by Jill Wolfson
There it was. A question formed by a breath of air and hanging heavy in the silence. A question that even Helen knew had only one reasonable answer. Of course they haven’t thought about organ donation! What parents of a perfectly healthy fourteen-year-old do?
“Consider it, please. I hope you will.”
Another pulse of silence as the confusion cleared and Claire finally understood exactly what had been asked.
“No!” Her words, fueled by the adrenaline of outrage, couldn’t get out fast enough. They were disconnected, wild in panic. “Robert. Amanda. I. No. Organs? Fourteen. No cutting. Look. See her. Cutting? No!”
Robert sprang to his feet, torn equally between two actions: wanting to soothe the mother of his children by wrapping his large frame protectively around her and wanting to smash something.
“Shhh,” he said tenderly to Claire. “Nobody is going to do anything you don’t want.” The next word to Helen – “Nobody!” – was followed with a bang of his fist on a nearby table. “You’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve. This is our daughter, not some container to be opened and emptied.”
Helen bowed her head, not out of regret for her question – it had to be asked – but to let the man’s emotion pass over her. She had been doing this job long enough to know that people reacted in so many different ways, with fear, tears, resignation, silence. She knew not to be afraid of his anger or to take it personally. She even understood how, in some way, it might actually be satisfying. This father finally had someone to rage against, when, in reality, everyone in this tragic situation was blameless.
“Robert, please,” Claire said. Her voice softened as quickly as it had flared. “It’s okay. I’m okay.” To Helen: “So sudden, so … maybe … if we have more time to let it sink in … maybe?… No!… Oh, I don’t know, maybe … we just need time.”
Time, unfortunately, was the enemy. How could Helen stress the urgency to them? The nurses could keep the oxygen and blood flowing for a while, tricking the organs into thinking the girl was still alive. But eventually, too soon, everything would begin to deteriorate. Helen wanted them to understand that. She answered their few questions as gently, honestly and succinctly as she could. Was organ donation compatible with their religion? They were Jewish.
“Yes,” Helen said. “It’s considered a blessing.”
Would people be able to see Amanda, or would she be too – Claire choked on the word – scarred? Helen assured them that no one would be able to tell.
“But what about…” Claire paused.
“About what?” Helen prompted.
“A miracle. They happen.”
Helen didn’t say what she was thinking. There wasn’t going to be any miracle for Amanda. But there could be a miracle for someone else. “It’s your decision,” she said before leaving the room. “What do you think Amanda would have wanted? If you decide yes, please decide soon.”
On the other side of town in a nondescript office building in a nondescript room, a computer sat on a desk. No human being at the moment; the data input supervisor was off on his coffee break. No ringing phone. Just a computer that was waiting for a decision to be made.
But if someone were to jump ahead and start the paperwork, it would read like this:
Age of potential donor: 14
Height: 4 feet 11
Weight: 85 pounds
As information entered the computer, a profound shift of identity would begin taking place. Amanda Schecter, beloved daughter, studious ninth-grader, sister, girl who could turn backflips and cartwheels, unique being with her own set of likes, dislikes, secrets and dreams, would begin changing into something else, something anonymous.
Donor #364 with a list of medical attributes: type O-positive blood, strong liver and kidney function, heart strong, no cancer, no HIV.
And then the computer would spring into action with letters, numbers and charts filling the screen with accounts of age, weight, blood type, organ function tests, dates of previous surgeries.
Recipient #3478: 36-year-old male, needs lungs
Recipient #63: 17-year-old male, awaiting a liver
Recipient #547: 12-year-old female needs a pancreas
Recipient #5670: 8-year-old female on dialysis, close to renal failure
At the top of the list of potential heart recipients: Recipient #6211: 15-year-old female, 5 feet 4, 115 pounds, AB-positive blood type
Can you picture her? It’s not too hard. Pale as snow, tired all the time, terrible circulation, waiting with cold hands, cold everything, for a warm heart.
