‘Marie had been admitted to the cardiology ward with acute and severe heart failure, where she was immediately put on the waiting list for a heart transplant. Her condition went downhill so rapidly, she needed two support VADs. That’s how she came to me in intensive care – a pile of flesh and bones, surrounded by machinery. Complications ensued, and we went urgently in search of a donor heart.
I was in touch with her family daily. The situation was dire, and their grief was palpable. I was honest and open about the fact that she might not make it, while my conversations with Marie herself were brief but intense. She occasionally felt that there was no point to it all, that the donor heart wouldn’t arrive in time. I tried to get her to have faith; we seemed to understand each other fairly easily, making few words necessary.
Her new heart arrived just in time. After the transplant, she did her rehabilitation in our hospital and then came back for regular check-ups. She also popped in occasionally just to let us know how she was doing. That wasn’t uncommon, plenty of patients do the same.
One year later she threw a party and asked me to come. I was suspicious; was there perhaps an ulterior motive behind the invitation? Did she merely want to show her thanks, or was there more at play? I went along and in the end, I was the last to leave. We talked long into the night. That’s when things truly started between us, but thinking back, my feelings for her must have developed sooner. Not while she was still my patient – I’m certain of that – but in the year afterwards. I realised I’d been pushing my feelings aside. I was head of intensive care, after all, and falling in love with an ex-patient was unacceptable. We went away together a few times after her party and eventually confessed our feelings for one another.
We made a conscious attempt to sift through our emotions, to make sure nothing else was at play: gratitude perhaps, or relief. And although we never did truly figure it out, in the end we decided to go for it and make a full commitment to one another.
After taking the step, I quickly told some of my closer colleagues about our relationship. They were all very happy for me. That’s fantastic, they said, good for you. Their responses put me at ease, because I hadn’t been able to allay my doubts completely. Marie was no longer my patient, true, but she certainly had been. I was balancing on the precipice of my own ethical boundaries, and I needed affirmation from others that it was all above board.
Where I initially did have some difficulty was with my in-laws, as my presence was a painful reminder to them of a very traumatic period in their lives. For a while I had been the bringer of bad news, and suddenly there I was again, sitting down to dinner as their son-in-law. But not only did we get through that too, they also taught me a valuable lesson. They told me what their experiences in intensive care had been like, how hard it had been for them to make sense of all the information. Through them, I realised that I needed to start listening even more carefully, to explain in even more detail and show even greater understanding. It was love that gave me a unique glimpse behind the scenes, an opportunity that very few doctors get.
When we first met, Marie was thirty-one and I was fifty-nine. I did some calculating and told her that our life expectancies were actually not that far apart. A new heart will generally hold out for about twelve years, by which time I would be seventy-one and probably running out of steam myself. It was a silly bit of maths, but it did offer us some consolation and provided a tentative answer to the question of how much time we might ultimately have together.
We’re now far beyond the calculated limit, and the love we share is so deep and strong, we are the envy of our friends and family.’