Lines in, lines out. The Impella running its quiet rhythm. The monitor glowing green behind my head. That’s what a support system looks like from the inside—not dramatic, not cinematic. It looks like logistics. It looks like someone already moving before you’ve asked them to.
Listed on a Friday afternoon. Status 2, on an Impella, waiting. Three days of relative stability. Monday nearly killed me. By Thursday I’d walked four laps around the ward and eaten a real lunch and started to feel like a man who might survive long enough to get a heart. Then endocrine walked in.
The Impella went in on October 3rd—a catheter-mounted pump threaded into the left ventricle to do the work the heart no longer could. Five percent ejection fraction going in. What happened in the hours afterward was not, primarily, a clinical experience.
Death came to my room more than once. The first time I was at home, alone in the dark, and woke to a figure crouched near the ceiling with the patience of something that had nowhere else to be. I had known for years I would die at fifty-five.
