Second Hand Heart

by Hyde, Catherine Ryan

  Then I woke up, and my mother was still gone, and I wondered if what just happened to me had been all dream or partly real. Maybe part of my spirit was so involved with the journey of the heart to this hospital, to me, that I got to meet it and travel along.

  Only, I don’t think there would be a wisp of steam from the dry ice. I think there would be nothing until they opened it, which I guess they wouldn’t do until it was in the operating room with me, and then I guess it would be a big cloud of steam. But while they’re closed, I think those medical coolers are too perfectly sealed for that.

  But I was asleep, mostly, and maybe my dreaming self could have been partly dreaming and added that little part in a dreamy sort of way.

  And maybe the rest of it was some form of real.

  I wish I’d had that dream before Dr. Vasquez came in and talked to me, and then I could have asked her about the medical cooler, what color it is and all, but maybe she wouldn’t know anyway, because it isn’t even here yet.

  Besides, maybe the whole thing was just a dream and nothing else.

  But, really, I don’t think so. I’m pretty good at feeling things. And that’s not the way it felt.

  A Secret About Me and the Heart

  You know that thing I keep talking about? About changing form? Changing locations? Just flickering off here and flickering on somewhere else?

  So, on the one hand, it’s dying. So, really not preferable.

  On the other hand, even though it’s not the kind of outcome you purposely choose, it was starting to sound kind of … peaceful. Compared to the alternative.

  Pretty much the polar opposite of having your cardiac surgeon cut you open from your collarbone to the bottom of your ribs, power-saw through your sternum, pry open your ribcage with this big metal separator (until your thoracic cavity is open so wide a surgeon can get two gloved hands in there, and everybody else in the OR can see your weak, defective heart doing its best but failing miserably), cut out this poor heart, which is the most primary organ of your survival, even though that’s not saying much, throw it away, replace it by sewing in a big chunk of somebody else entirely, then wheel you into the ICU, where you’ll wake up later feeling like you’d been kneeling in the street and a speeding car hit you right in the middle of your chest. (Despite being on enough IV morphine to lay out a small horse.) Not that I’m not glad she can. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. Not that I won’t be really happy about it when it’s over. But right now it isn’t over. Right now I’m looking it in the eye, and I’m writing the damn truth about how I feel. I’m just trying to describe how it feels to have to reset my internal clock to suddenly gear up for more pain and struggle.

  So, that’s my huge secret about me and the heart. I have a very small pocket of mixed feelings about it showing up when it did.

  Please, whoever is going to be reading this, please, please, don’t ever tell my mother what I just wrote.

  Dear Vida,

  I’m sitting in the doctors lounge with the two surgeons who assisted me on your transplant. Talking over what we think you might want me to write. I wasn’t really sure I was clear on that, and although these two are tremendously helpful in the OR with surgery, they’re not too much help in the lounge with journaling. So I’m just going to do my best here.

  I’m guessing you don’t want to know too much about the bare medical details, things like whether or not I had to order another unit of blood sent, and how the ICU nurses were concerned about the amount of fluid in your drains, and how long we monitored that before we decided you were doing OK and we could go have a soda. That’s all in my paperwork if you care, but I’m guessing that’s not why you gave me your journal. So I’ll tell you a few more personal things, things that come more from my heart. How appropriate is that?

  I’ve known you for a long time, Vida. We go way back, don’t we? This was the third time I’d opened your thoracic cavity and watched your poor beleaguered heart doing its best to circulate your blood. The first two times, of course, being the second and third phases of your Norwood procedures. A couple of things I’ll note.

  One, every time I close up a patient’s sternum I have a little wish, or hope, or even prayer as the case may be, that this will be the last time any human will witness the beating of that heart. I’d wished that for you twice already, and I remember feeling that your poor heart has had far too much exposure and supervision in its short life. But this time I got to wish it with more conviction. When you’re doing the Phase II Norwood, that’s hard. It’s unrealistic. You know there will probably have to be a third, especially in your case. Then after the third, you just don’t know.

