January 6, 2024
Today’s date is more than a mere page on the calendar to me. It is a milestone.
Today is the eighteenth anniversary of my first heart transplant. January 6, 2006.
This time of year is always fraught with emotion for me, and a perpetual cloud hangs over the holidays no matter how hard I try to chase it away with cookies and glitter and music.
I spent Christmas 2005 in the hospital waiting for a heart to become available. While I sat in my hospital bed, I tried my best to reconcile two incompatible thoughts, holding the yin and yang of two disparate futures in my hands. For me to live, someone else must die. Although I sought solace in the knowledge that my donor’s death was inevitable, I felt some guilt as I waited for the doctors to walk through the door of my hospital room and tell me I would live because of another’s death. Only one of us could survive.
By now you know a heart did become available in time to save my life. A young man named Roy passed away, and his family generously chose to donate his organs to save the lives of others, including mine. I owe eternal gratitude to his family for making that selfless decision in their time of grief.
But my story began long before the transplant. In early January of 2004, I went to the Emergency Department of my local hospital with a terrible cold or pneumonia, unable to breathe more than small gasps. There, I was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, CHF. It was a death sentence at the relatively young age of thirty-six. My only hope for survival was a heart transplant.
For twenty of the past fifty-six years, I’ve lived with either heart failure or a heart transplant, swallowing a fistful of pills every day. That’s thirty-six percent of my life. Even before my condition reached critical mass shortly after my thirty-sixth birthday, I lived with the congenital heart defect of Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy, HCM, since birth, although it wasn’t diagnosed until I was seven years old.
Without the generosity of two different organ donors, and the miraculous advancements of medical science, I would not be alive today. Indeed, if I had been born into this world in my grandmother’s day, I probably would have died in childbirth as a young woman. Medical advancements save lives. I encourage everyone to get your heart health checked and get a checkup for your children as well. There are medications today for HCM that were not available when I was young.
Additionally, I implore each and every one of you to register to become an organ donor. It only takes a minute by going online to register at the link below. You could be the hero who saves the life of someone just as wonderful as me and you!
https://www.organdonor.gov/sign-up
This is a post that, though uncomfortable, everyone should read. We are thankful to have Dawn's story, which she can only tell because of the medicines that are now available for people with her condition(s). She is alive because of those medicines and because someone's heart was donated to her. I do hope others will consider becoming organ donors.
Thanks Dawn for sharing this post and for your other writing.