The new heart was beating. The surgery was done. By any external measure, the crisis had passed. What nobody tells you—what the discharge packet does not cover, what the follow-up schedule does not account for—is that the emotional accounting hasn’t even begun. Before the Transplant: The Exposure Starts Early The prednisone didn’t begin post-transplant. It…
The number 55 had been hanging there for years. Not a premonition in any mystical sense—a calculation. The kind that runs quietly in the background when you know your body well enough and have been paying attention long enough to see where the trajectory leads. When things started going downhill fast after my 55th birthday,…
A heart transplant is not a recovery. That distinction matters, and it takes time to understand it fully. Recovery implies a baseline to return to. There is no baseline. The years of decline that preceded the surgery didn’t pause while the transplant happened—they accumulated, and what they accumulated was loss. Physical capacity, yes, but also…
On the morning of December 2nd, twenty-three days post-transplant, I needed a ride to The Christ Hospital for my first post-discharge biopsy. Mom was sick. Exposing an immunosuppressed transplant patient to whatever she had picked up was not an option, and she knew it before I said anything. Teresa was otherwise occupied—my youngest son had…
And just like that, I was home. Nine days post-transplant. Sixty days in the hospital—first at Mercy West, then via Air Care flight to The Christ Hospital, where I would spend the better part of that time before anyone spoke seriously about discharge. The procedures, the alarms, the particular quality of institutional time that moves…
The move to the step-down unit came on November 14th—five days post-transplant, the A-line out, down to a PICC and a peripheral, and the recovery ICU finally behind me. Get me the hell away from this nighttime ICU. That had been the sentiment for days. The recovery ward was different in character—quieter in some ways,…
The new heart was already doing its job. Not metaphorically—physically. More blood moving, more oxygen reaching places that had been running on fumes for years. I had not known, until that moment, how far gone I had been. The contrast was available to me before I had words for it. And then, in the hours…
The first few days after a heart transplant are not straightforward. The body is recovering from major trauma while a new chemical environment is being forced into place, and the two don’t always agree. Signals cross. Responses don’t match their causes. What feels like one kind of problem can turn out to be something else…
The nurse came through the door differently. It was 10:15 on Thursday evening, November 7th. The ward had settled into its overnight rhythm—the particular quiet of a hospital after the last shift change, monitors steady, the corridor outside moving slowly. The day had been ordinary by the standards of that room: a walk outside, pork…
Tom Petty said it as well as anyone ever has. The waiting really is the hardest part—but not for the reasons most people assume. It isn’t a matter of patience. Patience implies something you can summon—a discipline you can practice. This is something else entirely. The runway is short, and the solution to a successful…
