time.
Contact
Thoughts? Comments? Discussion?
JNJ@OneMoreBeat.com
