How to explain what has taken place in me?
How to quantify something that is beyond all reasonable expectation? I can’t pin it down. I can’t make sense of it.
It just shouldn’t be this way.
I shouldn’t be this way.
For the first time since I was twenty-five years old, I feel well.
I mean really well.
So well that I’ve been jogging three miles a day, just eight weeks after my surgery. And it’s easy.
My body hums with such effortlessness I forget that it houses me; I’m not lugging it around and willing myself through its ills as I did for all those hard heart transplant decades.
How is this possible?
At my final clinic appointment before heading back to New York, Dr. Kobashigawa tells me, “What you put in is what you get out,” meaning that all the jogging and gym workouts I banked right up until the time the vasculopathy grounded me have primed my muscles and organs to snap back quickly to strength.
“But I don’t just feel strong . . . I actually feel well. I’m not nauseated all the time, like I was with my first transplant. I don’t feel ill and achy and weak. I don’t have infections every ten days. I tell you, Dr. Kobashigawa, I feel so much better at fifty than I did at twenty-five—it’s mind-boggling.”
This makes him smile and pull his white coat across his middle. “Well then . . . enjoy!”
“But how can it be?”
He drops his chin, tugs his stethoscope from his neck, and tucks it into his front pocket—then pauses, smiling, shaking his head slowly.
Finally, he shrugs and tells me, again, to enjoy. “We want you to live your life,” he says.
Live my life . . .
My transplant life.
As wonderfully well as I feel, and as high-flying as I am on gratitude, I am no less aware of my medical reality. This second transplant carries an even more daunting threat to my heart’s longevity. And the antibody treatments have put me at a higher risk of cancer and serious infection.
I’m not sure how to respond to Dr. K.
Even though I will return to Cedars in thirty days for a checkup, this still feels like a parting moment, and I’d like to speak the truth of it with him.
I sit up taller on the exam table now, taking in a deep breath for confidence. “I’m going to live this life, you can count on it,” I begin. “But . . . well . . . there’s no free lunch, right? That’s what you said a few weeks ago when I got scared about all the side effects and risks of eculizumab—you reminded me that, living with a heart transplant, there’s no free lunch . . .”
“Ah, Amy.” He chuckles lightly, the corners of his eyes crinkling with kindness. “Yes, you pay for that lunch dearly, we both know it. But you—you’ve got a special brand of determination. I wouldn’t put any limit on how far you’ll go with this heart.” He reaches his arms out to me, and I know to come in for a good-bye hug. “And of course, we’re all here for you.”
As I’m pressed against his white coat, an entirely new feeling sweeps me up and away to a place of contentment and peace I’ve never known in my transplant years: for once, my doctor and I understand each other.
In fact, I’ve experienced nothing but understanding from the entire Cedars heart transplant team, as I realized all at once when I left the hospital some seven weeks ago. The nurses and aides on the sixth floor gathered to say good-bye to me that day and, to my surprise, present me with a special gift. “We wanted to do something for the transplant patients as they set out on their new lives,” the head nurse told me, speaking for the semicircle of staff around her. “We hoped to say something meaningful to them, so we created this.” She handed me a navy blue T-shirt rolled up lengthwise and secured by a red ribbon.
I unraveled it.
On one side was an image of a chest X-ray printed directly onto the cotton, along with a message that read:
We are honored to be with you on this new journey.
—The Nursing Team
The other side of the shirt read:
Life may not be the party we hoped for,
but while we are here we might as well dance.
It was the wisest, most honest orientation to heart transplant life that I’d ever seen: a striking acknowledgment that I—and all T-shirt recipients—would pay for our lunch, side by side with the wisdom for how we might make the most of our exceptionally fortunate seats at the table.
I knew right then: I’m going to eat it up.
The years of life ahead of me may not be long, but they will be different from those that came before, and better—not because my health challenges will be fewer or less serious, but because the truth of them is no longer a lonely one.
I held the shirt to my chest as if it were a salve and wept warm, salty tears.
* * *
Breaking the stillness of the very early morning, Scott and I roll the last of our suitcases along the dew-misted gravel path and out the gate to a cab that’s waiting on San Vicente. “I got this,” he assures me, lifting the first duffle into the trunk. I turn back to say good-bye to the garden.
“Five months since I first saw you,” I say to the greenery all around. “A whole season!” I’m standing in my favorite spot—directly in front of a speckled rock propped to its two-foot vertical stance by smaller rocks and plantings. It’s meant to be a little fountain of sorts—there’s a water pump behind it that produces a glistening stream along the contours from top to bottom—but the flow has been inconsistent lately. This morning, there’s none at all. The rock is practically dry.
That’s okay, it can stop now, I tell myself. It knows I’m leaving.
Just then, a hummingbird zooms by and lands on a tree branch to my right.
“Oh, hello, Miss Hummingbird. Coming to say good-bye?” I ask, admiring the iridescent green feathers on her underside. “Fly away, fly away now. I’m leaving too,” I say. But she doesn’t move at all, holding remarkably still.
Another one darts by me and lands on the same tree. And then another follows.
I’ve got my hand to my chest now. “Look at that—three.”
And now here’s another, and another . . .
I continue counting as the hummingbirds keep speeding to this wiry, leafless tree—the only one in the garden that happens not to be thriving. Each bird lands on a bare branch that will give no nectar, and yet they all stay there.
Six . . . seven . . . eight . . . “Ah! Oh gosh!” Tears spring to my eyes now. Nine . . . ten . . .
I hold my breath in amazement.
All at once, they whir up and scatter in unison—out of sight in just seconds.
I turn my head away from the tree, and just when my eyes land upon the rock, a single bubble spills over the top and water begins to flow.
Scott spies me through the gate and rushes to my side. “Hey, are you all right?”
I don’t realize that I’m sobbing.
“I’m fine . . . uh, I mean, I’m great—Scotty, the birds . . . the fountain . . .” I describe quickly what I’ve just witnessed. “That was incredible. I have to tell the girls . . .”
A few minutes later, I slide into the back of the cab and send a group email from my cell phone.
Val calls me early the next morning, bursting with interpretation. “Ten hummingbirds—you know what that was, don’t you? That’s nine of us women from the spreadsheet . . . and the girl who gave you her heart.”