Second chance, mulligan, kismet, fate, luck, and miracle are all terms we routinely use, maybe overuse. You lose weight on ‘The Biggest Loser’ and they talk about their second chance. A dribble off the tee asks for a mulligan. Finding that doubloon on the beach was meant to be - kismet. We all know about the luck of the Irish. When something happens to us Americans we have to have a name for it. When we couldn’t explain how or why we created a word – miracle. I sometimes cringe at the cavalier use of these words. They have no idea of how important they can be.
I call my story – My Four Miracles. These things happened to me which seem to defy reality. One morning shortly after we moved into our new house I had a premonition – something wasn’t right. Strangely, I had my wife call 911. And that is the last thing I recall. Now imagine your wife standing nearby watching the paramedics shaking their heads, clenching their fists, slashing their throats and yelling ‘clear’ as they shocked me again – six times. I was given a less than 10 percent chance of survival.
The next miracle – my survival explains why that premonition of my ‘silent’ heart attack was a miracle. A muscle under stress emits chemicals call enzymes. For the heart they are called troponins. A good heart puts out less than one unit while a level of 700 usually indicates death. I was told that my reading was over 2400. When I was discharged, rather than being wheeled out, I made them let me walk out so I could say I was a ‘dead man walking.’
In the middle of the night on the fourth of July 2004 – why is it always in the middle of the night? – I got another call saying ‘get down here ASAP; we’ve got a good one.’ I call the transplant a miracle despite the surgery dating back to 1967 because of all the required technologies developed over time. One can think of it as the ‘perfect storm’ of medical technology.
Lastly there is the miracle of being selected to receive a heart. There is a long list of those waiting to receive their replacement and a very specific ranking system to identify and determine who gets the next heart available and when. My donor lived in Colorado Springs, CO where the center is Denver. To me the miracle is being selected from amongst the large number of waiters within 1000 miles of Denver. The next part of this miracle involves recovering, transporting the heart from Colorado Springs (900 miles from St Louis) to the hospital here and reconnecting it – WITHIN FOUR HOURS. I, fortunately, know my donor family and have had the honor of meeting them. Heidi was a 20 year old daughter/sister fatally injured on a motorcycle.
Then there is the most difficult question, what am I to do in the future. I feel a tremendous debt to Heidi to honor her gift, to keep her heart continuing to beat. Think of it as previously dedicated to keeping her alive and now is has been rededicated to keeping me continuing. One extremely significant attribute of my experience is that it has moved me from being a sympathizer to being an empathizer. My shoe may have been a brogan rather than their pump but they understand that I have walked in their shoes and that my caring and concern can be genuinely believable.
With my story I hope you see why I am so cynical about the use of the phrase, second chance. It is so much more than having to buy a new wardrobe after a big weight loss. That mulligan, it is the result of too much loft, Lack OF Talent. I hope you see that miracles do happen to ordinary people at the strangest times. I hope you see that these miracles cause one to continuously seek answers to the questions of how and why. Don’t give in to the admonition that ‘it is fate, kismet.’
