Okay, so the pic at the top is actually me and that is an actual human heart. Not that many people have pictures of them holding a human heart and less so looking quite as devious — and if you DO have similar pictures, please, please, please send them to me and I’ll post them. We’ll have a contest — so, maybe it deserves explanation. Especially since I can’t think of anything else to write about this afternoon.
One of my best friends has has a double lung transplant because of disease. He kept in contact with the girl who coordinated the transplant, mostly because she was hot, and introduced her to me several years after the fact. Not a week later I got a call at about 8pm wondering if I’d like to witness an organ harvest. “You’ll have to lie, though,” she told me.
Let me digress a moment and answer the question that inevitably comes up at this point, namely, “Why would you want to say yes?” Well, because I’m a writer. And I believe that as a writer, you need to experience as much as possible, and know at least a little bit about as much as possible. And when an opportunity like showing up at a hospital in the middle of the night to be changed into scrubs, silly booties, a bad hat and a mask to witness a terminally injured man be scooped out comes up — you take it. It might come in handy one day, it might not, but at the very least, now I know what happened to my friend. I know, in fact, a lot more than he does about what happened to him. That part anyway.
Back to the heart. I was worried about my reaction. I was encouraged to take pictures, which I saw as a godsend because when you look at something through a lens, you’re removed from it, and I figured if I got too upset and weirded out, then I’d just bring the camera up to my face and take a break that way. It turned out that I didn’t get nauseated and I didn’t get freaked out. I got really, really hot. For whatever reason, that’s how my body reacted. My skin felt like it was on fire. Several times during the surgery — it took hours — I backed up and rested my bare arms against the cool tile of the operating room. That was all the relief I could get. I also had to step outside to take that awful mask off occasionally because it traps your breath and that’s hot, too.
Two of the operating rooms next to the harvest rooms were going as well, and I got to visit them. In one, a woman was waiting for a single lung transplant, and in the other, a man was put on bypass to get the new heart. Yes, the heart in my hands is his old, defective heart, after it was taken out so the shiny new one of the guy who had been shot in the head by members of his former gang could be put in.
So, that’s the picture. I will say, though, that I was in the room when they finally turned off the machines to let the donor die after everything inside of him was finally ready for the scoop and run. I remember the room standing still. Everyone stopped and waiting. I remember the guy finally flat lining, and I remember something disappearing from the room. Maybe it was just that all the doctors and real nurses stopped and we were all really present in that moment, together, and then the moment he flatlined, all their attentions scattered to their, specific task, their specific organ. Or maybe it was that was the donor’s last moment, his last second alive and he filled everyone there who witnessed it. He glowed in this last bit of his usefulness, and when he died, when he was gone, it deflated. You can make your own decision. I was there and even I don’t know.
Tags: heart bypass, lung transplant, organ harvest, organ transplant, photo contest
