Summer continues. The days are long. Self’s favorite time of day is after dinner, when the heat is dissipating. Around 8 p.m. It’s still light.
Self’s reading has slowed with the warm weather. Today she’s on Chapter Nine of Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table: Westaby is doing a heart transplant on a 10-year-old boy named Stefan. The doctors begin surgery when they get word that “the donor heart had left Harefield” and “would arrive in Oxford in thirty minutes.”
It arrives. The assisting doctor, Marc, “started to trim the donor heart,” which was “from a live person with a normal brain.”
(In parts, this book reads like a horror story — Westaby seems to have a taste for the gruesome detail)
It was time to cut out Stefan’s own sad heart and make ready for the new one. Out it came. The empty pericardium was a curious sight. No heart. It must have been scary when Barnard did it for the first time. Like a car without an engine under the hood.
Then, the implantation:
Any donor heart is slippery and wet. Not easy to hold in position.
My treacherous imagination takes over.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Kanlaon 
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