Heart Transplant Quotes

You’re right. In a world where doctors can cure cancer and do heart transplants, there isn’t a single pill to treat menstrual cramps.’ Her sister pointed at her own stomach. ‘The world wants our uterus to be drug-free. Like sacred grounds in a virgin forest.

Unconditional love. That's what this is. I love him, as is, fully. I've had to stop arm wrestling with the facts. Why me? Didn't I already have a big love once? And lost it? So why should I get it again? I've had to stop trying to look for cracks and flaws to prove that it's not as good as it seems. Because it's as good as it seems. Even when we fight, we fight inside the container of good. Somehow, through a flip of the coin, I ended up here. Feeling like somebody at the top of the heart-lung transplant recipient list. Damaged but invigorated and fucking lucky.

He was my secret conduit to myself—like a catalyst that allows us to become who we are, the foreign body, the pacer, the graft, the patch that sends all the right impulses, the steel pin that keeps a soldier’s bone together, the other man’s heart that makes us more us than we were before the transplant.

A bucket full of butterflies is flutter contained. I’d like to have that installed in my chest when I have a heart transplant, which I’ll need to contain my growing love for you.

I needed new panties and a heart transplant.

A brick could be surgically inserted in the chest of a man who needs a heart transplant. And for just $20,000 more dollars, that brick could be replaced with a new heart.


It is infinitely better to transplant a heart than to bury it to be devoured by worms.

For a dying man it is not a difficult decision [to agree to become the world's first heart transplant] ... because he knows he is at the end. If a lion chases you to the bank of a river filled with crocodiles, you will leap into the water convinced you have a chance to swim to the other side. But you would not accept such odds if there were no lion.

So animated are these freestanding hearts that surgeons have been known to drop them. “We wash them off and they do just fine,” replied New York heart transplant surgeon Mehmet Oz when I asked him about it. I imagined the heart slipping across the linoleum, the looks exchanged, the rush to retrieve it and clean it off, like a bratwurst that’s rolled off the plate in a restaurant kitchen.

This time you aren't escaping. It's time for a heart transplant.

And just before I go to sleep, I'll think of sentences that don't contain words like Hoover, Jogging, and Heart Transplant

Dearest Alexia, Oh, please absolve me of this guilt I already feel squishing on my very soul! My troubled heart weeps! Oh dear, Ivy was getting flowery. My bones ache with the sin that I am about to commit. Oh, why must I have bones? I have lost myself to this transplanting love. You could not possibly understand how this feels! Yet try to comprehend, dearest Alexia, I am like a delicate bloom. Marriage without love is all very well for people like you, but I should wilt and wither. I need a man possessed of a poet’s soul! I am simply not so stoic as you. I cannot stand to be apart from him one moment longer! The caboose of my love has derailed, and I must sacrifice all for the man I adore! Please do not judge me harshly! It was all for love! ~ Ivy.

I have heard that sometimes when a person has an operation to transplant someone else's heart or liver or kidney into his body, his tastes in foods change, or his favorite colors, as if the organ has brought with it some memory of its life before, as if it holds within it a whole past that must find a place within its new host. This is the way I carry Lexy inside me. Since the moment she took up residency within me, she has lent her own color to the way I see and hear and taste, so that by now I can barely distinguish between the world as it seemed before and the way it seems now. I cannot say what air tasted like before I knew her or how the city smelled as I walked its streets at night. I have only one tongue in my head and one pair of eyes, and I stopped being able to trust them a long time ago.

New York has an energy that takes root inside of you. Even a transplant like me gets to know the different boroughs, like they're living, breathing organisms. There's nowhere else like it. The city becomes a character in your life, a love you can't take out of you. The mysteriously human element about this place can make you fall in love and break your heart at the same time.

they could easily do heart transplants these days, yet childbirth still felt like a black art, some form of ancient witchcraft. If men gave birth you could bet they would've worked out a trouble-free, painless way to do it.

Could a literary life be referred to with the iambic pentameter of, say, harnessing wind power, transplanting hearts or saving the whales. Or did it necessitate the sombre and monotonous dirge of software, priority banking or turbine building.

It was a wicked game. “Homer,” says Snowman, making his way through the dripping-wet vegetation. “The Divine Comedy. Greek statuary. Aqueducts. Paradise Lost. Mozart’s music. Shakespeare, complete works. The Brontës. Tolstoy. The Pearl Mosque. Chartres Cathedral. Bach. Rembrandt. Verdi. Joyce. Penicillin. Keats. Turner. Heart transplants. Polio vaccine. Berlioz. Baudelaire. Bartok. Yeats. Woolf.

Perhaps the physical and the metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other. To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me. To be in his mouth while he was in mine and no longer know whose it was, his cock or mine, that was in my mouth. He was my secret conduit to myself—like a catalyst that allows us to become who we are, the foreign body, the pacer, the graft, the patch that sends all the right impulses, the steel pin that keeps a soldier’s bone together, the other man’s heart that makes us more us than we were before the transplant.

Who knew?’ he says. ‘I had no idea that someone could be such a thorn in your foot during a death march and still be irresistibly attractive in some magical, undeniable way.’ ‘So is that what people call sweet nothings? Because somehow, I expected it to be a little more . . . complimentary.’ ‘Don’t you know a heartfelt declaration of love when you hear one?’ I blink dumbly at him with my heart pounding. He caresses a lock of my hair out of my face. ‘Look, I know that we’re from different worlds and different people. But I’ve realized that it doesn’t matter.’ ‘You don’t care about the angelic rules anymore?’ ‘My Watchers have helped me realize that angelic rules are for angels. Without our wings, we can never be fully accepted back into the fold. There will always be talk of taking a newly Fallen’s wings and transplanting them onto us. Angels are perfect. Even with transplanted wings, we’ll never again be perfect. You accept me just the way I am, regardless of whether or not I even have wings. Even when I had my demon wings, you’ve never looked at me with pity. You’ve never wavered in your loyalty. That’s who you are – my brave, loyal, lovable Daughter of Man.

