Essays, observations, anything that doesn’t fit neatly elsewhere.
There is a version of this story where the voice is a side note—one complication among many in an experience that had no shortage of them. A temporary setback, eventually resolved, mentioned in passing alongside the hair loss and the tremors and the rest of what the medications and the procedures took and gave back…
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,…
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…
