By Natalie Johnson
In February’s Valentine’s Day issue, I shared with the Sebastopol Times an encapsulation of the love story my husband and I share. A high school crush, musical friendship, and 28-year hiatus was followed by a spontaneous reconnection from 3,000 miles away. Our impulsive marriage last summer changed both our lives in breathtaking ways.
Today, we both live in a state of near continuous gratitude. My offering now is a brief history of how this grace came to be. It’s accompanied by a photo of Andy, my husband, walking casually toward the camera, having followed a path up a modest slope beside a green meadow. I am a few steps behind, on his right side, where I have paused to look back down the hill. This photo, taken on Nov. 3, may look like a couple just enjoying a walk in the park, but it actually captures a convergence of many miracles into one beautiful moment.
Andy was born with cancer. Doctors at St. Jude’s saved his life with chemotherapy during infancy—the first miracle in our story. Unfortunately, this experimental 1976 cancer treatment thinned his heart wall significantly, and he has been slowly progressing into heart failure ever since. When we met as teenagers, he had just learned of this lifelong side effect, and it wasn’t slowing him down. He drummed barefoot for hours at a time. (I played bass.) He was doing one-hundred-mile bike rides at age 40, just before it really started to catch up with him.
When we reconnected after nearly 30 years last May (another miracle!), he had multiple implanted devices keeping him alive, including one that actually pumped his blood. He wore a battery pack continuously to keep this life-supporting machine humming.
He was loving his life, and we were loving each other, but no more bike rides. We soaked up the back porch and the hummingbirds, and we carefully hunted out walks that were relatively flat—no easy task in Northern California. On good days, Andy could slowly walk a bit of slope, even a small hill if he was motivated, stopping to catch his breath every 15 feet or so. He might sleep for 14 hours the next day. By September, when he’d been on the transplant list for seven months, he would sometimes get short of breath putting on his shoes.
Sometime in the first week of October, a dear soul—someone’s son, brother, father, someone young and healthy, someone to whom Andy will forever be karmically connected—experienced an unexpected tragedy. Through that individual’s and their family’s unimaginable generosity, they were kept alive on life support until all the grateful recipients of their donated organs could be in place, ready to receive these lifesaving gifts. I recognize how much harder this gift can make that time of grief, having to wait, putting life and time and the inevitable great loss into someone else’s hands. I know I haven’t yet fully explored all of the gratitude and emotion that comes with this particular miracle, a miracle of choice. I only know it comes streaming down my face every time I think about it.
On Thursday, Oct. 9, Andy’s heart and all the machines attached to it, were removed from his body. In my sleepy meditation during the surgery, at about 2:30 am, I saw Andy in the hospital hallway, pulling on his sweater.
With his sweet half-smile, he said, “It’s time for me to go.”
“Wait!” I said, panicked, “They’re giving you a new one! Wait for it. Please.”
The donor’s healthy heart was expertly placed in his body by surgeons and their many nurses and assistants at UCSF. Which miracle is this?! I’ve lost count.
And surgeons! Oh, my goodness, after 12 hours in the operating room through the middle of the night, that young resident surgeon (one of at least three who performed the surgery), came into the ICU to tell me how well it all went. My husband was lying there with a breathing tube, 14 IV drips, and countless other drains and tubes all working exactly the way they were supposed to, with a new heart beating in his chest. I looked at the surgeon with awe and amazement that anyone would choose this as their life path—so freakin’ courageous! The ICU nurse who received him from the operating room? A goddess. Whenever I feel like I’ve had an exhausting day or my job feels harder than I want it to, I will think of them. They choose to do this. Every day.
The weeks that followed have been intense and blessed in more ways than I can share here. The number of medications and appointments and procedures is only exceeded by the friends from near and far who have surrounded us with divine love—miracles all!
Recovering from a surgery of this magnitude is long and effortful, and the new heart can take time to warm up and start functioning at full capacity. When we were discharged 16 days after surgery, the instruction was for Andy to try to take three 8-minute walks per day. They were hard. Despite the new heart, he was still short of breath and exhausted, and he was always cold.
Each day, we tried to get out to Golden Gate Park, just a few blocks from his cousin’s graciously donated apartment where we’d been staying with his mom, Cathy. We’d bring camping chairs and sit in the sun, walk a little bit, watch the dogs.
On the day of the photo, Andy, Cathy and I pulled up to the field shown in this picture. I thought we’d take a short stroll in the sun and head home.
“I want to try to walk around it,” Andy said.
So we started out. I carried a little camping stool that could be quickly unfurled if he needed to sit down.
This picture marks the moment when I looked back and noticed the hill we had just climbed. Without stopping to catch his breath, without pausing, without even noticing what we were doing, we were just out for a walk. This was the moment right before I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Look behind you. Look what you just did.”
It was the moment right before we looked at each other, both realizing what these miracles added up to. Or, more to the point, that we can’t know what they might add up to, but that we…blessedly…have the rest of our lives to find out.