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…
The appointment was routine. That was the part I kept coming back to afterward—how completely routine it was supposed to be. I was in my early thirties, recently married, a new father. My wife was a few months into her second pregnancy. One morning I noticed I was a little short of breath—unusual enough to…
Death came to my room more than once. The first time, I was at home, alone in the dark. I woke to a presence and looked toward the corner near the ceiling — and there it was. A dark figure, crouched, looking down at me with the patience of something that had nowhere else to…
