by Jill Wolfson
“Hmmmm,” Dr Emily said, stethoscope on my chest.
“Hmmmm good?” Mom asked with hope.
“Hmmmm not so good.”
“How much not good?”
Stethoscope off. Worried look on. “Not good at all.”
“What are you saying?” Mom asked. “Are you saying she needs more surgery? Surgery will fix this, right?” She glanced at me sideways and lowered her voice to a stage whisper, as if that would protect my delicate ears. “Maybe we should, you know, talk about this first ourselves? Is this a good time for … considering what she just went through—”
Dr Emily placed her hand on Mom’s arm. “I know you want to protect her. You are a great advocate, but I think she’s old enough to—”
“I’m old enough, Beth.”
“To hear about her situation straight. Okay?”
Mom started to protest, but she was outnumbered. She crossed her arms against her chest. Dr Emily went on, this time directly to me. “Dani, your heart has deteriorated too much. There’s no bringing it back anymore. We – all of us – knew this time would come eventually.”
She talked on for a while using medical terms, but all I heard was this: I wasn’t going anywhere. Definitely not barefoot to the Andes. Not back to school. Not even back home to my pink and orange polka-dotted comforter, which suddenly seemed like heaven.
I wasn’t going anywhere, not without a new heart.
And who knew how long that would take? Obviously, a person can’t just go to the Major Organ Boutique and order up a perfect heart to go. I knew all about the transplant waiting list. I was already on it. Sometimes just to torture myself, I would Google the words heart, transplant, list and up popped the depressing statistics. There were three thousand of us in the country waiting. Each day, eight people on the list died. People died from what I had.
“How long can a heart like mine last?” I asked.
“I can’t really answer that. Each person is different. Each person is—”
“How long?”
“Worst case scenario? If you don’t get a heart in two weeks…” Her voice drifted off.
“Two weeks!” Mom blurted out.
“Worst case.” Then Dr Emily actually found something optimistic in all this. “Dani, you’ve been moved to the very top of the transplant list, from Status 2, somewhat stable, to Status 1A. In dire need.”
In my world, that’s what passed for great news. First come, first served. I was at the top of the heap.
Top of the messed-up heart heap. Congratulations, Dani.
Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep.
I must have drifted off because a commotion in my room jarred me out of sleep. One of the zillion machines I was hooked up to was having a fit. Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep. I wanted to ignore it and keep sleeping. Sleeping felt so good, the only escape from the constant ache and nausea that ruled my life. But the beeping reached in and hooked on to me. Against my will, I was being yanked down to the surface from the farthest reaches of outer space.
My eyes opened to see a frantic Nurse Brianna tearing into the room. She rushed to my side and examined cords and tubes, looking for kinks and malfunctions, trying to figure out why my IV hookup – the only thing keeping my heart pumping with enough force to keep me alive – signaled distress.
Head Nurse Joe peered into the room. He was one of those people you automatically see as a cartoon animal. Add whiskers and pointy ears and – bingo – Bugs Bunny. I also considered him to be one of the greatest bald adults who ever lived. He had stories about his own teenage experiences – protest marches, rock concerts, all-night dancing. These are things that I definitely hope to have the heart-lung capacity to experience someday.
“Do you see her?” he asked. “Is she in here? We need to find her. Stat!”
Nurse Brianna tilted her chin in the direction of my IV. “She definitely was here. That little one has got the fastest fingers in the West.”
Nurse Joe’s eyes narrowed and scanned the room, eventually landing on something that made him visibly relax. He put his index finger to his lips in a shhhh. “Come on out,” he said softly, like he was talking to a cat.
It wasn’t a cat. It was a girl scrunched up behind a chair, arms looped around her knees. When she noticed me looking, she covered her mouth in a giggle. I figured she was about six or seven, your basic first-grader except for her hair. A ton of blond curls cascaded down beyond her shoulders. I would have killed for hair like that. Probably some patient’s little sister. She flipped all that scrambled-egg hair and giggled again.
