Mack was flown to us at the university hospital nearly dead. He had contracted a vicious virus that had attacked his heart, and despite every available medication, a ventilator, and a cardiac assist pump, his heart failure was so severe that his organs were shutting down.
Mack was sent to us in the hope that he could be saved with a heart transplant.
His wife had died a year earlier, around Christmas, and now his daughter Lisa, 15, faced the loss of her remaining parent, again at Christmastime. She was alone with her desperately ill father, no siblings or grandparents.
I was in my fifth year of surgical training and had always had an interest in heart surgery and cardiac transplantation. I had been honing my skills by doing heart-lung transplants on pigs. Twice a day, while making rounds on the fading Mack, I spoke with Lisa, and was impressed with her composure in the face of catastrophe.
As Christmas approached, it appeared that we would lose Mack. Cardiac donors are rare, especially on such short notice. The competition for organs is fierce.
It was the afternoon of Christmas Eve when the call came. A young man had suffered an irreversible brain injury in a car crash in a neighboring state, and his family had agreed to donate the otherwise undamaged organs.
I was assigned the task of flying to the donor’s hospital and retrieving the heart.
As darkness fell in the midwinter afternoon, I boarded a helicopter to the airport (no time lost here), carrying a few instruments and a Playmate cooler, like the one you carry beers to the beach, to carry the heart.
At the private airport terminal, a leased corporate jet belonging to “Mrs. Fields Cookies” was waiting, engines hot. The jet was bright gold with green and red trim.
Sitting in this ultra plush vessel hurtling through night at 600 mph, the enormity of the situation pressed on me like G forces. Even though I was 31 years old, with 13 years of training since high school, I’d always had some degree of supervision, someone to check what I was doing, someone to call. Now, I was alone on this mission, and it really, really mattered that I perform it perfectly.
We got to the hospital before the donor was taken to the OR, and I saw the family saying goodbye to the young man at the door. It was a wrenching scene, his mother stroking his hair, a scene I wished I hadn’t witnessed.
Fortunately, the OR crew and the anesthesiologist were great, and the prep and procedure began smoothly. A team from Pittsburgh was there to harvest the liver and kidneys, three guys of Middle Eastern descent, who murmured softly during the case and radiated competence. Trying my best to keep it together, I split the breastbone and exposed the heart without incident. I encircled the big arteries and veins going in and out of the heart carefully (the scary part), and when the liver/kidney guys were ready, I clamped the aorta and infused a cold solution into the heart to both stop and preserve it. Using a large scissors, I removed the heart, put it in double freezer bags, and placed it in a cold bath inside the Playmate cooler. Whew.
On the flight back, high over the mountains in the crystalline night, the moon improbably below us, I felt suspended in a supernatural dimension. It is Christmas Eve, and I was flying through the night in a green and gold high tech sleigh owned by a company that makes cookies. I had just worked with the three Wise Men. Not only were we carrying the greatest possible gift, but I had received a gift as well. I could do this.
I thought of Lisa, alone and frightened, her father now in an operating room on a heart-lung machine. His failed heart had been removed, and his and Lisa’s future, a piece of muscle, now lay in a beer cooler 30,000 feet in the air. Where was Mack? Is there an out-of-body lounge somewhere in the cosmos where you wait while your life is adjudicated?
I thought of another very young woman, over two thousand years ago, frightened, pregnant, away from home, about to deliver in a decidedly non-sterile stable with a bunch of sheep around. She has endured the shock of a celestial visitation and conception, and no doubt the skepticism of neighbors in her unmarried state, and now must deliver a son, who will be the Christ, and that, like the mother of the donor, she will give her son’s life to others.
We landed in a light snow, and after another helicopter ride, I delivered the cooler with tremendous relief. The Big Boys implanted the heart, and after restoring circulation, the organ sprang to life, beating furiously as if to make up for the lassitude of its predecessor.
The sun was peaking over the mountains, electrifying the new snow, as I entered the waiting room to see Lisa. She was alert and calm, more than I was, as the emotion of the night barely allowed me to croak out “It is a good heart, and he is doing very well.”
There is no greater gift than the gift of life. It doesn’t have to have the drama of a heart transplant. It can be a touch, the act of listening, a gentle reassurance that a person is valued and valuable. We can all bring the gift of life, without a sleigh, without a star, but with our own heart full of the gifts we have received.
Reader Comments(0)