Binders, paperwork, medical devices laid all around and on me as I said goodbye to my mother. Scrubbed up medical personal scurried about and they wheeled me across the hallway to MY operating room.
Being in dozens of "procedural" rooms and seeing television O.R.'s didn't prepare me for what I saw. This place was huge, bright, off white subway tiled, so many pieces of machinery blinking, beeting and hissing, large and small attached to walls, hanging from ceilings, arranged neatly on carts. Bodies moving in different directions, Reassuringly it reminded me of a kitchen. I felt the room had a life of its own, it felt like it was breathing heavy, slowly inhaling and exhaling. Organized chaos a spastic dance.
I wasn't fazed or panicked in the least, rather at peace. At peace with my maker, at peace with possibly not leaving this room alive. I was resigned to whatever God had in store for me. Laying there with all those anonymous people floating around me I was so, so thankful. My only regret... that I might not be there to see my children grow up. The one small tinge of occasional panic was that. Please let me witness my children's milestones. Please let me be there to help them, pick them up when they fall, offer councel when they're lost. Please, please, please.
With those thoughts running through my head, I was strapped down, my gear was exposed, I was shaved and the "going under" procedure was explained to me. As the doctors and nurses where tidying up their last minute details everything around me slowed down to super slo-mo allowing me to take everything in. The anesthesiologist looking at vials of liquids and reading numbers on charts, docs conferring with each other in a corner, someone asking me what sort of music I want; does it make a difference, I won't be awake to enjoy it, he smiled a big toothy grin. Then I cocked my head and looked behind me and over my shoulder and I saw it.
Two people in scrubs where sitting on opposite sides of a table, in between them a stainless steel bowl sat filled with a slurry of water and ice. I smiled to myself, it was they same sort of bowled I made hollandaise in thousands of times. They seemed to be wearing special gloves. One reached into the ice water and pulled out a sealed plastic bag with a tag and bar code on it. The other cut the bag and spilled the contents out into his hands hovering just above the ice. The two men took turns inspecting it, rolling it over, treating it ever so gently, examining every inch of it. What they were looking for I didn't know. But they seemed to be giving it the same care and tenderness of a new born baby or a rare archeological find.
I knew it was my new liver. With the exception of my children I'd never seen anything so beautiful. It was a warm, soft rosy pink. Looking at it I felt it radiated a soft pink light, it seemed to have an internal light all its own. It was as if I could feel the warmth spilling off it. There was my chance at a second chance. There was a gift. I could feel a tear running down my face.
My chin was gently forces upright, a mask was lowered over my face and I was told to count backwards from ten. Instead, I started saying a Hail Mary for the person that lost their life, the family that lost a loved one.
And I went to sleep
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