Last week, we left off after I received the call that a heart was available. Gidget woke me up from where I was curled up on the bathroom floor to answer my cellphone. That excerpt ended when I walked out the apartment door to drive myself to the hospital in the middle of the night.
That call turned out to be a “dry run,” the term used for a call for a transplant that didn’t end up happening. But I did get the call again three days later, and that call resulted in the heart that is currently beating in my chest.
You can read about the three days between the two calls here:
Transplant Week Celebration
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October 3, 2025
Welcome to my favorite week of the year! This week is the anniversary of my second heart transplant, and so much more! Come along with me as I re-live and savor the wonderful memories of that week with you.
October 16th, 2018, I woke up after ten days on the ventilator. During that time, I endured a series of complications and setbacks. Reviewing the MyChart summary of that time, I can read the list devoid of emotion, but my memories are anything but emotionless.
The hardest issue was ICU Delerium. The whole time I was on the ventilator, I thought I was everywhere else but the ICU. Even after I woke up, it took a few weeks before I felt any certainty in differentiating between hallucination and reality. I was messed up for a while.
During the time that my mind was off wandering without me, I thought a lot about Gidget McFidget. Many of my hallucinations/dreams/fantasies were about searching for her, or finding her, or her rescuing me from my situation.
Below is a short excerpt about some of those mental fabrications that seemed 100% real to me at the time.
Although my memories of what happened in the real world stopped, my memories of what happened in my mind are still very vivid. The medical terminology for what occurred after surgery is “ICU delirium.” In my heavily drugged state, I became convinced they had canceled the transplant again but did not send me home. Instead, the hospital staff harbored some nefarious plot to harvest my organs and give them to other patients.
Jay tried to communicate with me, but the ventilator occupied my mouth, allowing only scribbled messages. Unable to focus my mind long enough to write a coherent message, I wrote “Amity” on the notepad then drifted back into my delirium. When Jay showed me the message weeks later, I vaguely remembered the message meant to say, “Amy is trying to kill me.” No one named Amy was involved in my care, and I have no idea if “Amy” represented a real person or a figment of my imagination.
Immediately following my surgery, I experienced a brief but extremely vivid hallucination involving both Jay and Gidget. I imagined a skywalk ran from the apartment complex, across the busy street, and into the hospital. The enclosed walkway narrowed as it crossed the street, shrinking down to a tube similar to a water slide. As the tube narrowed, porthole-like openings appeared along either side. Outside of those openings were monsters reaching long arms tipped with wicked claws through the holes, trying to grab and devour anyone inside.
From my perspective at the end nearest the hospital, lying on my back with my feet pointed toward the apartment side of the street, I could see Jay and Gidget running toward me, and he dropped the leash so she could sprint ahead to meet me.
Suddenly, one of the creatures caught Jay by his leg, causing him to fall. The zombie pressed its face against the porthole, slobbering for his flesh. Gidget sprinted back to Jay and stopped abruptly in front of him, going into her poopy stance to drop a fresh-steaming, tiny turd right in front of his face. Without hesitation, Jay bare-handed that turd into the monster’s mouth then jumped up and continued running toward me.
I heard people calling my name and yanking at me, trying to pull me out of the hospital end of the tube. I fought to stay in the tube, waiting until Gidget reached my side, but they wouldn’t stop pulling. With one last jerk, I slid out of the tube as if from a birth canal and found myself lying on a gurney in the middle of the street. A teenage girl with an edgy buzz cut and dark lipstick stood in front of me. Her petite frame was draped in a hospital gown that matched mine. In her hands, she held a human heart.
“Here’s another twenty years,” she said as she presented the heart to me. “Don’t fuck it up.”
At the time, I believed I met my donor.
Later, I became aware of being in a room in the ICU. In the hallway, a heavy door to a storage closet periodically closed with a loud, metallic thud. In my delirious state, I manufactured the story that the sound came from a guillotine, and each time it made the thud, they were chopping off another head. I lay awake in my hospital bed, ventilator tube blocking my screams and silent tears running from the corners of my eyes, as I waited in terror for my turn at the guillotine.
The next fabricated horror came a day or two later when I went down to the OR for my first post-transplant biopsy to check for rejection. The gurney had a defective wheel which made a loud “clack-clack-clack” as I wheeled through the hallways.
In my drug-addled haze, I took the sound and imagined I rode in a helicopter, being choppered away to a separate location until a suitable recipient for my organs matched with me. Although I returned to the same room in the ICU, my mind secreted me away in a hidden bunker in the mountains of Tennessee, not too far from where my father lived.
While I still pictured myself hidden in a bunker, my borrowed heart began to have sustained runs of atrial flutter, and the medical staff attempted to cardiovert me multiple times with the defibrillator paddles. I saw fireworks behind my eyes and heard explosions in my head and interpreted this as gunfire.
The storyteller in me created a scenario where my father and Jay had come to rescue me, and they were having a shootout with my captors. Since I remained in my hospital bed, I assumed they were killed and wept for their loss. It was my fault they died, and I choked on guilt and the ventilator tube.
My new husband had returned to our home in Michigan to tie up loose ends at our house and with his employer, and my father was at his home two hours away. For much of the time I spent in ICU, I was alone with no friends or family to visit me. Without a familiar voice or touch, I became untethered from the real world.
I believed myself to be held captive in a strange facility far away from the hospital, my loved ones gone and no one else to come to my salvation. I dug down deep to the core where the mammalian drive for survival resided. For most of my life, my survival depended solely on my ability to fend for myself, and this situation was no different. I chose to fight for my life and make my escape.
