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…
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…
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…
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….
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…
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…
My wife wanted me to go to the hospital sooner. She always did—that was the standing dynamic between us on anything medical, and it had been for over twenty-five years. Every setback, every symptom, her instinct was to call in the armada. Mine was to assess, monitor, and manage. We were both right, in our…