As únicas doenças que os "curandeiros" curam são as que seus clientes imaginativos não têm.

Uma população que afirma, indignada, que é perfeitamente sã agora devora drogas psicotrópicas, como se estivesse pondo açúcar nos flocos de milho.

A brick could be used in a heart transplant operation. And for just $25,000 more dollars, that brick could be switched with a real or artificial heart.


His mom always said that every child is like a heart transplant.

His mom always said that every child is like a heart transplant. He understands that now.

Niki blurted out the news. “Some joker in Africa has done a heart transplant!” “Jesus . . .” Kantrowitz groaned. He knew who had beaten him. “Barnard!

A heresia e a blasfêmia persistiam como disfarces pomposos para oprimir a liberdade da palavra, a qual sempre escolhe assuntos que provocam implicitamente nos opressores um mal-estar secreto.

Lina: I have no idea what you mean. Is he waiting for something? Rosie: … Lina: Something like a heart transplant? I heard he doesn’t have one. Rosie: Ha, funny. You should keep the jokes for when you two talk. Lina: We won’t. Rosie: That’s right. You two are too busy staring at each other intently. *fire emoji* An unwanted blush rushed to my cheeks. Lina: What’s that supposed to mean? Rosie: You know what it means. Lina: That I want to light him up in a pyre like a witch? Then, okay. Rosie: He’s probably working late too. Lina: So? Rosie: So … you could always go to his office and glare at him in that way I’m sure he loves.

هذي دمشق.. وهذي الكأس والراح إني أحب... وبعـض الحـب ذباح أنا الدمشقي.. لو شرحتم جسدي لسـال منه عناقيـدٌ.. وتفـاح و لو فتحـتم شراييني بمديتكـم سمعتم في دمي أصوات من راحوا زراعة القلب.. تشفي بعض من عشقو وما لقلـبي –إذا أحببـت جـراح This is Damascus... and this is a glass of spirit (comfort) I am in love... but I am aware of the fact that certain kinds of love can slaughter you in wrath I am a Damascene... if you dissect me into halves You will have but grapes... and apples falling in your path Open my veins with scalpels Hear ancestral chants If heart transplants... can cure some of the passionate Why does mine stay torn in half then?

He was different; innocent of heart, and full of good will, which nobody wanted, this castaway, that, like a man transplanted into another planet, was separated by an immense space from his past and by an immense ignorance from his future.

Of the many 'firsts' with which I have been involved at the Texas Heart Institute —including the first successful human heart transplant in the United States and the first total artificial heart transplant in the world—the achievement that may have the greatest impact on health care did not occur in the operating room or in the research laboratory. It happened on a piece of paper... when we created the first-ever packaged pricing plan for cardiovascular surgical procedures.

Alternativa" é a palavra da moda para fazer importante o que não tem nenhum significado. Ela serve para enfeitar um misto de misticismo medieval, bobagem herbalista, lixo dietético, brinquedos elétricos, superstição, sugestão, ignorância e pura fraude.

Nossos lunáticos assassinos e perigosos estão presos em prisões mentais. Os inofensivos estão escondidos nas enfermarias psiquiátricas. O resto pode dormir nas ruas, que pouco nos importamos. O pensamento são sobre sobre a insanidade retrocedeu para 1547.

Ritually abusive groups also convince children that something evil has been put inside them. For example, a child is made to believe he or she has a "black heart" - seeing the abuser holding an animal heart and then feeling severe chest pain while it is supposedly inserted. In "brain transplants", the brain of an abuser or of a despised animal such as a rate is supposedly put into a child. Children are told that they are demons or monsters or aliens, or internal copies of an abuser whose "seed" has been implanted by rape. Ch29, p324

A doutrina homeopática viajou para a América onde, mais tarde, foi dissecada pelo doutor Oliver Wendell Holmes como "uma mistura confusa de engenhosidade perversa, falsa erudição, credulidade imbecil e hábil deturpação". Mesmo assim, seu criador morreu milionário, em Paris.

One symptom of being on that path is loneliness." He continues: Nothing strengthens us so much as isolation and transplantation ... under the wholesome demand his soul will put forth all her native vigor . . . it may not be necessary for us to withdraw from home and friends; but we shall have to withdraw our heart's deepest dependence from all earthly props and supports, if ever we are to learn what it is to trust simply and absolutely on the eternal God.

Os gregos substituíram o Yang e o Yin por humores. O sangue, o muco, a bile amarela e a negra, a saúde dependia da harmonia disso tudo num dado momento. O médico mais importante era Galeno (c. 132-200 d.C.). Ele era um homem autoritário, com resposta pra tudo e, desse modo, estabeleceu o padrão e personalidade para nossa profissão.

We are beginning to learn that intangibles have more specific gravity than we suspected, that ideas can generate as much forward thrust as Atlas missiles. We may win a victory in exploring the infinities of outer space, but it will be a Pyrrhic victory unless we can also explore the infinities of our inner spirit. We have supersensitive thermographs to show us the slightest variations in skin temperature. No devices can teach us the irrelevance of skin color. WE can transplant a heart from one person to another in a brilliant feat of surgical virtuosity. Now we are ready to try it the hard way: transplanting understanding, compassion, and love from one person to another.

Somehow, through a flip of the coin, I ended up here. Feeling like somebody at the top of the heart-lung transplant recipient list. Damaged but invigorated and fucking lucky.

Our lovemaking was exactly that—not just sex, but the joining of two troubled hearts, the easing of two battered souls.