When medical staff approached my bed and attempted to provide care, I started swinging my fists, even while on the ventilator. I kicked at anyone within range. They solved the issue with soft restraints on all four limbs, effectively tying me, hand and foot, to the bed. Although necessary for both my safety and theirs, the restraints only had the effect of deepening my delirium.
During one of these episodes of combative delirium where I thrashed back and forth in the bed, fighting against the restraints and threatening the integrity of my chest incision, the nurses decided to pack pillows on either side of me to gently hold me still. Of course, my inflamed imagination believed they had summoned Hellhounds to tear me limb from limb. Instead, I laughed at their foolishness as the great beasts crawled into the bed, on either side of me, to protect me from my captors.
In my mind, I traveled back nearly twenty years to when I owned Spot and Dozer, a goofy pair of massive mixed breed dogs who each weighed over 100 pounds. I often referred to the two extra-large dogs as “Mama’s little Hellhounds.” Believing the alleged Hellhounds to be Spot and Dozer come back to protect their mama, I stopped my thrashing and snuggled into the pillows. That night, I slept peacefully for the first time in many nights, my safety assured by the loving devotion of two dogs who managed to comfort me long after their natural lifespans ended.
During my time in delirium, the TV in my hospital room remained tuned to programs such as talk shows, game shows, and court dramas. The morning after being soothed to sleep by the imagined presence of Spot and Dozer, I opened my eyes to find the TV tuned to Animal Planet.
Mallory’s face smiled down at me from the TV screen. Mallory, a scruffy white terrier, had been my special girl before Gidget, and she reigned supreme over Spot and Dozer back in their day. She had been my heart and soul when I underwent my first heart transplant, and now she had come back to comfort me for the second one.
“Mallory,” I whispered.
On the television, an episode of “Too Cute” featured several West Highland White terrier puppies running and playing together. For the first time in many days, my mind focused on the real world. It wasn’t Mallory, but several little white pups who were nearly identical frolicked on the TV screen.
The nurse on duty noticed my alertness. Approaching me cautiously, she said “Good morning. How are you today?”
Looking up, I saw a beautiful Black woman wearing perfectly applied makeup. She glowed with such beauty I thought she was an angel.
“I love your eyebrows,” my first words after getting a new lease on life. In all fairness, her eyebrows were on point.
Soon, multiple figures in white coats surrounded my bed. I could not see their faces or tell how many people were there since I still lay flat on my back. They came to see if I had returned to my senses.
“Do you know what day it is?” one white coat asked me.
“I’m not sure. I got here on October fourth. What day is today?”
“It’s October sixteenth.”
“Oh wow!” The lost time both surprised and saddened me. “That’s twelve days.”
“Do you know where you are and why you are here?”
I knew this answer. “I’m at Vanderbilt for a heart transplant. Did I get the transplant? Do I have a new heart?”
“Yes, the surgery was successful, and you have a strong new heart.”
“Oh, thank goodness.” The fear of becoming a donor instead of a recipient still lingered.
The doctor continued his questioning to determine the soundness of my mind. “Do you know who the president of the United States is?”
Without thinking, or stopping to filter myself, I blurted out, “That Asshole!” This brought a burst of laughter from several people in the room.
“Well, she’s not wrong,” someone commented.
Finding me to be alert and oriented, they authorized the removal of my restraints.
Later, when the nurse gave me my first sponge bath in a couple weeks, she asked if I brought any personal care items with me. I directed her to my bag in the closet. It held everything I could need, including scented lotions and lip balm. Having been a long-term hospital resident in the past, I knew just how dry my skin would be and planned accordingly. It felt so good to get cleaned up, and I welcomed the relief of the lotion on my skin for both the moisture and the fragrance.
When the nurse rummaged through my bag for toiletries, she found my cellphone. Saved in my photos, I found the wedding video filmed by the county clerk’s assistant, proof that our wedding had not been another figment of my imagination.
Tears sprang to my eyes as I watched the video of our wedding ceremony and scrolled through the pictures of our first kiss as husband and wife. I also looked at the most recent pictures of Gidget, and I choked back a sob when I thought about how much I missed both Jay and her. I longed to hold them both in my arms.
The last picture in my camera roll made me laugh out loud as I saw the drugged-out grin on my face in the pre-surgical selfie. I wondered how I looked now and opened the camera for a post-surgery selfie. After a glimpse of my haggard face and battered body, I quickly closed the camera app. There would be no selfies happening today.
Looking through my cell phone helped me fill in more of the blanks from my missing time. Jay carried it with him until he left to go back to Michigan, and he posted several updates on my social media to keep my friends informed of my progress. Reading his updates brought joy to my heart. His words were loving, sincere, and often funny. I read them in his voice and loved him even more.
He chose one picture I saved of a friend’s foster dog, a little white chihuahua named “Bianca.” In the photo, she wore a frilly pink gingham dress and posed in a white baby crib against an apple green wall. Jay found this picture to be amusing and uplifting, and he posted it to my social media during my surgery, saying the image brought a welcome bit of joy into this long and stressful time.
Several pictures of Gidget appeared among his posts, as he documented their time waiting together for my return. In most of the pictures, they were out walking around Nashville to distract them from their worries, but she always had her nose to the ground, sniffing for my scent as if she intended to track me down like a bloodhound.
He later told me that on that first walk, she led him directly to the hospital. She knew where I was and would have found her way to my side if given the opportunity.
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