Personally, I’m not a big fan of little kids, especially the ultra-adorable ones. Cute is definitely overrated in my opinion. You could already see what this girl was going to be like in middle school, concrete scientific evidence that Queen Bees are born, not made.
Nurse Joe made a lunge – “Gotcha!” – and lifted her from under both armpits. Suspended in midair, her legs whirred, another character in a cartoon.
“Put me down! I’m delicate!”
Nurse Joe headed for the door, trying to talk sense to her. “Honey, this isn’t the Touch Museum. You need to leave the buttons alone.”
“No touching me! Momma doesn’t allow it. I’m sensitive! I have a medical condition!”
“Wendy, you’re overtired! It’s not the end of the world. It’s just nap time.”
That girl could howl! In my own delicate state, any noise, especially high-pitched, spoiled-little-girl noise, made even my toes wince. I wouldn’t have minded slipping back into a coma right then.
Nurse Joe said over his shoulder to me, “With this kind of lung power, she could sing lead for the Rolling Stones. Hey, I saw the Rolling Stones in their first American concert.”
“I know,” I said. “Summer 1964.”
Nurse Brianna gave him a thumbs-up as he carried the girl out the doorway.
When they were gone, I asked weakly, “Who was that?”
“Wendy. Room 3. Waiting for a kidney. Believe it or not, according to her tests, she’s supposed to be just about comatose. You didn’t hear this from me. We’re supposed to love all our patients just the same. But that one? We love her, but she’s driving us crazy.”
Nurse Brianna reset my machinery, plumping the IV bag to make sure the liquid flowed smoothly down the tube and into my veins. “Still, you have to give her credit. She’s a fighter.”
Another howl. Wendy or a cat getting a shampoo?
Lucky me. Meet the neighbor.
SIX
MORE DAYS PASSED IN a blur of sleep, droning TV, prodding and probing by nurses, Mom’s worried face in and out of focus, plus the continuing background noise of Wendy fresh from dialysis treatment. Like an old dog, I slept a lot more than I was awake. Days weren’t much different than nights.
Gradually, though, the hospital miracle machines did their job. I stayed awake more often and when I was awake, I didn’t just stare into space with drool hardening on the corners of my mouth. Lovely, I know.
The family in the apartment next door to us sent a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of a famous painting that I would like to see in person someday because it means a trip to Paris, the city of lights and romance. I worked on the puzzle for a while. Then Beth read aloud the good parts of a trashy novel. We had a laugh over the heavy breathing.
“What if I never get to experience any heavy breathing in my life?”
“Wow,” Mom said. “You really must be feeling better, to even consider such a thing.”
At least I was feeling a little more like myself. The real sign of improvement was that I was getting bored. I pleaded with Dr Emily, but she said that I still wasn’t strong enough to move around (hello, catheter, which is worse, much worse, than a bedpan). For the time being, she also ruled out visitors other than Mom. Human beings are conveyor belts of germs, and I needed to stay as healthy as possible, or at least as healthy as someone who is facing death can be. If a heart became available – a heart that just happened to fit my particular ch
est size and my particular blood type – I’d be screwed if I even had the sniffles.
So I was floored when my nurse asked, “How would you like some company?” Nurse Brianna was clearing away my scrumptious breakfast of weak tea and even weaker chicken broth.
“Company? Who? Not Wendy! No way.”
“Room 1. Your neighbor on the other side. You have a lot in common.”
“What do we have in common?”
“Well, you know.” With her right arm, she made a grand sweeping gesture around the hospital room.
Great. Terrific. Other kids my age hook up because they like the same music or work on the school paper together or find the same things hilarious or have the same plans for the future. I was supposed to hit it off with someone just because they also happened to be screwed in the major organ department. Such was my social life. It was pathetic. But I didn’t see any other choice.
“Sure, why not?” I said. “The near-dead are my kind of people.”