FOUR
LET’S START WITH THE quick version of my life. When I was born, I almost died and then I didn’t and then I got into collecting Beanie Babies and then I gave away all my Beanie Babies and then I had surgery and then I got a whole lot better. That meant I could play some sports. But I got sick again. I was probably over sports anyway. So when I was too sick to do much of anything, I watched lots of TV shows and movies. And I thought about my past. That’s what you do when you have too much time on your hands. Think, think, think. I was a regular dwell-on-the-past machine. But then I decided, enough of that! And turned my brain 180 degrees in the other direction.
That’s where I am now, contemplating my future.
What about it? What’s out there waiting for me?
What if my future’s like … well, what if it’s like that old movie I saw?
Music, please. Opening credits of Hands of a Stranger. Sixties haircuts and cars. Enter a young, gifted pianist named Vernon, who is smack in the middle of musical stardom. He’s riding high on life, until he’s involved in a car accident in which his hands get mangled like dog meat. Next, enter the well-meaning but ethically challenged surgeon who removes Vernon’s hands and replaces them with a brand-new pair, courtesy of a fresh corpse.
Since the surgery is bizarrely experimental and has never been performed before anywhere on earth, you can bet that Vernon’s insurance company didn’t cover the costs.
So anyway…
After the surgery, reality sets in quicker than a staph infection, which is something that I hope to never, ever have again in my life. It turns out that Vernon’s replacement hands came off the body of a murderer. You know this because the hands were filmed in the kind of creepy black and white that was popular in 1960s low-budget horror films.
It turns out that you can take the hands off a murderer, but you can’t take the murderer off the hands.
If I were writing an essay about this movie, this would be my second paragraph point: Body parts have a mind of their own. The new appendages take Vernon down a very dark path indeed. He starts his murderous rampage with an ex‑girlfriend who didn’t bother to visit him in the hospital; the hands knock her backward over a table, sending romantic candles against the curtains and her whole apartment up in flames.
This last scene isn’t as scary as it sounds, despite the spine-chilling musical accompaniment. As Beth – aka Mom – reminds me, moviegoers back in the sixties had a lot less tolerance for serious bloodletting and decapitations than we do today. The murder scene is actually kind of funny, except if you’re about eight. My cousin Cara came completely and totally unglued and had to sleep with her mother for the rest of the week. Baby! Guess who got blamed for letting Miss Delicate Nerve Endings watch the sci-fi–horror channel?
Me. Moi. Danielle, Dani. That’s who.
I won’t spoil the ending of the movie because you might be home sick from school one day and wind up watching this horror classic. I thoroughly recommend it. Some people might consider it lame, but where they see cheesy acting and disappointingly tame love scenes, I see a thinking person’s medical thriller that turns your brain inside out with questions. Such as:
Is a piano player’s life worthwhile if he can’t play the piano? In other words, why bother living if you can’t follow your passions?
Just how much should medical personnel be mixing and matching body parts?
What makes you you and me me,
besides the standard package of muscles, veins, hair and organs?
I don’t know about people with ordinary medical histories, but I personally can’t get enough of this kind of thinking. My history, to put it mildly, is extensive. If you think you have problems – period cramps, enlarged skin pores, perhaps a cluster of gross warts on your hand – that’s nothing. I’m the belle of the misery ball.
Fifteen years ago, I got taken out of the womb with my heart on the wrong side of my body, the right as opposed to the left. There’s a technical name for it, dextrocardia, but I invented my own: Dani’s Freakish Feng Shui Chest Cavity.
I could have lived just fine like that. No problem. It was all the other crazy stuff, like screwed-up valves and how messed up the wall separating the two sides of my heart was. Nobody expected me to live long, but I did – long enough to start a whole big stink in seventh grade by putting my left hand over my heart during the Pledge of Allegiance. Certain girls accused me of being unpatriotic. It was very gratifying to hear the president of the Young Patriots Club grovel and apologize when my mom set them straight.