  But this time, maybe we really are done. I hope so.

  Secondly, I also want to say that, even though it’s not medically logical to feel this way, I felt a little guilty toward your old heart. For giving up on it. It was still living, still trying. I had to remind myself it was also failing, and would have ended your life soon. But it seemed, each time I saw it, so valiant in its efforts.

  Lastly, and this is something that both of my colleagues agree with one hundred per cent: we have looked into many thoracic cavities, and seen many different conditions. We’ve seen old hearts, loose and oversized and covered in fat deposits. We’ve seen neonatal hearts barely the size of a walnut. We’ve seen newly transplanted hearts, small and fit, beating in old bodies, looking too young and enthusiastic for their surroundings. We’ve seen single-ventricle hearts like yours, struggling to do their work against overpowering odds. But there is one thing we never get used to seeing, and that is an empty thoracic cavity, one containing no heart at all. No matter how many transplants we perform, we never really get used to the strange shock of that sight.

  One more thing I’m sure you’ll want to know: I didn’t use the paddles on your new heart. I would have if I’d had to. If it had fibrillated even a few seconds longer. But I remembered what you said, and I gave it just a tiny bit more time. Just warmed it and trusted it for a split second or two longer, and it started beating on its own. I remember you told me that was important to you. To get it off to a welcoming start.

  Have a good life, Vida. Of course I’ll see you again, but I hope to begin to see far less of you as these next few years go by. Go slow, take good care, but don’t neglect the business of living, now that you can have a chance to get on with that.

  With affection and no small measure of admiration,

  Juanita Vasquez

  CHAPTER 2: RICHARD

  From: Richard Bailey

  To: Myra Buckner

  Dear Myra,

  The purpose of this email is to let you know I’m OK. I’ve been meaning to write to you for days. Ever since you more or less held me up graveside. To let you know I’m OK.

  Now if I were only OK.

  Truth be told, I’m still fogged in. I’m still pretty fully enmeshed in that no-mans-land, the one I think I tried to explain to you at the time. No doubt I failed. Worse yet, maybe I only thought it. Never actually said it out loud at all. It’s been harder, lately, to tell the two apart.

  The land I’m referring to is that numb, foggy shock that follows one around in the wake of a traumatic event. Only, not for long enough it doesn’t.

  It’s a blessing in its own way. It really is. You wake in the morning with no orientation. No memory of what was lost. Then it comes back on you like a sleeper wave, followed by the numbing shock. It’s horrible, but it’s easy. All you have to do is get up and wash your face. Then you call a friend and say you got up and washed your face, and your friend says, Fabulous, Richard. You will survive. No mention is made of the finer details: the day’s work ignored, the unbalanced checkbook, the stacks of bills and messages.

  No one would dare suggest what I’m sure they will later tirelessly insist, that life goes on from here. For the moment, simply putting one of your feet in front of the other is a source of pride.

  I’ve been talking about myself in the second person a lot lately. I’m
not sure what that means.

  Anyway, my point is that later, I suspect, the bar will not be set so low on my life. But I’d rather not think about that right now.

  I almost went to see Vida in the hospital today. Even though I know you think it’s a bad idea. Even though, when we talked it over, you made that very clear. But I think I will, sooner or later. It’s one of those things that burns a hole at the back of your mind, where you store it every minute of every day. You can’t stop feeling for the way it’s resting or more likely not resting there in its makeshift storage. It becomes an irritation, and you find yourself working with that, like an oyster making a pearl out of a speck of foreign object, in self-defense.

  I’m just so sure I’m going to break down and see her, against advice, someday. Today began to look like as good a day as any to mess things up. But I was saved by an odd sort of a bell. Because first I have to have that small oil leak fixed on my car. I called the mechanic, but he needed a couple of days to schedule it in.