Right after lunch (more broth and jelly), Nurse Brianna pushed in a wheelchair with Nurse Joe guiding a bunch of clinging, clanging equipment. This wasn’t what I expected. I assumed my visitor would be a girl, not a boy with yellow skin and green hair. Nice color combination. Plus, there was something scary about him.
Okay, to be perfectly truthful here, there was something scary to me about any boy. When you’ve spent half your life absent from school, you miss out on all the practice opportunities of being around them. Mom was the big dater in our family. I was most comfortable talking to middle-aged doctors about potassium-sparing diuretics. This next confession is even more mortifying: What little social know-how I did possess came by analyzing characters on TV shows like reruns of Degrassi (both classic and Next Generation). I figured that if I decided which character I most resembled, I’d have my social blueprint for knowing how to talk and act. Am I the loud and funny girl who is really sensitive inside? The shy one who’s really a cutthroat? The smart one who wants to be popular? The popular one who wants to be smart?
Nurse Brianna backed up the wheelchair and angled the boy in like he was an SUV and I was the curb. Could they possibly manage to bring him any closer?
The whites of the boy’s eyes were also yellowish, like he had drunk nothing but orange juice for years. His hair stood up in a punk style. Either that or he slept on it funny. I looked away when he caught me studying him. That was close.
Joe introduced us: “Dani, this is Milo. Milo, Dani. Hey, you two both love music. Awesome, right?”
I still said nothing. Now I knew which sitcom character I was: the one who got cut out of the script. The seriously lame and pathetic one.
Suddenly, I was very, very tired. This was not a lie. I repeat: Not a lie! I was exhausted. People waiting for a new heart are allowed to get too tired for visitors, aren’t they? It’s their right! I definitely didn’t want company. Not this Milo. What kind of name was that anyway?
But then the nurses left. Just like that, they were gone. Poof, like the evil magicians they were. And it was just me and him. Me in a pink flannel nightgown with a boy I didn’t know wearing striped cotton pajamas, the matching kind that usually only grown-ups wear.
I was really grateful when Milo said, “Hey.”
“Hey,” I said back. I couldn’t think of anything to add.
He seemed to be making a serious study of our IV poles, which were lined up side by side and reminded me of two skinny old men, pals from the good old days. “Sixteen,” he blurted.
“Excuse me?”
“Sixteen.”
I got it. “Oh, I’m fifteen.”
“Liver,” he said.
“Heart.”
Silence again, except for the drone of the machines that were keeping us alive. They were slightly out of sync, beeping and pinging and humming, and came together in a weird, jittery harmony. As Milo studied the poles, I took the opportunity to grab a better look at him. His jaw jutted forward slightly. His nose was straight and strong. He chewed on the inside of his cheeks, which made his face all lines and planes, like a statue of one of our country’s Founding Fathers. The young, brilliant, passionate Thomas Jefferson. There was something fierce and dangerous about that. I liked it.
Say something, Dani. “That’s good.”
“What’s good?”
His eager response gave me the confidence to go on. “That you need a liver and I need a heart. That’s good. It means we’re not in competition. You know, for the same organ? Not in competition.”
Milo started doing the chewing thing again, this time with his upper lip. “That would suck.”
I was trying so hard not to stare at his lips and to think of the next interesting thing to say that I lost the thread of our conversation. “What would suck?”
“What you just said. It would suck if we were both waiting for the same organ. That kind of competition could get ugly.”
“Ugly. Right.”
“Actually, it would be okay if you needed a liver, too. Two people can use one liver – did you know that?”
I shook my head.
“After they rip it out of some poor guy’s dead body, they cut it in half, and after the transplant, both lobes grow to almost full size. Can’t do that with a heart, though. Too bad for your sorry ass.”
“Yeah, too bad.”
He cracked his knuckles. “Twenty-seven bones in the hand, 206 bones in the human body.” Then he went back to studying the wall and I was back to studying my lap and trying to come up with another good topic. I went with my sure-fire attention getter.
“My heart. It’s on the right side of my body.”