So in all honesty and modesty, I’m kind of a medical-miracle person. Just ask Dr Emily Alexander or anyone else in the pediatric cardiology department of Children’s Hospital. I don’t like to publicize myself much because some people might think I’m searching for sympathy, which I’m not. I’m not.
But it’s not fair. I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. I’m not some fatty fat. Still my life has been one long science experiment that nobody ever gets entirely right. I’ve had more X-rays, cath lab appointments, treadmill tests, pre-op exams, intravenous drips and green hospital jelly than any smoking, drinking, fatty sixty-year-old man. Not fair. I don’t want another surgery.
But what I want and what I need exist in different universes. The whole story is in the mirror. Tired brown eyes. Stringy hair and gray skin. My lips look like I’ve been sucking on blue lollipops. I look like what I am, a girl who needs oxygen.
I need a new heart.
I don’t know why they call it a new heart, because it’s obviously going to be a previously used heart. Used by who? What if I get the heart of a murderous deranged nutcase and it pumps all that evil through my body? Or a boy’s heart? A huge, sour-smelling, zit-popping, sweaty-faced boy’s heart? That can’t be good for a person. Or a five-year-old’s heart, a hyper one? How pathetic would that be, now that I’ve gotten so mature?
But those aren’t the questions right now. That’s what Mom keeps reminding me. She says to pray that the beeper from the hospital goes off soon. Because a blue-lipped, cold-handed, gray-skinned fifteen-year-old is in no position to turn up her nose at any heart at all.
FIVE
THE HOSPITAL BEEPER DIDN’T go off. I did.
This was not the one-day-this-pain-will-be-good-for-you kind of pain. If you’re thinking that your life is too cushy and tame and what you need is some intense suffering to get your character maturing, get your pivotal experience some other way. For instance, go backpacking barefoot in the Andes. Get a piercing like the one my mom got the day she turned eighteen and that she says was one of the most stupid things she ever did in her life. The piercing went straight through the edge of her belly button and out the other side.
But back to that morning. As usual, I was in bed with my pink and orange polka-dotted comforter bought on sale at Target, which Mom pronounces in the fake French way – Tar-jay. (That was funny the first time she said it, but not the two-thousandth time.) I was zoned out on a combination of painkillers and TV game shows. I do understand that I’m describing a dream day for many stressed-out, overachieving teens. For me, though, this had become a lifestyle. Most people are nouns; I was a passive verb.
I routinely took diuretics to remove fluid from my body, which – not to sound unladylike or anything – made me pee like Seabiscuit. So at about ten that morning, I needed to go. I really needed to go. But I didn’t want to call Mom for help. If I called her, we would no doubt wind up having the dreaded bedpan conversation again, which always went something like this:
“Just take it into consideration, Dani. Using a bedpan will let you save energy for what really matters.”
“What really matters? Honestly, Beth, what could matter more than getting to pee in the toilet like a normal person?”
“I hate when you call me Beth. I’m Mom.”
“I hate when you push the bedpan on me.”
“Okay, no bedpan.”
“It’s a deal, Mom.”
So as you see, just getting bathroom help meant setting off the whole, exhausting, déjà-vu mother-daughter family dynamic. Which was why on that morning – the morning I’m talking about – I decided not to bother her. I stuck out my tongue at the baby monitor that was always turned on in case of emergencies. I remember moving aside my comforter, my right leg swinging over the edge of the mattress, my foot touching the carpet. I pushed to a seated position and took a minute to gather the strength to stand. I stood.
That’s when it hit. Hot. Cold. A sensation like someone had turned on the air-conditioning and portable heater full blast at the same time. Then a wave of nausea. A far-off ringing came at me, slammed into the side of my head. I remember pain, pain everywhere.
Then nothing. That was it for remembering.
