Miracle Man

Jim and YoYo 2014.  Before the trauma.

First, the raw vitals:  Today makes 18 days without dialysis.  Not that everyone’s counting.  Jim still hasn’t passed his swallow test (so, no solid food yet).  He has his laptop these days, but his fingers aren’t yet as facile as he’d wish.  He’s in no pain whatsoever.  “Are you pain free because you’re on good meds?” I asked. 

“No medication,” said an emphatically bewildered Jim.  “I’m pain free because there’s no pain.”

“Does that surprise your doctors?”

“I got holes all in me, Brian.  It surprises everybody.  There’s just… no pain.  No pain, no pacemaker, no anything.  The heart feels like it belongs here.  Dude, I’m a miracle man!”  He makes it sound like he just been cast in Marvel’s latest feature film.

Tomorrow, doctors have scheduled the first of six routine weekly biopsies.  They’re monitoring him for signs of rejection.  But so far, nothing remotely suggests an organ mis-match.  His progress is so promising, he’s been moved to a step-down room:  Jim Southerland, 10 Duke Medicine Circle, North, Room 3117, Durham, NC  27710

Jim talks about coming home within weeks, not months.  But a visitor dropped by his room today, a graduate of the program, you might say.  A man whose own transplant is 13-months young.  He advised Jim to “take it easy.  You’re running a marathon, not a sprint.”

But Jim’s thinking about more than the mechanics of recovery.  It seems he is remembering with new clarity spiritual milestones of the recent past.  “I died, Brian.  I died.  Sometime, way back in November, when I was still in Asheville, still at Memorial Mission, I was dead.   But I wasn’t fearful.  I was sad; of course I wanted to be with my family.  But I wasn’t scared.  I felt safe.  

“I felt like I was being offered a choice.  I knew that if I lived, it was going to be a painful, expensive fight.  And maybe I wondered whether it would be worth living through that kind of hell.  

“I also felt that I could have simply let go.  I felt like I understood what it means when we say ‘death has no sting.’  I really was ready to go to the next level.”