I am going to hold you like someone would hold a heart, that is being transplanted, into someone they love." - Kain

Os casais que concebem filhos que não desejam refletem os casais que querem filhos mas não podem ter. O problema destes últimos tem sido resolvido pelos ginecologistas com menor alarde e esforço. As pessoas autoritárias fazem mais objeções ao fato de as outras fazerem o que elas acham que não deve ser feito, ao invés de procurar realizar o que acham que devem.

Quando a rainha Adelaide consultou um homeopata, Guilherme IV ordenou ao médico real, Robert Keate (1777-1857): "Examine a receita que ele der a ela para ver se a rainha pode tomar sem perigo." Eu prometi fazer isso, e quando recebi a receita, eu disse: "Ah, majestade, ela pode tomar durante sete anos que, no fim desse tempo, não terá tomado nem uma grama de medicamento".

Despite its image as a disease that affects middle-aged white men, heart disease claims 50 percent more African Americans than whites and African Americans die from heart attacks at a higher rate than whites. African Americans are more likely to develop serious liver ailments such as hepatitis C, the chief cause of liver transplants. They are also more likely to die from liver disease, not because of any inherent racial susceptibility, but because blacks are less likely to receive aggressive treatment with drugs such as interferon or lifesaving liver transplants. Even

At the Temple of the Seven-Handed Sek a hasty convocation of priests and ritual heart-transplant artisans agreed that the hundred-span-high statue of Sek was altogether too holy to be made into a magic picture, but a payment of two rhinu left them astoundedly agreeing that perhaps He wasn't as holy as all that. A prolonged session at the Whore Pits produced a number of colourful and instrutive pictures, a number of which Rincewind concealed about his person for detailed perusal in private. As the fumes cleared from his brain he began to speculate seriously as to how the iconograph worked.

A relação da medicina com o charlatanismo é a mesma da astronomia com a astrologia. O que as estrelas predizem para os leitores de jornais é inofensivo, mas o lançamento de um ônibus espacial ou de um satélite, orientado pela astrologia, ao invés da astronomia, seria desastroso. Mas a humanidade sofre de uma fascinação eterna pelos charlatães. Talvez porque todos nós gostemos de pensar que sabemos mais do que nossos médicos.

We are all, of course, wayfaring strangers on this earth. But coming out of the rainbow tunnel, the liminal portal between Marin and San Francisco, myth and reality, I catch sight of a beautiful, sparkling city that might as well be on the moon. I can name the sights, the streets, the eateries, but in my heart it feels as unfamiliar as Cape Town or Cuzco. I've lived here for fourteen years. This is the arena of my adult life, with its large defeats and small victories. Maybe, like all transplants (converts?), I've asked too much of the city. I would never have moved to Pittsburh or Houston or L.A. expecting it to save my soul. Only here in the great temple by the bay. It's a mistake we've been making for decades, and probably a necessary one. The city's flaws, of course, are numerous. Our politics can suffer from humourless stridency, and life here is menacingly expensive. But if you're insulated from these concerns, sufficiently employed and housed, if you are -in other words- like most people, you are in view of the unbridgeable ideal. Here, with our plentiful harvest, our natural beauty, our bars, our bookstores, our cliffs and ocean, out free to be you and me; here, where pure mountain water flows right out of the tap. It's here that the real questions become inescapable. In fact the proximity of the ideal makes us more acutely aware of the real questions. Not the run-of-the-mill insolubles-Why am I here? Who am I?- but the pressing questions of adult life: Really? and Are you sure? And Now what?

Scientists have identified individual neurons, which fire, when a particular person has been recognized. Thus, [it is possible that] when a recipient’s brain analyzes the features of a person, who significantly impressed the donor, the donated organ may feed back powerful emotional messages, which signal recognition of the individual. Such feedback messages occur within milliseconds and the recipient [may even believe] that [he] knows the person.” —“Cellular Memory in Organ Transplants

If we had always thought from a so-called practical angle – we would’ve never had anything new in this world. We would’ve hidden under the security of practicality and taken no risk, we would have never discovered heart transplantation as a new possibility, we would’ve never thought curing cancer patients a possibility, and we would’ve never discovered a new galaxy in the universe. Taking the cover of practicality is more or less like hiding under the cover of security for fear of failure.

I was at a most impressionable age when I was transplanted to the new soil. I was in that period when even normal children, undisturbed in their customary environment, begin to explore their own hearts, and endeavor to account for themselves and their world.

A moral é de modo geral uma expressão da história e da geografia. Qualquer coisa vale, mas não em toda parte. Os hindus não podem beber, mas têm várias mulheres, os cristãos podem se embriagar quantas vezes quiserem, mas estão presos, como disse Saki, "ao costume ocidental de uma mulher e quase nenhuma amante". Nos EUA, em 1933 era errado brindar o aniversário de Washington, mas em 1934 era um gesto patriótico. Nas ilhas Fiji, na década de 1830, até o canibalismo era socialmente aceitável, separando-se o cérebro, como um petisco, para as mulheres.

My eyes focused on the chart that hung on the wall behind him. It was a diagram of the human heart, with detailed renderings of the muscle and tissue, and I immediately thought how fortunate I would be to have something as simple as a heart problem. There were surgeries for that. Clinically proven medications to prescribe. Transplants, even. Labels identified the organ's components in words like chamber, ventricle, atrium, valve. It all looked so simple. Like the parts of a machine. But the human brain was like the uncharted depth of the oceans. Science was still wading around in the shallows.

HEART: Let’s try stress and being on the go all of the time. Have you ever thought that you try to fit too many things in one day? Do you know how to relax and do nothing? Do you know how to just be as in human be-ing? LERITA: It seems like I’ve heard this before. HEART: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You need the threat of a damn heart transplant to get your attention, huh? I’ve been trying to get through to you for years, especially since you jumped on that bandwagon in high school. LERITA: What bandwagon? HEART: The “I’ve got to be Miss It… somebody famous… Miss Perfectionist…prove to everyone that I’m at the top” bandwagon.