  That is one detail I was not about to numb away for later. If some innocent soul were to skid off the road in a fine late-spring rain, the mist of water sitting on a wash of filmy crankcase oil, unable to soak into the pavement, just pooling there where the rubber meets the road, it was important that none of the oil be mine. That this new disaster not be any of my leaving. The fact that no rain is predicted didn’t seem to influence the matter.

  Come to think, no rain was predicted on the evening Lorrie left us.

  Sorry to be euphemistic, but I’m so tender that the truth feels like a type of violence to me just now.

  Anyway. I put off my visit until I can honestly know I’m not leaking oil on to the road, and making it the problem of some innocent soul driving behind me, or driving that same road at a later point in time. Possibly someone’s irreplaceable loved one. I guess, on some level, everyone is irreplaceable to someone.

  Don’t you think it’s strange how we’re all driving everywhere, dropping little bits of ourselves along the road? Oil, transmission fluid, antifreeze. Old tire rubber. Leaving trails of discarded us wherever we go. Well, OK, I guess you’ll say our cars are not us. But I’m not so sure. It’s like they say about dogs, how they grow to resemble their owners after a while. Only, the dogs and the cars, both, I think it’s more that we’ve created them in our image.

  Why am I talking so much? I never used to be a man who did that.

  I don’t know why you put up with me, Myra. Assuming of course that you do. Maybe because you loved Lorrie as much as I did. Maybe because we are the only two people in the world who lost so much that night. People bond over all sorts of things. Why not that?

  Maybe I’ll write again when I’ve been to see Vida. We can compare notes. Undoubtedly see how right you were.

  My best to you,

  Richard

  From: Richard Bailey

  To: Myra Buckner

  Dear Myra,

  I haven’t been to see Vida yet. I’m cheating. Writing early.

  I have something to confess.

  I’m mildly lactose intolerant. And of course you know Lorrie wasn’t. So we always kept both kinds of milk in the house. Only that night we were out of my kind. It’s silly when you think about it, because I’m a grown man. I’m thirty-six years old. I’m not ten. Why do I need to drink milk with my dinner? It’s just one of those habit things.

  All I had to do was to break the pattern. To say, Never mind. I’ll drink water.

  That was all I had to do, Myra.

  All I had to do.

  Can you imagine what that leaves behind for me to live with?

  I’ve said it about three hundred times since. I wake up in the night saying it. Before I wake up, I’m pretty sure I was saying it in my dreams.

  I’ll just drink water.

  I could have just drunk water.

  Or, at very least, why didn’t I go out and get milk myself? It was me who wanted it. I’d brought some work home. I was sitting in the living room working on my laptop, and Lorrie just took it upon herself to slip out and get my kind of milk.

  I never knew it had rained. It wasn’t even enough rain to hear on the roof. I guess it just sprinkled for a few minutes. Late-spring rain. First rain in a long time. There’s some physics thing to that. Later, after it’s rained hard for ten or fifteen minutes, the oil washes off the road. But at first … No, how could that be? You can’t just hose oil off the driveway. I’ve tried. But it’s something about the first minutes of that first rain. The water sits on top of the oil. Or something. I had it explained once. But I haven’t asked since, because I couldn’t bear to hear it again.

  A bit of a disjointed confession. But now that I’ve told one other human being, maybe I can finally get to sleep.

  Then again, maybe not.

  My best to you, Your son-in-law (am I still?),

  Richard

  The Worry Stone

  When I arrived at the hospital, Vida’s mother, Abigail, was nowhere to be found.

  I’m not sure why, but somehow it felt important to find her.

  Maybe because I felt as if I knew Abigail, having received a letter from her, thanking me profusely and discussing the prospect of our all meeting in person just as soon as Vida got out of ICU. Tossing it about as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Something that could never destroy an already tenuous life. Keep anyone from moving on. As if it were something that couldn’t even cause pain.

