Second Hand Heart Read Online Free PDF

little detail. The radio was playing. Some kind of semi-mellow classic rock.
    The thing I remember best was the weird thin medical drape they had on my body, actually stuck on to my skin. It has iodine in it, so it’s kind of reddish-yellowish, and I thought it was my skin at first, and it made me look like a corpse. It made my skin look papery and weird, like I was a hundred years old, or even like I was decomposing. It was shocking to me.
    That and the cauterizing smell. It’s really hard to forget that smell.
    I never checked the details with anybody after I came out of surgery, and I never told anybody what I either dreamed or saw. Because I knew it would freak my mother out. Because, if it wasn’t a dream, then it was something like being dead for a minute. I mean, if your heart isn’t beating, what’s that? Under the circumstances, hard to say.
    But I’ve learned in my life that not everything that happens needs to be talked about. Some things are better left alone.
    Anyway, back to my talk with Dr. Vasquez.
    While I was thinking about all that stuff, she was telling me more details of the surgery, and what to expect, but I was only half-listening and I don’t remember enough to write them down now. I think a lot of it was about the heart-lung machine, though. How it’ll circulate my blood while nothing else can. As if I didn’t know that already.
    “Anything else you want to know?”
    “Is the heart here yet?”
    “No, but it’s being harvested. Right now. They had an option on when to harvest, because the donor was being kept alive artificially. But it’ll be on its way soon.”
    And I thought, Good. Maybe more time to write. “Are you going to take me into the operating room and take out my heart while you’re waiting for it?”
    “We’re going to take you into the OR while we’re waiting, yes. But we won’t take you past what we call the point of no return. I think you know what I mean by that. Not until we see that donor heart walk through the door. Not that there’s likely to be any trouble. But you just never know. What if the helicopter crashed?”
    “What difference does it make? I’ll die without it either way.”
    “It makes a difference,” she said.
    I figured she meant to her. I’m not sure how much difference it makes to me.
    “Can I ask you a favor?” I said.
    “Sure. Anything.”
    “I know the last two times you operated on me you used those defibrillator paddles on my heart. To get it to start again.” I hadn’t actually seen that. I just knew from being told. “And that’s OK, because it was my old heart. But I read that sometimes a transplanted heart will start beating on its own. Not always, but sometimes. Sometimes you can just warm it up and it’ll start to beat. So maybe you could give this one a chance. You know. To beat on its own. Because I feel like it’s sort of a guest. In a weird sort of way. I’ll just be getting to know it, and vice versa. And I want to get off on the right foot with it. You know. Be welcoming. Treat it as politely as we can.”
    She smiled, but I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. I was hoping she was listening to me with the right side of her brain, or with both sides at least, and not entirely from the professional side on the left.
    “Circumstances will have to dictate that,” she said. “But I’ll keep your request in the back of my mind. We’ll be as welcoming as we can.”
    “Thanks,” I said. “One more thing. It’s about my journal.”
    “OK. What about your journal?”
    “I want to write something about my transplant surgery in my journal. But I won’t be able to. Because I’ll miss the whole thing. So I was hoping you would.”
    “You want me to write in your journal?”
    “About the surgery. Yeah.”
    “What do you want me to write?”
    “I don’t know. Anything that seems important. Anything you want. It’ll be at the nurse’s station. I can’t give it to you now because I need to work on it some