Second Hand Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

heart! Granted, it’s not much of a heart, but it’s mine. I’ve had it all my life. It’s me. After all.
    Who will I be without it?
    But I didn’t say any of that to Dr. Vasquez, because she has an important job ahead of her, and I didn’t want what she was about to do to seem any weirder or more complicated than necessary. To her, I mean. Even though I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that this was probably a lot weirder for me than it was for her. She does heart transplants all the time. This is my first.
    She stood by my bed and reached out for my hand, and I gave it to her.
    She asked me how I was doing.
    Probably seems like a simple enough question. At least from the outside of me.
    I said I figured I was as close to OK as anybody could be in my position, and she smiled in a way that made me think she was actually listening. (Lots of people will ask you how you’re doing, but usually when you answer, if you pay close attention, you’ll see they’re not really listening.) She asked me if there was anything I wanted to know about the surgery. You know. Any final questions.
    I said at this point I was thinking maybe the less I knew about it the better, and she laughed a little.
    “Really?” she wanted to know.
    “No, I’m kidding,” I said. “You can tell me.”
    “Well. You know an awful lot about heart surgery already. Too much for a girl your age, really … I wish you didn’t have to be such an expert. This probably seems like a really unique surgery, and it is in some regards, but the basic sequence of events isn’t all that different from the procedures you’ve had in the past. In some ways it’s simpler. We make the same size incision. Saw through the sternum the same way, except this time we have to go through more of the wire sutures left from the last couple of procedures. And you probably know about how we use a cauterizing tip to keep the bleeding down—”
    “Yeah,” I said. “I hate that thing. It smells really bad.” She looked at me, kind of curious.
    “Who told you that?”
    Then I knew I’d made a mistake by talking about something I promised myself a long time ago I would never talk about.
    “Oh,” I said. “That’s a long story. Never mind about that.”
    See, back when I had that third procedure, when I was four, I either saw or dreamed part of what happened. I have no idea which, and I probably never will.
    I just know I saw myself on the table, except I couldn’t see my head at all because it was behind these blue drapes. My chest wall was pried open with that big metal separator, and Dr. Vasquez was standing there, along with one other surgeon and three nurses and the anesthesia guy and the heart-lung machine guy. Staring down at my heart. Watching it stop. She’d put a bunch of ice in there, on my heart. To slow it down and stop it. I could see the wet chunks of it filling up that cavity in my chest.
    Actually, the heart-lung machine guy and the anesthesia guy weren’t looking down into my chest. They were too far away from the table for that. They were watching the monitors. But it amounts to more or less the same thing, because they were still watching my heart stop. Even a four-year-old knows what it means when that red line goes flat. At least, this four-year-old did.
    After a minute she lifted out the bulk of the ice and suctioned out the rest, and I could see the two thick tubes of blood going from me to the heart-lung machine, and how the blood was a different shade of red coming and going.
    While she worked, Dr. Vasquez kept stopping to use that cauterizing tip on anything that was still bleeding, and when it touched the bloody live tissue it made this little wisp of smoke or steam, and the smell was bad.
    Do you dream a smell? Maybe. But probably not.
    I watched her for a minute or two, from high up, and I could see really well. I could see straight down. It’s almost like I was watching from up where the lights were.
    Oh, and just one other weird