A heart kept on ice can be transplanted up to four hours after death. A liver, ten. A particularly good kidney will last twenty-four hours, and sometimes as long as seventy-two if doctors use the right equipment after surgery. This is known as the “cold ischemic time.” Consider it the five-second rule, but for organs.

Marjory Gengler (white American) to Mark Mathabane (black South African) in the late 1970s-- Marjory: Why don't blacks fight to change the system [apartheid] that so dehumanizes them? Mark's Response, from his memoirs: I told her [Marjory] about the sophistication of apartheid machinery, the battery of Draconian laws used to buttress it, the abject poverty in which a majority of blacks were sunk, leaving them with little energy and will to agitate for their rights. I told her about the indoctrination that took place in black schools under the guise of Bantu Education, the self-hatred that resulted from being constantly told that you are less than human and being treated that way. I told her of the anger and hatred pent-up inside millions of blacks, destroying their minds. I would have gone on to tell Marjory about the suffering of wives without husbands and children without fathers in impoverished tribal reserves, about the high infant mortality rate among blacks in a country that exported food, and which in 1987 gave the world its first heart transplant. I would have told them about the ragged black boys and girls of seven, eight and nine years who constantly left their homes because of hunger and a disintegrating family life and were making it on their own; by begging along the thoroughfares of Johannesburg; by sleeping in scrapped cars, gutters and in abandoned buildings; by bathing in the diseased Jukskei River; and by eating out of trash cans, sucking festering sores and stealing rotting produce from the Indian traders on First Avenue. I would have told her about how these orphans of the streets, some of them my friends--their physical, intellectual and emotional growth dwarfed and stunted--had grown up to become prostitutes, unwed mothers and tsotsis, littering the ghetto streets with illegitimate children and corpses. I would have told her all this, but I didn't; I feared she would not believe me; I feared upsetting her.

EVEN THOUGH I KNEW it was going to be what she would ask me, Graciela McCaleb’s request gave me pause. Terry McCaleb had died on his boat a month earlier. I had read about it in the Las Vegas Sun. It had made the papers because of the movie. FBI agent gets heart transplant and then tracks down his donor’s killer. It was a story that had Hollywood written all over it and Clint Eastwood played the part, even though he had a couple decades on Terry. The film was a modest success at best, but it still gave Terry the kind of notoriety that guaranteed an obituary notice in papers across the country. I had just gotten back to my apartment near the strip one morning and picked up the Sun. Terry’s death was a short story in the back of the A section.

Here I am at that fork in the road where one arrow points to an unfamiliar life as an organ transplant recipient and the other arrow points directly to death—another unknown territory but with much darker overtones. What am I going to do with someone else’s heart? I can’t bear the thought of living without my heart. How can I make such a decision? Dr. Martinez asks me what my heart thinks about all of this. He suggests that I talk with my heart—that we should make the decision together. Is he crazy? What does he mean, “Talk with my heart?” Have I ever communicated with my heart? Has it ever tried to talk with me? How am I going to talk to my heart? Dr. Martinez recommends that I sit down with a yellow pad or at my computer and engage in a practice called “active imagination.

The body takes about seven years to replace all its cells. As we age original factory parts get harder to come by. We accept seconds and rebuilds. Some are even transplanted with recycled parts. We get less miles to the gallon, and eventually, after several towings, we must abandon the body by the side of the road. From there we must go the rest of the way alone with just our heart for guidance.

Chorus of Comforters We are gardeners who have no flowers, No herb may be transplanted From yesterday to tomorrow. The sage has faded in the cradles-- Rosemary lost its scent facing the new dead-- Even wormwood was only bitter yesterday. The blossoms of comfort are too small Not enough for the torment of a child's tear. New seed may perhaps be gathered In the heart of a nocturnal singer. Which of us may comfort? In the depth of the defile Between yesterday and tomorrow The cherub stands Grinding the lightnings of sorrow with his wings But his hands hold apart the rocks Of yesterday and tomorrow Like the edges of a wound Which must remain open That may not yet heal. The lightnings of sorrow do not allow The field of forgetting to fall asleep. Which of us may comfort? We are gardeners who have no flowers And stand upon a shining star And weep.

76. Two men, one heart – one widow?! It was over the news around the end of 2010s – a man called Sonny Graham, 57 at the time, had received a heart transplantation which saved his life. The heart had belonged to Terry Cottle, an adopted father of two, and a husband of a woman named Cheryl, who had taken his life at the age of 33. Here is where things got creepy. Mr. Graham suddenly changed some of his life habits, including his food and drink preferences, which now strangely matched Mr. Cottle's. On top of that – he fell in love with Cheryl, Mr. Cottle's widow. Soon after, they married. However, there was no happy ending to this story. 13 years later, Sonny Graham, who had previously never displayed any signs of mental or emotional instability, took his life as well – in much the same way as late mr. Cottle did. So who says our brain is our only thing responsible for our thoughts and emotions?

