Today We Walk. Tomorrow We Dance.

Abstract

Today We Walk. Tomorrow We Dance Allen Callaci Roughly 10 years ago I was helicoptered from my local community hospital to Cedars-Sinai with less than a 25% chance of surviving the brief flight. I left work early, not feeling well that afternoon, and shortly after arriving home, blacked out across my bathroom floor. The heart that had been beating inside me for 40-plus years was in complete collapse. After more than 40 years, it was discovered that the circumflex branch of my left coronary artery had been underdeveloped since birth. My other arteries overcompensated over the ensuing decades, which slowly wore my heart down. I was tired in the years leading up to my transplant but I attached that weariness to my rich and active life, which was filled to the rim with working two jobs, being a grad student and occasionally singing in a rock ’n’ roll band. They say life changes in an instant. Mine changed quicker than that. I left work that afternoon thinking I’d be back in a day or so and catching a Bruce Springsteen concert I had tickets to the following week. Instead I woke up in a hospital bed hooked to oxygen and the symphony of a beeping heart monitor, connected to 27 IVs and two heart assist devices attached to each side of my heart. I woke in a medicated fog with my sister mentioning I was going to be having a heart transplant. I wondered if my situation was real or if I was dreaming and had been swept to a hospital located in Oz. The most positive and painful moments of my recovery and quest to get back home could sometimes be part of the same moment. There were excruciatingly painful moments as I balanced myself on a walker surrounded by a pit crew of nurses helping me balance all the IVs and an oxygen tank. One of the crew followed close behind me with a wheelchair if I should tire on my trek around the nurse’s station and should need a rest. Having not walked in weeks and weeks, each step was excoriatingly painful. My legs felt like a pair of wet flimsy noodles as I stood up for the first [End Page 120] time in a month and a half. My mind knew exactly what it was supposed to do, but the body wasn’t getting the message But as painful as these steps were (and they really were), I saw each step as one step closer to home. The staff at Cedars-Sinai were not just staff taking another patient on a walk—they made me feel like they were my crew with their reassuring and positive attitude as they guided me. I’ll be forever grateful to the nurse who, on one of my first brutally painful walks around the nurse’s station, lightheartedly told me that “today we walk, tomorrow we’ll dance.” I’ve known fewer moments as hopeful, humorous, and humanizing as that one. That mindset transferred onto me as we made our daily walks around the nursing station. Those walks became less and less painful with each passing day. I saw my progress as I graduated from walker, to cane, to being able to walk independently again. I have not stopped thinking of my donor and their family in the years since returning home from Cedars-Sinai, although I only know minimal details about them. I know they were 25 years old and a male. I have reached out to the family with written expressions of my enduring and unending gratitude over the years through the proper channels but have yet to hear back. When I sent out my initial note to the family, I was told that the odds were that I would likely not hear back as it can be an overwhelming emotional experience for donor families to meet the donor. This is more than understandable. My hope is only that my donor family found some small comfort and a sense of closure in my messages. I am often told by others what a journey I have been on. And it has been a journey...