“Do I need surgery?” I ask, my chest already tightening up in anticipation of the answer.
My mom and dad look at each other again, and I really want to shake them this time, because I know they know I hate it when they treat me like a baby who can’t handle uncomfortable information. If there’s something important going on, I want to know what it is. I like to have answers.
But before I can ask another question, there’s a knock at the door.
“Hello?”
A man wearing green surgical scrubs appears in the doorway and my mom and dad stand up.
“Please come in,” my mom says. “She’s awake.”
A smile spreads across his face as he walks toward me.
“Nice to meet you, Chloe. I’m Dr. Ahmadi.”
According to Dr. Ahmadi, here’s what (not who) is responsible for breaking my heart:
Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Dysplasia. ARVD for short.
It’s a rare form of cardiomyopathy — a cellular defect — and it’s been slowly killing the muscle tissue of my right ventricle, probably for years. Maybe since I was born. The resulting scars are now making it hard for my heart to do what it’s supposed to do. Like beat hard enough to oxygenate my blood. Which is not exactly something a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and an ugly cry is going to fix.
ARVD is why I collapsed on my high school’s track. Why I have been feeling so tired and out of breath recently.
Why I’m going to need a new heart.
And it’s why, if I don’t get one soon, I’m going to die.
I’m going to die before I turn eighteen. I’m going to die before I graduate high school. Before I get to go to college, visit Tokyo, climb the Eiffel Tower, fall in love, own a dog, and become the first scientist to confirm the existence of life on another planet. Oh my god, I think. What else? I don’t even know all the things that I want to do, to see, to taste, hear, and touch, because I assumed I had plenty of time to figure it out. A lifetime of it.
Dr. Ahmadi tells us that, based on my condition and my age, the chances are good that I’ll be given a priority position on the transplant waiting list.
And then we will be in the very awkward, awful situation of hoping that someone who is not me might die instead.
So I can live.
Somewhere — close by? far away? — I hear an alarm. Is it a hospital monitor, alerting nurses to come running? Or is it the phone on my nightstand, in my bedroom, at home? I’m stuck again in that weird in-between place that bridges asleep and awake, where I’m not sure if I can trust my senses.
Is what’s happening right now really happening, or is it a dream?
Where am I?
What am I supposed to be doing today?
I never got stuck like this before. Before everything that happened with my heart, I always woke up with a plan, hardly remembering my dreams. My brain would already be busy preparing for the day ahead: the French quiz scheduled for first period, the English paper that I needed to revise during study hall, the cross-country meet after school.
But now, I sometimes struggle to ground myself. Am I in my room, or someplace else? Sometimes I forget when it is, forget that it’s morning and not night, that it’s almost summer and not fall, that more than eight months have passed and I’m not still running side by side with Emma in the second week of October during our senior year. Sometimes . . . sometimes I open my eyes and wonder, for many more seconds than is comfortable, if I’m living or if I’m dead.
Spoiler alert: I’m still alive. My heart? Not so much.
Now I have a new one, and a lot of things are different. Not just different — strange.
The most obvious is the scar. It runs from the top of my collarbone to my abdomen and makes me feel like the Bride of Frankenstein, who, as you may know, was also brought back to life using borrowed parts. This is why, technically speaking, I guess I shouldn’t even call it a “new” heart.
If I want to be 100 percent accurate, it’s recycled.
Repurposed.
Reanimated.
One that previously belonged to someone else.
Until a fog-shrouded night this past December — one week before Christmas — when it was extracted from my donor’s still-warm body and transplanted into mine.
We both had run into some serious bad luck.
My luck, as we know, turned south that day I collapsed during cross-country practice. And two months later, a trauma of some sort rendered my donor’s head pretty much kaput.
Healthy heart. Dead brain. An ideal match for a patient on the list.
A patient like me.
True story: The national transplant waiting list is the only list I’ve ever made it to the top of for failing rather than succeeding. My heart was getting a big fat F in keeping me alive, and that’s one consideration that moves you to the front of the line. Minors also generally get priority over older people, who have less of their lives ahead of them, I suppose. How much you have in common with your donor determines the rest. Blood types need to be compatible. Proximity is also important, since hearts, in particular, have a limited shelf life. My donor had O positive blood, just like me. We also lived within thirty miles of each other, which is how, on the night I got the call, I was able to be in surgery, buzz saw poised over my sternum, within minutes of my partner-in-bad-luck’s official pronouncement of death.
And now we’re not partners in anything anymore. It’s just me left standing, trying to wrap my head around everything that’s different, and strange, and not like how I’d thought.
So what else? In addition to the scar, there are a lot of pills. Pills to take in the morning. Pills to take at night. Pills that I can’t forget or else I’ll break this heart too, and then I’ll be back on that horrible list, waiting again for someone who is not me to die. Or not waiting, if it’s me who does the dying. This is why my mom makes me carry around one of those plastic dispensers with a tiny compartment for each day of the week, just like my grandma.
I also used to run all the time, but now I don’t. I used to be a vegetarian, but now I’m not. I used to have every minute of my life scheduled, but now I have hours, sometimes whole days, where I do nothing but watch back-to-back episodes of Parks and Recreation and The Walking Dead and leaf through the stack of comics I bought at the used bookstore downtown.
I used to never have nightmares.
But the most different thing of all, especially for everyone who knew me before, is that I’m now a high school dropout. Well, sort of. I missed more than half of my senior year, so I’m making it up in summer school, which is full of actual dropouts, like Jane Kessler, who tells me she flunked trig; and Brian Felder, who didn’t graduate because he had to go to one of those rehab camps for World of Warcraft addicts. So instead of doing a research-lab summer internship like I’d planned, I’ve been spending my weekdays in the nearly empty school library, staring blankly at an open Google doc and pretending to make headway on the essay I need to turn in about The Grapes of Wrath. Normally, this is something I could probably wrap up with one hand tied behind my back, but the “Symbolism of the Turtle in Chapter Three” is eluding me. Does anyone really care why John Steinbeck wrote about a turtle crossing the road? I know I sure don’t. Not at the moment, anyway, which is not . . . like me.