Let me tell you a joke, Rora said. Mujo wakes up one day, after a long night of drinking, and asks himself what the meaning of life is. He goes to work, but realizes that is not what life is or should be. He decides to read some philosophy and for years studies everything from the old Greeks onward, but can't find the meaning of life. Maybe it's the family, he thinks, so he spends time with his wife, Fata, and the kids, but finds no meaning in that and so he leaves them. He thinks, Maybe helping others is the meaning of life, so he goes to medical school, graduates with flying colors, goes to Africa to cure malaria and transplants hearts, but cannot discover the meaning of life. He thinks, maybe it's the wealth, so he becomes a businessman, starts making money hand over fist, millions of dollars, buys everything there is to buy, but that is not what life is about. Then he turns to poverty and humility and such, so he gives everything away and begs on the streets, but still he cannot see what life is. He thinks maybe it is literature: he writes novel upon novel, but the more he writes the more obscure the meaning of life becomes. He turns to God, lives the life of a dervish, reads and contemplates the Holy Book of Islam - still, nothing. He studies Christianity, then Judaism, then Buddhism, then everything else - no meaning of life there. Finally, he hears about a guru living high up in the mountains somewhere in the East. The guru, they say, knows what the meaning of life is. So Mujo goes east, travels for years, walks roads, climbs the mountain, finds the stairs that lead up to the guru. He ascends the stairs, tens of thousands of them, nearly dies getting up there. At the top, there are millions of pilgrims, he has to wait for months to get to the guru. Eventually it is his turn, he goes to a place under a big tree, and there sits the naked guru, his legs crossed, his eyes closed, meditating, perfectly peaceful - he surely knows the meaning of life, Mujo says: I have dedicated my life to discovering the meaning of life and I have failed, so I have come to ask you humbly, O Master, to divulge the secret to me. The guru opens his eyes, looks at Mujo, and calmly says, My friend, life is a river. Mujo stares at him for a long time, cannot believe what he heard. What's life again? Mujo asks. Life is a river, the guru says. Mujo nods and says, You turd of turds, you goddamn stupid piece of shit, you motherfucking cocksucking asshole. I have wasted my life and come all this way for you to tell me that life is a fucking river. A river? Are you kidding me? That is the stupidest, emptiest fucking thing I have ever heard. Is that what you spent your life figuring out? And the guru says, What? It is not a river? Are you saying it is not a river?

Because of the city's fragmentary, far-flung floor plan, accessible almost exclusively by car, there is no collective sense of community, no overarching sense of "we." ... It's a city of transplants ... Everyone moves to LA with plans not to stay. But then we stay. Because somewhere along the way, this Garden of Forking Freeways burrows itself inside our hardened, from-elsewhere hearts, and slowly, we begin to love the place we claimed to hate. Los Angeles is such a misunderstood city... It's a place that's impossible not to ridicule until you...fully appreciate all its endearing inconsistencies. It is ugly, and it is also beautiful. It is fast; it is slow. It is sexy, and it is also smart.

In 1996, when Senator Bob Dole runs against President Clinton, it’s a historic moment for people with disabilities. No one with a visible disability has run for the high office since Franklin Roosevelt—and unlike Roosevelt, Dole is forthcoming about his impairment (an arm injured in wartime). It sets a political conundrum for some in the movement: Dole may be one of us, and may have been an early supporter of the ADA, but aren’t Democrats better for disenfranchised minorities? That same year, a woman with Down syndrome becomes the first person with that diagnosis to receive a heart and lung transplant. She’d been turned down at first, but hospital administrators cave to activists. These and other

Nurses on transplant wards often remarked that male transplant patients show renewed interest in sex. One reported that a patient asked her to wear something other than "that shapeless scrub" so he could see her breasts. A post-op who had been impotent for seven years before the operation was found holding his penis and demonstrating an erection. Another nurse spoke of a man who left the fly of his pajamas unfastened to show her his penis. Conclude Tabler and Frierson, "this irrational but common belief that the recipient will somehow develop characteristics of the donor is generally transitory but may alter sexual patterns.' Let us hope that the man with the chicken heart was blessed with a patient and open-minded spouse.

At the outset I must confess that I am no longer very good at telling the difference between good things and bad things. Of course there are many events in human history that can only be labeled as evil, but from the standpoint of inner individual experience the distinction has become blurred for me. Some things start out looking great but wind up terribly, while other things seem bad in the beginning but turn out to be blessings in disguise. I was diagnosed with cancer in 1995, which I thought was a bad thing. But the experience brought me closer to God and to my loved ones than I'd ever been, and that was wonderfully good. The chemotherapy felt awful, but it resulted in a complete cure, which I decided was good. I later found out it may also have caused the heart disease that now has me waiting for a heart transplant. At some point I gave up trying to decide what's ultimately good or bad. I truly do not know....Although not knowing may itself seem like a bad thing, I am convinced it is one of the great gifts of the dark night of the soul. To be immersed in mystery can be very distressing at first, but over time I have found immense relief in it. It takes the pressure off. I no longer have to worry myself to death about what I did right or wrong to cause a good or bad experience-because there really is no way of knowing. I don't have to look for spiritual lessons in every trouble that comes along. There have been many spiritual lessons to be sure, but they've given to me in the course of life; I haven't had to figure out a single one.

Dearest Alexia, the message read. Oh, please absolve me of this guilt I already feel squishing on my very soul! Lady Maccon huffed, trying not to laugh. My troubled heart weeps! Oh dear, Ivy was getting flowery. My bones ache with the sin that I am about to commit. Oh, why must I have bones? I have lost myself to this transplanting love. You could not possibly understand how this feels! Yet try to comprehend, dearest Alexia, I am like a delicate bloom. Marriage without love is all very well for people like you, but I should wilt and wither. I need a man possessed of a poet’s soul! I am simply not so stoic as you. I cannot stand to be apart from him one moment longer! The caboose of my love has derailed, and I must sacrifice all for the man I adore! Please do not judge me harshly! It was all for love! ~ Ivy.

