We have returned home after the eight-year checkup on my transplanted heart. Everything looks good, which is reassuring, but I did hear one phrase I really disliked. Now that this heart has been with me for nearly eight years, one doctor referred to her as “a mature heart.”
My donor was a teenage girl, and I’ve always thought of her as forever stuck at that age, but she would be in her mid-twenties by now. Looking back at myself at that age, I was not very mature, but I don’t think they are talking about emotional maturity in this situation.
The donor of my first transplanted heart was a teenage boy, and he got me through just shy of thirteen years. If this heart follows the same trajectory, it’s technically past the midway point, beginning the downhill slide into functional decline and eventual failure. The thought haunts me more than it should.
And I still haven’t made it to Paris.
Ever since I was a bright-eyed sixteen-year-old girl, I’ve dreamed of going to Paris. I want to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower and tour the Louvre, viewing some of the great artworks in person, although I hear that the Mona Lisa is disappointingly small. My husband has been there, and he waves it off as just a minor thing, but he has no idea how great my desire really is.
My other great wish is to breathe the air inside the Sistine Chapel and get a crick in my neck from looking up at Michaelangelo’s masterpiece. He is my favorite Renaissance painter. I have to insert the qualifier of his era because my favorite overall painter is Frida Kahlo, with Salvador Dali a close second. I guess Surrealism is closer to my true aesthetic.
The girl in my chest is starting to show her age. If you’ve been following along, you know I was in the hospital over the Fourth of July weekend for arrythmias. My symptoms have changed during the course of recent months, moving from supraventricular tachycardia to atrial fibrillation, but I guess the real truth according to the doctor is that my atria – the top chambers of my heart – have been remodeling. I hope she picked out some good décor for her remodel.
The doctor tells me that it’s not unusual for transplanted hearts to undergo some minor structural changes as they age (there’s that maturity again). Since I can’t tolerate the meds that would control the rhythm changes, I have been scheduled for an ablation. Maybe the surgeon can give me a little nip and tuck while he’s in there. One of the nurses mentioned that he’s very good at “rejuvenating” hearts. Of course, my bizarre mind had to think of this ad I saw in a doctor’s office a long time ago.
After all of my medical visits were completed, my husband and I wandered over to a little indie theater not far from the hospital, in Hillsboro Village – the area of Nashville where we used to live. They were showing the Mary Oliver movie, and I was elated by this discovery. It’s a documentary style movie about her life, her loves, and her poetry. It has Oprah, Steve Colbert, and several other celebrities, and lots and lots of dogs. She loved her dogs.
As I contemplate the existential trepidation of my own mortality, I can’t help but compare the lifespan of both hearts. In a way, I feel like I haven’t accomplished as much with my second heart as I did with the first, but I know that’s the pressure of “productivity culture” punishing me for not attaining visible achievements.
With the first heart, I returned to work in less than a year and continued my career for another eleven years. I helped raise my two stepsons through high school and college graduation. I co-founded an animal rescue that saved the lives of nearly a thousand small animals including dogs, cats, rabbits, and guinea pigs. Those are visible, measurable goals.
This second heart has been focused on personal desires more than externally notable metrics. The timing of this transplant contributed to this altered trajectory.
The transplant itself was in October 2018, and we were required to stay in Nashville for a full year following the surgery. We finally got back to our home in Michigan in October 2019. I focused on getting through the holidays and a kitchen remodel in January/February before I let myself think about returning to work. And then March 2020 arrived with the Covid shutdown. My doctors didn’t want me to return to any kind of public role for a couple years, so I became a sort of recluse in our home. That’s when I turned to my lifelong love of writing.
What I have accomplished with this heart includes completing multiple drafts of my memoir about the two heart transplants and a draft of my memoir about growing up in a dysfunctional family beset by poverty and trying to survive early adulthood with a history of childhood trauma and a heart defect. The first is basically ready to query, while the second still needs more polish. But querying is a daunting task, so I have procrastinated.
I’ve been writing poems about my journey through transplant for the past twenty years, and I found an amazing poet friend who helped me edit and structure my debut poetry chapbook which will be released in June 2027. Pre-orders begin in February, and I plan to share that link everywhere and with everyone, so brace yourself. Last year was consumed by caring for my father in hospice, and an entirely new batch of poetry emerged from that experience. My poet friend has that manuscript now, and I plan to send that out to prospective publishers by the end of this year.
When I put it down on paper, I guess I have done a lot with this heart. I lived a dream I’ve had since I was a small child. I wrote, and I published. That little girl hiding behind the couch with a dog-eared copy of “The Idylls of the King” would be proud.
“Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.” – Sylvia Plath
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