The Best of Me(96)
“It’s not that simple—”
“Why not?” Her face reflected her incomprehension.
“I have to call an emergency meeting with the transplant committee.”
Amanda felt her last threads of composure give way as he said those words. “Transplant?”
“Yes,” he said. He glanced toward the ICU door, then back to her. He sighed. “Your son needs a new heart.”
Afterward, Amanda was escorted back to the same waiting room she’d occupied during Jared’s first surgery.
This time, she wasn’t alone. There were three others in the room, all wearing the same tense, helpless expression as Amanda. She collapsed into a chair, trying and failing to suppress a horrible feeling of déjà vu.
I’m not sure how long he’s going to last.
Oh, God…
Suddenly, she couldn’t stand the confines of the waiting room anymore. The antiseptic smells, the hideous fluorescent lighting, the drawn, anxious faces… it was a repeat of the weeks and months they’d spent in rooms identical to this one, during Bea’s illness. The hopelessness, the anxiety—she had to get out.
Standing, she threw her purse over her shoulder and fled down the generic tiled hallways until she reached an exit. Stepping into a small terraced area outside, she took a seat on a stone bench and drew a deep breath of the early morning air. Then she pulled out her cell phone. She caught Lynn at home, just as she and Frank were about to leave for the hospital. Amanda related what had happened as Frank picked up the other extension and listened in. Lynn was again full of unanswerable questions, but Amanda interrupted to ask her to call the sleepaway camp where Annette was staying and arrange to pick up her sister. It would take three hours round trip and Lynn protested that she wanted to see Jared, but Amanda said firmly that she needed Lynn to do this for her. Frank said nothing at all.
After hanging up, Amanda called her mother. Explaining what had happened in the last twenty-four hours somehow made the nightmare even more real, and Amanda broke down before she was able to finish.
“I’m coming,” her mother said simply. “I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
When Frank arrived, they met with Dr. Mills in his office on the third floor to discuss the possibility of Jared receiving a heart transplant.
Though Amanda heard and understood everything that Dr. Mills said about the process, there were only two details that she later truly remembered.
The first was that Jared might not be approved by the transplant committee—that despite his grave condition, there was no precedent for adding a patient to the waiting list who’d been in an automobile accident. There was no guarantee that he would be eligible.
The second was that even if Jared was approved, it was a matter of pure luck—and long odds—whether a suitable heart would become available.
In other words, the odds were slim on both counts.
I’m not sure how long he’s going to last.
On their way back to the waiting room, Frank looked as dazed as she felt. Amanda’s anger and Frank’s guilt formed an impenetrable wall between them. An hour later, a nurse stopped by with an update, saying that Jared’s condition had stabilized for the time being, and that they would both be allowed to visit the ICU if they wanted to.
Stabilized. For the time being.
Amanda and Frank stood beside Jared’s bed. Amanda could see the child he’d been and the young man he had become, but she could barely reconcile those images with the prone, unconscious figure in the bed. Frank whispered his apologies, urging Jared to “hang in there,” his words triggering a flood of rage and disbelief in Amanda that she struggled to control.
Frank seemed to have aged ten years since the night before; disheveled and downcast, he was the picture of misery, but she could summon no feeling of sympathy for the guilt she knew that he was feeling.
Instead, she ran her fingers through Jared’s hair, marking time with the digital beeps of the monitors. Nurses hovered over other patients in the ICU, checking IVs and adjusting knobs, acting as though the day were completely ordinary. An ordinary day in the life of a busy hospital, but there was nothing ordinary about any of this. It was the end of life as she knew it for her and her family.
The transplant committee was meeting soon. There was no precedent for a patient like Jared to be added to the waiting list. If they said no, then her son was going to die.
Lynn showed up at the hospital with Annette, who was clutching her favorite stuffed animal, a monkey. Making a rare exception, the nurses allowed the siblings into the ICU together to see their brother. Lynn went white in the face and kissed Jared on the cheek. Annette placed the stuffed animal next to him on the hospital bed.