Anything I can do to help?” “Convince the entire Dark Court to abandon their queen’s plan and join Team Leave Now?” “I was thinking more along the lines of recording tonight’s Easton Heights rerun so that hour was freed up for you.” She held up her hands at my outraged look of horror. “Kidding. Kidding. I’ve been helping David and Raquel set up emergency places for all the faerie land transplants and IPCA refugees who aren’t leaving. We’ll get everything ready here. You focus on the faerie stuff.” “Can’t I be in charge of the DVR, instead?” I stood and turned around. Arianna swatted my butt as I walked away. I wanted to laugh, but it was all I could do not to hyperventilate. Everything was finally happening. I hadn’t made it very far back up the path when Reth stepped out of the woods, scaring me half to death. “Way to make an entrance,” I said, my hand over my rapidly beating heart. “You need to come with me.” “Did you know I have to open the gate tonight? Never mind. Don’t answer. If you did know, I’ll want to kick you in the nuts for not telling me, and I don’t have time to do it. Good news is I’m going to save your life.

I write all this with respect for the possibility that rather than some kind of contact with the consciousness of my donor's heart, these are merely hallucinations from the medications or my own projections. I know this is a very slippery slope…. What came to me in the first contact….was the horror of dying. The utter suddenness, shock, and surprise of it all….The feeling of being ripped off and the dread of dying before your time….This and two other incidents are by far the most terrifying experiences I have ever had…. What came to me on the second occasion was my donor's experience of having his heart being cut out of his chest and transplanted. There was a profound sense of violation by a mysterious, omnipotent outside force…. …The third episode was quite different than the previous two. This time the consciousness of my donor's heart was in the present tense….He was struggling to figure out where he was, even what he was….It was as if none of your senses worked….An extremely frightening awareness of total dislocation….As if you are reaching with your hands to grasp something…but every time you reach forward your fingers end up only clutching thin air.

— PAULING’S ADVOCACY GAVE BIRTH TO a vitamin and supplement industry built on sand. Evidence for this can be found by walking into a GNC center—a wonderland of false hope. Rows and rows of megavitamins and dietary supplements promise healthier hearts, smaller prostates, lower cholesterol, improved memory, instant weight loss, lower stress, thicker hair, and better skin. All in a bottle. No one seems to be paying attention to the fact that vitamins and supplements are an unregulated industry. As a consequence, companies aren’t required to support their claims of safety or effectiveness. Worse, the ingredients listed on the label might not reflect what’s in the bottle. And we seem to be perfectly willing to ignore the fact that every week at least one of these supplements is pulled off the shelves after it was found to cause harm. Like the L-tryptophan disaster, an amino acid sold over the counter and found to cause a disease that affected 5,000 people and killed 28. Or the OxyElite Pro disaster, a weight-loss product that caused 50 people to suffer severe liver disease; one person died and three others needed lifesaving liver transplants. Or the Purity First disaster, a Connecticut company’s vitamin preparations that were found to contain two powerful anabolic steroids, causing masculinizing symptoms in dozens of women in the Northeast.

In March 2002, the National Academy of Sciences, a private, nonprofit society of scholars, released a high-profile report documenting the unequivocal existence of racial bias in medical care, which many thought would mark a real turning point. Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care was so brutal and damning that it would seem impossible to turn away. The report, authored by a committee of mostly white medical educators, nurses, behavioral scientists, economists, health lawyers, sociologists, and policy experts, took an exhaustive plunge into more than 480 previous studies. Because of the knee-jerk tendency to assume that health disparities were the end result of differences in class, not race, they were careful to compare subjects with similar income and insurance coverage. The report found rampant, widespread racial bias, including that people of color were less likely to be given appropriate heart medications or to undergo bypass surgery or receive kidney dialysis or transplants. Several studies revealed significant racial differences in who receives appropriate cancer diagnostic tests and treatments, and people of color were also less likely to receive the most sophisticated treatments for HIV/AIDS. These inequities, the report concluded, contribute to higher death rates overall for Black people and other people of color and lower survival rates compared with whites suffering from comparable illnesses of similar severity.

The impact of second-class treatment on black people’s bodies is devastating. It is manifested not only in the black–white death gap but also in the drastic measures required when chronic disease is left unmanaged. Black patients are less likely than whites to be referred to kidney and liver transplant wait lists and are more likely to die while waiting for a transplant.68 If they are lucky enough to get a donated kidney or liver, blacks are sicker than whites at the time of transplantation and less likely to survive afterward. “Take a look at all the black amputees,” said a caller to a radio show I was speaking on, identifying the remarkable numbers of people with amputated legs you see in poor black communities as a sign of health inequities. According to a 2008 nationwide study of Medicare claims, whites in Louisiana and Mississippi have a higher rate of leg amputation than in other states, but the rate for blacks is five times higher than for whites.69 An earlier study of Medicare services found that physicians were less likely to treat their black patients with aggressive, curative therapies such as hospitalization for heart disease, coronary artery bypass surgery, coronary angioplasty, and hip-fracture repair.70 But there were two surgeries that blacks were far more likely to undergo than whites: amputation of a lower limb and removal of the testicles to treat prostate cancer. Blacks are less likely to get desirable medical interventions and more likely to get undesirable interventions that good medical care would avoid.

Wicomb?’ ‘Yes, professor?’ ‘Is the heart in a good condition?’ How the hell should I know? It’s been in storage for more than sixteen hours, the machine did not supply oxygen and nutrients for a while, and I did not know what the heat in the storage compartment of the aeroplane had done. Then, I thought of the stories we had heard about Barnard, especially the one in which he was faced with a patient they could not wean off the heart-lung machine. The world-renowned professor promptly summonsed Jacques Losman to the theatre, ordering him to bring a baboon  – talk about taking risks. Barnard was the biggest risk-taker of them all. ‘This heart, Professor, is fit for an Olympic athlete. It’s the finest specimen you’ll ever handle.’ Barnard stopped operating as he glanced at me. ‘Taking a chance, Wicomb?

