LCFC#10: Help me find the other women like me

Plus: An almost ordinary miracle

Nearly twenty years ago, I took my first, and forever favorite, science writing class. It was called Science Writing as Literature. It’s goal: Teach us that we could write about science accurately, yet as engagingly as “fine fiction.”

I remember several pieces we read, and one title in particular. It was Rob Kanigel’s An Ordinary Miracle about hip replacement surgery. The surgery was ordinary because it was becoming common, yet, a miracle because of the relief it brought to so many. The same could be said of knee replacements.

Typically, doctors perform 600,000 knee replacements and 330,000 hip replacements each year. Heart transplants are a fraction of that. Since 1988, doctors have done 88,908 — 4,111 of them last year.

I don’t think it is quite safe to say a heart transplant has become the ordinary miracle of knee or hip replacements. Replacing your heart with another’s comes with consequences. But the fact that it can be done, and it can be done the number of times it has been, despite the challenges, makes me think of the surgery as an almost ordinary miracle.

Why? Because when you step back and think that we can take out a person’s heart, what we often poetically think of as our essence, our soul, and sew in the heart of another and survive, that is mindblowing. The fact that doctors have begun to do it for an array of heart diseases hint at the surgery becoming more ordinary.

In fact, in terms of ordinary, several of the heart surgeons I talked with said that heart transplants are the easiest open heart surgery they do. Hearing this going into the procedure didn’t put me or my family at ease, but researching the step-by-step process of a heart transplant versus quadruple by-pass, for example, I can see why it might seem more straightforward.

It’s become so straightforward, in fact, that doctors started performing it for people who have the disease I had, ARVC, in 2007. Since then, 245 people with ARVC have gotten transplants; 93 were women — 3 roughly my age (35-49) were transplanted in 2022.

Those statistics, from the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network database, may read just like a list of numbers. But to me they are more.

Those numbers are people, and each person has a story, maybe like mine, maybe not.

What I find so fascinating is the fact that there are two other women about my age out there who had the same disease I had and who had heart transplants in 2022. I want to find them, talk to them, empathize. (They might not want to talk with me, and that’s ok).

But if they do, will you help me find them? I want to hear about their almost ordinary miracles.