"Your mother needs a new heart," my father told me when I called on that December afternoon. An unrelenting optimist, he spoke as if she merely needed to have a part replaced. But, although my two sisters and I knew that our mother had heart problems, this news still made us frozen for a while with our eyes widening in disbelief.
Dr. Marc Semigran of the transplant team reviewed my mother's medical history. She'd had an irregular and rapid heartbeat for most of her life. Her present treatment——the use of a series of cardioversions, or electric jolts, to restore a normal heartbeat——would not work in the long-term. She had an enlarged and weakened heart, as well as a faulty valve.
"With medication," Dr. Semigran said, "you have a 60 percent chance of living six months. You could have a longer life with a transplant, but there are risks. You're at the
top end of the age group of sixty years old. The lungs and other organs must be healthy and strong. While the transplant surgery is actually a straightforward procedure, acceptance by the body is the difficult thing."
My family came together, trying to provide strength and work out what to do. We'd already gone from shock, over our mother's condition, to worry that she wouldn't be a suitable recipient. Despite of the risk, we chose to believe that she would make it eventually.
Word came later in December that she had been accepted into the programme. Dr. Jeremy Ruskin told us one of the reasons she had been accepted was that she had such strong family support.
One Monday in May, at about 8 p. m., my mother received a phone call from the hospital that a heart was available. As she was about to be wheeled off, my father took her face in his hands and looked into her eyes. His look said everything about their 42-year relationship.
The heart transplant operation was successful and the conditions could not have been better.
The irony of the transplant process is that one family's loss is another's gain; that tragedy begets fortune. It is a kind of life after death, our hearts beating beyond us. We developed a feeling of love for this new part, of gratitude for the doctors, for the process, and for those people who made a decision just for humanity.