In The Heart’s Code, psychologist Paul Pearsall chronicles arresting accounts of our body’s cellular emotional intelligence. He tells of Claire Sylvia, the famous heart-lung transplant recipient who suddenly began craving new kinds of food—chicken nuggets and beer— as well as experiencing unfamiliar emotions. But why? Stunningly, in dreams, she had conversations with her donor (whose identity had been kept anonymous, standard hospital policy), which allowed her to locate his parents. They confirmed that her new tastes and feelings were those their son had too.

Pearsall also describes an eight-year-old girl who received the heart of a murdered child. After the transplant, the girl started having nightmares about the man who had killed her donor. Her mother then took her to a therapist. Details she reported in therapy sessions were so precise—time, weapon, the murderer’s clothes, crime scene—that they notified the police. Astonishingly, the girl’s information led police to the murderer.

Wicomb?’ ‘Yes, professor?’ ‘Is the heart in a good condition?’ How the hell should I know? It’s been in storage for more than sixteen hours, the machine did not supply oxygen and nutrients for a while, and I did not know what the heat in the storage compartment of the aeroplane had done. Then, I thought of the stories we had heard about Barnard, especially the one in which he was faced with a patient they could not wean off the heart-lung machine. The world-renowned professor promptly summonsed Jacques Losman to the theatre, ordering him to bring a 238 baboon  – talk about taking risks. Barnard was the biggest risk-taker of them all. ‘This heart, Professor, is fit for an Olympic athlete. It’s the finest specimen you’ll ever handle.’ Barnard stopped operating as he glanced at me. ‘Taking a chance, Wicomb?

The Lord tells us in the book of Ezekiel that, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek. 36:26, NIV). God removed the old, hardened heart that was cold and unloving. He gave you in its place a new, tender, touchable heart. Now, wouldn’t God be a cruel masochist if your entire life were a long, bloody open-heart surgery, where He removed your heart bit by bit? This heart transplant was a one-time transaction. The old is gone; the new has come.

I had always thought of my heart as the two of us against the world. My heart and me — that was it. We could do this. It was more than an organ in my body. The seat of the soul, my heart, was part of my personality. I wasn’t ready to concede the fact that I was going to lose it forever. It had weathered the storm with only 10 percent function and sustained two potentially fatal episodes with barely detectable blood pressure, events that would have likely been too much for even the healthiest heart to handle. As weak as it was, my heart had gotten me to this point. It stuck with me. It was determined to see me through, and I somehow felt as if I couldn’t leave it now. As strange as it seems, I wasn’t thinking about how much I needed the transplant to survive. I was focused on what life was going to be like for me from a spiritual standpoint. Over the years since discovering it was damaged, I had developed a spiritual connection to my heart. I talked to it regularly and visualized it being encased in healing light to open up whatever chakras were blocked — whatever bad karma was happening in the heart. I concentrated on treating my heart with loving-kindness and prayed for the chance to let me get it through this. I would silently say to my heart, the doctor said you shouldn’t have made it through,

He directed ... to go to the Georgetown University Medical School library and bring back everything they could find about heart transplants. McGowan became an expert, spouting survival statistics and talking knowledgeably about drug therapies and the leading specialists.

Do art critics give awards to the canvas? Is there a Pulitzer for ink? Can you imagine a scalpel growing smug after a successful heart transplant? Of course not. They are only tools, so they get no credit for the accomplishments. And the message of the Twenty-third Psalm is that we have nothing to be proud about either.

SHARING THE SAME HEART In very rare circumstances, it is possible for a heart transplant recipient to talk with the person whose heart they received. Through a process called domino transplantation, a patient with failing lungs receives a combination of a new heart and lungs from someone who has died, and donates his healthy heart to another person. (Because the heart and lungs function as one unit, and to reduce the chances of rejection, a heart-lung transplant is the preferred approach for some patients.)

In preparation for his New York Times Magazine story about one woman’s heart transplant experience, he had the opportunity to attend a Valentine’s Day party held for more than one hundred heart transplant recipients. Almost every recipient reported “spiritual memories,” or feelings of the energy of their donor. Siebert writes, “All the people I met at the party spoke in the same reverent tones about the angel in their chests, about this gift, this responsibility they now bear, and the little prayer they say to the other person inside them. It was as if they were part of some strange new cult, the tribe of the transplanted.”28 No one forgets that they have another person’s heart in their chest, and Siebert acknowledges that no matter how hard we try to see the heart as “just a pump,” every heart transplant recipient seemed to “re-inform themselves with a larger spiritual significance.

for months Fred would say the name Sandy when we made love. I could have killed him. He said I was hearing things and he still denies it, but when he was really passionate, he used to say Sandy.” With a red face, Sandra leaned toward Karen and whispered, “Jim always calls me Sandra, but in bed he calls me Sandy.” As Jim blushed and took his wife’s hand, Sandra added, “In fact, since the transplant he never says my name at all, but he is much more romantic and much less macho. I’d say he donated his type A heart and got a type B version.

domino transplant” in which she received a healthy heart and lung from a deceased donor and her still-healthy heart was given to another patient; this way, her new lungs, connected to their original heart, are less likely to fail.)

We have seriously considered doing the procedure in humans,” Lower said, but “because of the fact that we considered it an extremely high risk and untried, unproven procedure in humans, I think we decided it would be reserved only for extreme circumstances in humans.”3 As he explained his thinking, Lower added that it “should be used only when death of a patient seemed imminent.” It should be used to save a life, he said, but not to create what he called “cardiac cripples.” Though his self-examination drew scant notice at the time, it showed the surgeon’s awareness of the inherent risks that came with bringing heart patients back from the edge of the abyss.

sometimes bad things just happen that aren’t necessarily someone else’s fault.

Christiaan Barnard, for all his well-documented flaws, would later agree with the Americans. “You have to recognize that in South Africa we didn’t have the legal restraints of other countries,” he confided to British medical writer John Illman. “I didn’t even have to ask permission to do that first transplant. I just told the hospital authorities after I had done it. Can you imagine that happening anywhere else in the world?”39

Despite encountering the occasional swelled head, Jack Russell “could stand toe to toe with them,” observed John. “He respected their egos and they respected his.