  Notice I talk about it as if I’m in no way responsible for it. But I have to report the truth, which is this: If I’d wanted to remain anonymous, so that Abigail had never known how to reach me, I could have. In fact, anonymity would have been the default setting for this donor arrangement. The donor program encourages her to write to me. But they don’t give away my address. I invited further contact. Then, the moment said contact accepted my invitation, I backed up and began to feel imposed upon.

  And yet, there I was in the hospital, ready for the drama to begin.

  Why? Hard to say. I’m halfway guessing.

  I suppose we wanted to think of it as one of those happy human interest stories on the evening news. Life springs from death, and even the deepest tragedy can open up to reveal a miracle in its wake. And here is the gratified young woman, lying in a hospital bed, breathing. Living! Living proof.

  What a tribute to the deceased woman and her grieving family!

  As I stood in that stark hospital hallway, I believe it was dawning on me that there would be more to it than that. It would be real.

  Maybe this is why it was so important for me to find Abigail. She was my partner in denial, and I needed her. Perhaps, with her help, I could still find my way back.

  I even asked at the nurse’s station on Vida’s floor, but as far as they knew she had gone home for a nap.

  I had two choices. Come back later. As if one drive to the hospital hadn’t used up a week’s worth of my scant supply of energy already. Or let myself into the girl’s room alone, without introduction.

  I suppose there was a third choice of forgetting the whole questionable idea. Accepting that I had hit a logistical and emotional red light, perhaps for a reason.

  But I dismissed that idea, having passed a point of no return within myself on this Vida issue.

  I decided that seeing her alone at first was preferable anyway. With no one taking notice, able to observe that I’d come with an agenda, some indistinct expectation for gain. Especially if that expectation turned out to be misguided. Especially if I was about to fall on my ass.

  I steeled myself outside her door for so long that two nurses came by and gave me questioning glances. One with raised eyebrows. As if I must need something. And I did. But nothing they would likely have on hand.

  I walked through the door.

  I expected her to be asleep, but she sat half-propped-up, her dark eyes wide open and staring at me. There was some startling element to them, something wild and intense. I’d expected at least to see her
groggy and half-conscious. Just a handful of days after such a traumatic surgery, wasn’t she still on some kind of heavy painkiller? If so, what must her eyes look like naturally?

  I couldn’t imagine she was nineteen, though I knew from her mother’s letter that she was. She seemed high-school age, underweight and frail. Perhaps borderline anorexic, with dirty-blonde hair which might actually have been dirty, or just looked it. She had dark circles under her eyes, a body strangely slack and at rest, only her eyes fully alive. Only her right thumb was in motion, rubbing an obsessive, repetitive pattern over a small oval object.

  Above the neckline of her hospital gown I could see the top of the scar, shockingly unbandaged and still stapled. It caught and tingled in my stomach and made me feel squeamish, as though I should sit down.

  “You’re the guy,” she said. “Huh?”

  I never bothered to ask how she knew. I figured I must be wearing it on my face, entering her room with an expression that only one person in her world could possibly fit.

  “Yes,” I said. “I am the guy.”

  I walked over closer, and sat down on a hard plastic chair. I remember a vague sense of disappointment. I’m not sure what I thought I might see. Whatever it was, I didn’t see it. Just a stranger, a girl I’d never met before.

  She turned her head to follow me with the stare. Her assessment of me made me uncomfortable, a role reversal I hadn’t meant to allow. I found myself wondering what her stare did while I was elsewhere. It was all part of that disconnectedness, that sense that only I existed in the world, because everything else felt like a dream.

  “My mom wasn’t kidding in her letter,” she said. “It really was a matter of probably days. I was going to die that soon. You really get a chance to look death right in the face. You know?”

  “Is that what the worry stone is about? That is a worry stone you’ve got there in your hand. Isn’t it?”

  She held it up under the lamp, as if to scrutinize it more closely. Or to allow me to. Or both.