I’m gettingsomeone else’sheart.
My fingers shake so hard when I reach for my cell phone that I can barely unlock it. It rings twice before my mom answers.
“Hello?”
Her voice is only slightly louder than the raucous noises of my brothers near her. I can picture them wrestling with some video game blasting in the background.
“Hey, Mom.” My voice quavers with the gravity of my news.
“Boys! Turn that off! I can’t even hear myself think, let alone your sister!” Her words are muffled—she’s covered the phone with her hand to yell at them. The video game goes quiet, and then she says, “Sorry, hon, you know how crazy the boys are. How are you?”
Talia continues to cry, her hands pressed against her mouth, and Dr. Nielsen nods at me, his eyes liquid and bright.
I try to speak, to tell my mom,I’m going to live, but that’s when the sob rises, choking away my words.
“Liv? Are you okay? What’s going on?”
My voice breaks, each word a struggle against the flood of feeling inside me. “Mom, I got a heart.”
There’s a sharp intake of breath, then nothing except silence until one of the boys says, “Mom, why are you crying?”
“It’s Livvy,” she manages thickly. “She’s getting a heart!” The boys don’t cry; they start whooping and cheering, and it makes me grin through my tears. After a moment, Mom says, “I’m coming. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
I nod, though she can’t see me, because even though the heart is apparently hours away, a sudden, desperateplease-hurry-come-nowneed for my mom to be here strangles my words.
“I’m coming, baby girl,” she repeats fervently. “I love you.”
“Love you too,” I manage, and then she hangs up.
When I set the phone down, Dr. Nielsen comes to the other side of my bed and takes my free hand. “We’re going to make sure everything goes perfectly, okay? When your mom gets here, I’ll explain more details of what’s going to happen, and then we have to start prepping you for surgery. As Barb mentioned, it’s a very tight timeframe, so we’re going to have you ready and waiting for the second the heart arrives.”
I nod and whisper, “Thank you,” as if he personally had found me this heart. Which, in a way, he did by giving me the time to have one come to me.
He and Barb each squeeze one of my hands again, and then he nods to Barb. “Let’s give her a minute.” They murmur congratulations and leave me alone with Talia.
Once they shut the door, Talia launches out of her chair and grabs me into a hug—careful of all the machines andtubes I’m hooked up to—shaking with the force of her emotions. “I can’t believe it. You’re getting a new heart, Livvy. You’re going to make it.”
But the tears that slip down my cheeks are more complex than hers. I think of the countless prayers I know she, my mom, my brothers, and so many other people have sent to heaven on my behalf—pleading with God for this moment to come over and over andover. I never could though.
Not after I realized what we wereactuallypraying for.
“You’re getting a new heart,” Talia repeats, soft with wonder.
“More like a gently used heart,” I joke, but it falls flat.
“Compared to your current heart, I definitely think you can check the box that says, ‘like new.’”
I release a shaky breath, tremulous with grief. “Because someone elsedied.”
Talia stiffens and pulls back. “Oh, Olivia.”
My shoulders cave in, and I drop my face into my hands. Iwilllive, finally breaking free from the prison of this hospital room and the LVAD machine. But somewhere else, someone else is never going to open her eyes again. Never walk out of the hospital her body lies in, as they cut her heart from her chest to save me from the same fate. The prayers of those who care about me have been answered ... while in another corner of the world, God ignored the desperate cries of another family.
Talia’s hands come to rest on my shoulders, forcing me to meet her earnest gaze. “I know I can’t ever understand what you’ve been through. Or how hard it must be to know that someone had to die for you to live. But if it were me—ifIhad died and had the choice to save someone else with my death—I wouldn’t want that person to feel bad. I would wantthem to experience as much happiness as possible since I wouldn’t have the chance to.”
I crumple forward, pressing my forehead into Talia’s shoulder. “I’ll try,” I say. But I know what it’s like to bury someone you love, to look at a once-familiar face turned waxen, lifeless, and foreign way too early in their life. I know what the family in the waiting room somewhere else in this country is going through. Grief like that never leaves you—it roots in your body, lodging in your bones, echoing in the hole they’ve left behind.
I don’t know how to reconcile being so heartbroken for them while feeling so relieved for myself. Any joy I dare let myself feel is consumed by the simultaneous guilt.
