Wanted:
My Perfect Match
At 26, I wait and pine for
someone I’ve never met; my perfect match. With any luck, someone on the shorter
side, with a petite frame similar to mine. I am not picky about gender, but I
hope he or she is kindhearted and that some of their goodness will permeate
into me. I can be overly stoic and independent—some might even say a little
cold and elitist. I don’t try to be, but years of hurdles have made me so. I have
standards that can be hard to meet. Sadly, I’ve been through this agonizing
wait once before, and after finding what I hoped was my perfect match once, I believed
that I would never have to go through this search and torturing wait again. I
would never have chosen to put myself through such suffering a second time.
When I was 19, for six
months I lay in bed wrapped in my heavy Pottery Barn cornflower blue comforter
with red flowers stitched into it, hoping that profound love—through a selfless
act by someone I’ve never met—would save my life in time. Mostly I slept through
life, with my two dogs, Max and Pazzo, always nestled close to me. They were the
truest form of love I had ever known. They stayed by my side, all twenty pounds
of them combined—in my bed, or outside the shower as I sat on the wet white
plastic floor—while warm water and salty tears simultaneously dripped off me. And
under my feet if I momentarily could muster sitting at my desk to scan a few
emails in my attempt to stay connected to the outside world.
On a good day, I would watch
Law & Order marathons in my dim bedroom between napping. These perfect
wrapped in a bow start to finish stories were a wonderful distraction. On a
good day, I fought back tears that allowed me to remember I was human and
actually alive. On a bad day, I did nothing while I waited. I barely even
opened my eyes to the world. I didn’t care to see my surroundings. I didn’t
care to see what I was missing or possibly losing.
It all sounds like a normal
story: a young girl moping around, spending her life waiting for her perfect match
to complete her. But my story is actually not very typical. I was not waiting
for the great love of my life. Instead, I was waiting for my perfect match in
an organ donor because my lungs were failing me. I needed a match in size,
blood type, tissue type; not a match in physical chemistry, or personality. I
wasn’t looking to fulfill some little girls’ checklist of love. I wasn’t
looking for someone with dark intense eyes, a high intellectual capacity, or a
certain amount of money. I was looking for a healthy person with perfect lungs
that would soon breathe inside my chest and keep me alive.
As I waited on the lung
transplant list at Columbia Presbyterian, my mom was my best friend. Anything I
was capable of doing she did with me. Anything I was not capable of doing she
did for me. We were the ultimate pair. She wished more than I did that my
perfect match was coming. She prayed and yearned harder than I did. Her life
depended on it just as much as mine. She was not living the normal mothers
dream either—wishing for a perfect man to come sweep her only daughter off her
feet. She was praying that our phone would ring telling us a donor match had
finally been found after years of lingering between death and life.
And for a while, it seemed
like our prayers had been answered when my perfect lung donor match came into
my life on November 12th 2003. He was a young athletic male. That
was the extent of what I knew about him. But his lungs gave me a normal lung
capacity for the first time ever. I had a lung function of 100%. I’d been
struggling to breathe my entire life, on a continual quest for air. I became a
normal person almost overnight thanks to my seemingly perfect match. I could
breathe.
My first donor was my soul
mate in life. We had the perfect relationship for five years. We got along
famously. We rarely ever fought—only once, a month after my transplant, I had a
minor episode of rejection that was quickly taken care of. Because of him, I
was able to go back to college. I could walk to my classes without stopping to
sit and catch my breath. Previous to finding him, I would stop and sit on any
bench I walked by and pretend to look at my phone when I was really waiting for
my lungs to catch their breath and my heart to slow down. I didn’t have to take
the elevator up to my first floor door room anymore and worry that people
crammed in there with me just thought I was being lazy. I could go out with
friends. I wasn’t trying to conceal an IV ball with antibiotics pumping through
me while trying to decide between a, b, c, or d on an exam. I didn’t have an
oxygen tube fixed to my face and a tank dragging behind me. I graduated
college. And best of all I could laugh without laboring to breath. I could cry
without a coughing fit. I was normal—which is all I ever wanted to be.
And then, five years into
our harmonious union, something fatal happened. My chest felt tight. My lungs
felt restricted. I was short of breath. I knew something wasn’t right. Initially
when I was going through the transplant listing process at 16 I thought the
only way this would be worth it was if I got at least 10 years more out of
having a transplant. I needed ten good years. But my body had other plans. It
reflexively craved the DNA of my old horrible lungs. It very quickly started rejecting
my donor lungs. And swiftly they started to fail. It was a horrible and
terrifying breakup. I lost lung function with each month that went by free
falling to death again. The oxygen machines returned. The feeding tube I fought
for most of my life eventually came when my 5’2” frame got down to 55 lbs. My
once perfect lung match that ironically allowed me to think about everything
else in life but them, no longer worked well enough to allow me to support my
own weight. I had to start using a wheelchair, or worse be carried. My lungs
occupied my every thought once again.
My doctors told me that if I
wanted to live I would have to go back on the transplant list and undergo a
second double lung transplant. Did a second match exist for me? Could I wait
again? I wasn’t sure it was possible to love another the same way I loved my
first lungs. Would any other love be as good as my first?
Here I was, nine years after
my first lung transplant, in the same devastating scenario. This time my wait
for a second donor match seemed crueler and longer than my first. And it was. I
had been through this before and I knew what to expect, but knowing what was
coming made it worse. I had experienced living for the first time and that had
been taken away. I knew what it was like to suffocate every day and that was
coming again.
My donor gave me a life I
had never experienced or even dreamed of—seeing life through him was
incredible. The last three years we had together, while I had chronic
rejection, was a slow and painfully heartbreaking time. It was hard to admit
our time was over. I was in denial for as long as possible. I kept thinking we
could make this work somehow that by some miracle we could mend things. But it
was time for me to move on. If I wanted to live I had to be dramatic and
drastic—I had to cut him out of my life. Literally.
I waited fourteen months for
my second transplant; couch bound this time, my criteria the same as the first.
I was not very picky; in fact, I was probably more accepting this time. I was
even willing to take a former smoker into my life, this idea would have made me
cringe the first time around, I would not have even considered it. I wavered a
lot during this time period. I feared I would never find a match. I was in one
sense scared enough to almost be hopeless, paralyzed with panic, but in another
sense hopeful to return to breathing.
On February 15th,
2012 I got a call saying a donor match was found, after 4 false alarms and
little life left I had my second transplant. It was hard to let go of my first
pair of lungs. It was like any breakup – letting go was painful. The same
surgeon who performed my first transplant also performed my second. It took him
over ten hours to get all remnants of my first lungs out. I guess it was hard
for both of us to let go. Any complicated breakup leaves scar tissue behind. My
second pair of lungs came from a very young girl, and I have high hopes we will
be together for a long time.
Now at age 31 I can grasp the
enormity of both my miracle matches, and the reality of what I have been
though, better than I ever have. I understand what they have both given me. I
love my donors; both of them. It is a special unparalleled kind of love I feel—a
rare eternal unwavering love that I can’t really compare to anything else. I
love my donor families—on the worst day of their lives, they let go of someone
they loved very much in order to give life to someone else. I know what it is
to have a soulmate inside me. My donors have both melded into my body,
connected quite plainly to my heart, and into my life forever. Love has saved
my life time and time again.
I cherish the gift that has
been given to me twice. I can only pray this pairing lasts as long as possible.
I will continue to live with the thought that miracles happen and that love
saves lives—because it does.
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