I texted Eric that morning to say things had taken another downturn and I might not come back from this. He answered the way Eric answers: a bad joke about the Six Million Dollar Man, then something that cut straight through. I went to the OR a few hours later.
The Egyptians pulled the brain out through the nose with a hook and threw it away. It was packing material. The heart they left exactly where it was, because the heart was where the person lived. They weren’t eccentric in this, and they weren’t alone.
There’s a moment in the recovery arc when you realize the person you’ve been looking for was there the whole time. Not rebuilt. Not reconstructed from parts. Retrieved—the way you find something you misplaced and recognize it instantly.
The discharge paperwork is thorough the way a legal document is thorough—complete, technically accurate, and practically insufficient. It tells you what to do. It doesn’t tell you why the restrictions exist, how long they apply, or how the calculus changes as recovery progresses.
Home nine days after the transplant, four days before Thanksgiving, cold and flu season already underway and COVID still the bigger worry of the three. My immune system had just been deliberately suppressed to its lowest point. The timing was not ideal.
The diagnosis has landed and the team has already moved. What managing cardiac allograft vasculopathy actually looks like is not a single medication adjustment—it runs across immunosuppression, lipid pharmacology, metabolic management, diet, and surveillance, each piece addressing a different part of the problem.
A year out, the numbers looked the way you hope numbers look. Ejection fraction solid, pressures normal, biopsy clean, bloodwork good across the board. The team was pleased. I was pleased. Then they mentioned something else.
Nobody hands you a shopping list at discharge. They hand you prescriptions, a follow-up schedule, and a set of dietary restrictions. Everything you actually need to manage the day-to-day—the tools, the devices, the supplies—you work out by trial and error, usually after the error.
Someone counted during the initial workup—roughly fifty vials in a single sitting. A full cup of yourself, handed over one vacuum-sealed tube at a time. Then near-daily draws, then twice weekly, then weekly, until both arms carry the geography of a patient under close surveillance.