What I don’t remember and learned about only later: My legs buckling and sending me crumpling to the floor hard enough to leave a nasty purple bruise on my forehead. Lovely. My hand knocking the monitor off the table. Mom rushing into my room, her voice shouting into the phone. An ambulance screeching up the street. All the nosy neighbors leaving their apartments to see what the fuss was about. EMTs all over me, pounding my chest, breathing what was surely bad breath through a tube into my mouth. Doors slamming, siren blasting, the ambulance running red lights.
Next thing I do remember was blinking open my eyes, and there they all were in a semicircle around me: my very own grim-faced medical cast of hundreds. White-clad figures with stethoscope necklaces came in and out of focus. Like I was at the bottom of a pool and they were looking down at me from the surface. One by one, they leaned in, shapes swirling. Their faces were huge.
Short, grayish hair. Dr Emily Alexander, pediatric cardiologist.
Bushy black eyebrows. Cardiac surgeon Dr Sean McGarry.
Mole with hair sprouting on left cheek. Dr Jon Bailiff, anesthesiologist.
Brianna V., Monday-through-Friday daytime floor nurse.
Head Nurse Joe.
Dark wavy hair. Mom.
Dr Bruce Lubeck, pediatric cardiology second opinion. “Great,” he said. “She’s back in the world.”
Wires, tubes, needles. Something sharp in my chest, pain along my arms and down my throat. “Ugghhh,” I groaned.
Truthfully, I’m not sure whether I actually made an ugghhh sound, or whether I just had an ugghhh thought that never made its way down from my brain, up through my throat, over my tongue and out into the air where people could actually hear it. I was that out of it. You might think you know what out of it feels like because of certain experimental alcohol or drug use, but you don’t know. You don’t. My eyelids closed.
“Dani? Can you hear me?” Dr Emily, with her calm-in-any-crisis doctor voice.
Now Mom. “Dani, we’re right here. Right next to you.” Did she just squeeze my hand?
Dr Emily again. “Give us a sign, sweetheart. Okay? If you can hear me, let us know. Can you blink for us?”
I felt my eyeballs rolling like pebbles under the lids. But raise the lids? And then lower them again? Blink? She might as well have asked me to jump out of bed and rearrange the furniture.
Touch and go. Once I woke trying to scream “Mom!” and flailed at the wires and tube in my throat. I was in and out of it for days until the doctors finally got me stabilized. Still, I felt bad. I felt bad and headachy and sore all over, like the poor piñata at the end of the birthday party.
“I wish I was dead.”
“No you don’t. You
don’t!” Beth – Mom – has this amazing ability to see happy endings everywhere and tried to assure me that the worst was over. “The breathing tube is out.”
“Why do they call it a breathing tube when it makes it so hard to breathe?”
“And the fluid pressure around your heart is lower.” She stroked my cheek. I think she was trying to rub some color back into it. She picked up my left hand, folded it in hers and kissed it. “Your hands. They’re still so cold.”
“Mom, did you have to miss a lot of work? You missed a lot of work. And what about school?”
In addition to being a single mom and working full-time in a boring real estate office and trying to sell stuff on eBay, Mom went to school two nights a week at the local community college. She was trying to get into the exciting, challenging and financially lucrative career of medical technology. It didn’t exactly feed her creative side, but thanks to my extensive medical history, she had a ridiculous amount of experience in the field.
“Missing a little school? No problem. You know I’m the star of that class. I can afford to take off a few days.”
“Beth! You’re lying.”
“Dani! Don’t call your ancient mother a liar.”
That last part, the “ancient” part, was Beth being ironic, since she’s only seventeen years older than me. Plus, where I’m challenged in the gorgeousness department, Mom is … well, every male doctor in the hospital does a double-take when he first lays eyes on her. I can see their minds hoping for a chance to practice a little mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But she didn’t look so ravishing just then. Her hair was matted, her lips chapped. She wasn’t going to stop anyone in his tracks, not even the potato-shaped orderly who usually drooled over her. I was about to point this out in a constructive way when Dr Emily came in to examine me. Mom released my hand and moved aside.