“So?”
“Not right as in correct. I mean, the wrong side, which is the right side.”
“Cool,” he said. “That could come in handy. Like if someone was trying to murder you by stabbing you in the heart with a fork, he’d miss.”
Then I remembered some sitcom dating advice: To break the ice, ask boys about themselves. Something personal. They like that. “So, what are you anyway?”
“You mean, like what sign? I’m a Gemini. Not that I believe in that. I’ve definitely ruled out astrology as a life philosophy.”
“Not your sign. Your blood type.”
“Oh.”
“O?”
“No, I’m B. That kind of sucks.”
“Not so bad. I’m lucky because I’m AB. Universal receiver. That means—”
“I know what it means! You can get a heart from anyone.”
“At least you’re not type O.”
He brightened at that. I guess I passed some kind of private test of medical knowledge. He got the nicest smile creases around the corners of his mouth. For the first time, he looked directly at me, like he had completely forgotten to be embarrassed about having orange horror-film eyes. His irises were normal green. Normal with flecks of brown, like little sparks, scattered through them. As eyes go, they were extremely attractive ones.
“Yeah, type O can only take from another O. That’s fucked up,” he said.
“Not for some people. Universal donor! An O can give an organ or blood to anyone, save lots of lives.”
“I’m not in any position to be giving. You either.”
“Obviously. So, how long have you been waiting?”
“Just a couple of weeks this time.”
“This time?”
“Yeah. I’m on my second transplant. The first one I got when I was three. This is Liver Transplant, take two. Liver Transplant: The Sequel. Liver Transplant: The Next Generation.”
“Son of Liver Transplant. What happened to the first one?”
“Crashed and burned. Guess I had something to do with that. Long story.”
Milo slumped a little and I have to say that he looked really good doing it. Not everyone has enough personal style to get away with poor posture. When he mumbled something, I didn’t catch the words.
“I’m sorry. I—”
“Don’t! Don’t ever feel sor
ry for me! It’s the way it is.”
“I’m not sorry for you. I just didn’t hear what you said.”
He went on as if I hadn’t explained. “I’m sick of people and how they get all weird and sorry for me. I’m not sorry for me. Since I made the most-likely-to-die list, I’ve gotten philosophical. I’m making a study of it.”
“It?”
“Everything. Everything that’s important to know. Death, life, what it all means. All the world’s belief systems, past and present. Hedonism. Hinduism. Rastafarianism. Existentialism.” He ran his nails through his hair, gave his head a hard scratch. “Yeah, I used to be into the whole darkness-of-the-soul thing. For a while, I was a nihilist. You can tell by my hair. Right now, I’m digging deep into the secret society of the Rosicrucians.”
Secret society? I wanted to ask about that. I also wanted to ask what he meant by having something to do with needing a second transplant. There was no opportunity because Brianna, all nursey and chirpy, stuck her head in the door. “Okay, you two. Visiting time is over. Nice chat?”
Neither of us answered. As the nurse wheeled him out the door, Milo flashed the peace symbol over his shoulder.
Meet the neighbor, part two. Scary, but definitely better than Wendy.
After that major social interaction, I fell asleep. I woke up in time for dinner, and as I waited for it to arrive, I decided that it would be a good idea to know more about philosophy. My education was definitely sketchy in that area. Rastafarian? That had something to do with dreadlocks and smoking pot, didn’t it? Existentialism? Something about being French and living in a world that was mad and out of your control. I could definitely use advice on that.
By the time my delicious meal of semisolids (coddled egg and applesauce) arrived, I decided that Milo was okay, better than okay. Certain girls in school would say ewww about his skin color and death talk. But at least he didn’t have too many zits. And maybe, I thought, maybe he would be really hot with a new haircut and a new liver.
As I played with my food, my mind drifted. What did Milo think of me? What did I look like through his eyes? Could he make out any facial beauty beyond my pasty skin? Did he think I had a scrawny chicken neck? Did he think I was cute at all?