Is the death of a person a matter of medical judgment, left to the physician to determine, or is it a legal question?” It was, in its own way, an updated version of the nineteenth-century controversies over body snatching,

Even as doctors acquired new cachet in the upper strata of society, the education of the American MD became inextricably bound to a system that would one day be seen as inhumane, unjust, immoral, and—more often than not—driven by deep-seated racial prejudice. So why did men who took the ancient Greek Hippocratic oath “to abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous” persist in inflicting such pain and emotional suffering upon vast swaths of the population?20

The supply of material for Practical Anatomy is ample and at a very trifling cost.

In December 1882, “Old Chris” Baker had his cover blown. He was arrested, along with several white medical students, for attempted grave robbery at two African American cemeteries—Oakwood and Sycamore. The arrests were cheered by the Virginia Star, a black-owned publication with Republican ties. The news account focused more on the role of Baker as a traitor to his people than to the mendacity of the white MCV students.

It has been claimed by many white men that Negroes are physically dissimilar to Caucasians. If that be true, then it is not fair to the white people that only colored ones should be dissected, and should be the only ones of whose physical structures the doctors have any knowledge.

This authorized history of MCV provides, in its own a way, a useful account of the blindness about the system that frightened generations of black children in Richmond—including its future governor L. Douglas Wilder.

Their outrage was understandable considering the continuing desecration and plundering of African American burial grounds at a time when lynchings—meant to enforce white supremacy and intimidate blacks through terrorism—often went unpunished throughout the South.

It took years before journalists exposed these government-backed operations. The psychedelic spy craft would join other instances in American medicine where human rights were trampled in the name of progress. In the 1950s and 1960s, doctors and academic medical centers enjoyed so much prestige and authority that they often operated virtually unchecked from outside supervision. The notion of “informed consent” was nonexistent.

Philip Morris always managed to make billions of dollars in profits. It did so by adapting to the changes in the political, legal, and cultural climate. The same couldn’t be said, however, of the nearby public hospital that treated thousands of Virginians each year for heart disease, lung cancer, and emphysema. This was especially true of MCV’s years of hand-wringing about finally stamping out its racist practices.

GRACE IS THE answer to that question. Grace is the answer to the call for help. Grace isn’t just forgiveness, a covering, an acquittal; it is an infusion, a transplant, a resurrection, a revolution of the will and wants. It’s the hand of a Higher Power that made you and loves you reaching into your soul with the gift of a new will. Grace is freedom.

Without a heart transplant, you were going to die. He didn’t pull through.” James lets his tears fall as he clears his throat. “His last request was that you receive his heart.

In a world where doctors can cure cancer and do heart transplants, there isn’t a single pill to treat menstrual cramps.” Her sister pointed at her own stomach. “The world wants our uterus to be drug-free. Like sacred grounds in a virgin forest.

Mr. Nobley had entered the room before he noticed her. He groaned. “And here you are. Miss Erstwhile. You are infuriating and irritating, and yet I find myself looking for you. I would be grateful if you would send me away and make me swear to never return.” “You shouldn’t have told me that’s what you want, Mr. Nobley, because now you’re not going to get it.” “Then I must stay?” “Unless you want to risk me accusing you of ungentleman-like behavior at dinner, yes, I think you should stay. If I spend too much time alone today, I’m in real danger of doing a convincing impersonation of the madwoman in the attic.” He raised an eyebrow. “And how would that be different from--” “Sit down, Mr. Nobley,” she said. He sat in a chair on the opposite side of a small table. The chair creaked as he settled himself. She didn’t look at him, watching instead the rain on the window and the silvery shadows the wet light made of the room. She spent several moments in silence before she realized that it might be awkward, that conversation at such a time was obligatory. Now she could feel his gaze on her face and longed to crack the silence like the spine of a book, but she had nothing to say anymore. She’d lost all her thoughts in paint and rain. “You are reading Sterne,” he said at last. “May I?” He gestured to the book, and she handed it to him. Jane was remembering a scene from the film of Mansfield Park when suitor Henry Crawford read to Frances O-Connor’s character so sweetly, the sound created a passionate tension, the words themselves becoming his courtship. Jane glanced at Mr. Nobley’s somber face, and away again as his eyes flicked from the page to her. He began to read from the top. His voice was soft, melodious, strong, a man who could speak in a crowd and have people listen, but also a man who could persuade a child to sleep with a bedtime story. “The man who first transplanted the grape of Burgundy to the Cape of Good Hope (observe he was a Dutchman) never dreamt of drinking the same wine at the Cape, the same grape produced upon the French mountains--he was too phlegmatic for that--but undoubtedly he expected to drink some sort of vinous liquor; but whether good, bad, or indifferent--he knew enough of this world to know, that it did not depend upon his choice…” Mr. Nobley was trying very hard not to smile. His lips were tight; his voice scraped a couple of times. Jane laughed at him, and then he did smile. It gave her a little thwack of pleasure as though someone had flicked a finger against her heart. “Not very, er…” he said. “Interesting?” “I imagine not.” “But you read it well,” she said. He raised his brows. “Did I? Well, that is something.” They sat in silence a few moments, chuckling intermittently. Mr. Nobley began to read again suddenly, “Mynheer might possibly overset both in his new vineyard,” having to stop to laugh again. Aunt Saffronia walked by and peered into the dim room as she passed, her presence reminding Jane that this tryst might be forbidden by the Rules. Mr. Nobley returned to himself. “Excuse me,” he said, rising. “I have trespassed on you long enough.

Their lives assumed the precarious rhythm of a transplanted heart. In light