When you receive a transplant, you aren’t supposed to know whom it was from.

When you receive a transplant, you aren’t supposed to know whom it was from. A lot of my patients have a hard time with that. They want to say “Thank you. Thank you for this swell new kidney/lung/liver/whatever.” But there are laws and ethical guidelines that prevent such a thing. I suppose there’s some kind of metaphor there, some kind of statement. A metaphor or simile or whichever the fuck you call it, but it’s beyond me to put it into words. So I won’t even bother. What I can do, and will do, is re-tell this story to the best of my abilities. If I go fuzzy with the details, I hope that you can find it in your heart to forgive me. After all, this story did take place a long time ago. Twenty-six years ago today, to be exact. And if it seems too fantastic or horrific to be true, all I can say is that I, along with the rest of the surgical staff at Sacred Heart Hospital, all of us present that day, will tell you the exact same story.

I was leaning against the nurse’s station on that particular day, the end of my 24 hour double shift as a surgical intern was still four hours away and I was counting down the seconds until I could go home and sleep. From where I leaned, I could see out the large glass doors that served as the main entrance. Sacred Heart had a sizeable front lawn with several dozen large maple and oak trees. And I remember, with incredible clarity, how the leaves falling from the trees were particularly beautiful that year. The wind was swirling them around in little whirls of peaceful color, the whole outside had that smell, that smell of dead leaves and fall. The maintenance guys had raked up several huge piles of leaves, a few of which were placed into those orange garbage bags that look like jack o’ lanterns when they’re full. A few actual jack o’ lanterns were placed on either side of the main entrance doors, typical things, triangle eyes with oval mouths, one tooth on the bottom. The candles inside of these were lit and flickering.

The entire place was decked out in Halloween gear – cobwebs, little paper witches, plastic cauldrons of candy, the general B.S. that comes with the holiday. A few of the staff were wearing some small costumes, a few kitten ears on some nurses or pirate eye-patches on the doctors. There had been a very light workload for the day and everyone was relaxing, even though no-one was sure that the peace would last, everyone was acting like it would. In fact, the hospital had a stillness to it that day. Walking around, I felt this incredible calm and peace permeating the place. You could sense it in the air. No one spoke about it, but you could just see it in the easy way everyone breathed. The place was quiet, and also kind of deserted. We’d discharged a large number of patients the day before and a little more than half of the rooms in the hospital were empty. The whole place was calm, quiet, peaceful and empty, a weird sensation to feel in a hospital, a place that is normally high action all the time. Not that day though.

So there I was, just leaning against that nurse’s station, minding my own business, and soaking up the atmosphere. Outside, the sky was starting to darken and the sun would be set in an hour or two. There was only one nurse by me, doing some paperwork and not paying attention to anything that was going on. The other four or so nurses on duty had scattered around the hospital. I decided to try and strike up a conversation with her.

“Whose chart is that?” I asked.

“Reed Davis.” she replied, polite but disinterested.

“The little red-haired kid right? Room 118?”

“Yep. Red-haired kid, about 14 years old, room 118, bad heart.” This kid had been in and out of the hospital over the past few months with an assortment of cardiovascular related problems. No one had figured out why a kid so young would be facing heart failure. They had figured out that if he didn’t receive a transplant soon, it wouldn’t matter.

“Have they moved him up the waiting list yet?” I asked her.

“That’s what I’m working on right now.” I waited for her to elaborate and she didn’t, giving me the polite brush-off. I gave up on the exchange and turned back to face the front doors, watching the sun slowly sink behind the tree line.

I stared out the doors for a few minutes when something caught my attention to my right. This nurse’s station was also in the middle of a long hallway that ran almost the entire length of the floor. To my right the hallway extended all the way down to a side entrance, a single door that the public could use to enter from the side. Out of the side of my vision I noticed someone walking down the hallway towards me. Only walking isn’t the right word. He was dressed like a bum, a dingy army jacket and soiled jeans, a mesh trucker cap pulled low over his face. I was trying to figure out what it was about the way he was walking that was weird. I had a fair bit of time to try and pin point it because he was moving ridiculously slowly and he had 50 feet or more to cover before he made it the nurse’s station and the main lobby.

“Hey, hey. Look at this guy walking towards us,” I said to the nurse behind me. She didn’t respond. I looked back over my shoulder and she was gone, her paperwork sitting on the desk. I then looked around for anyone at all, only to see that the main lobby and nurse’s station were completely abandoned, just me and that shadow walking down the hall. I turned back around to look at the guy some more and he was inches away from my face, breathing into my mouth and staring into my eyes.

——————————–

I don’t know if any real description can convey the vibe that this, I don’t know, “thing,” gave off. Close up, the state of decay that his clothing was in was unbearable. His jeans and jacket had holes in them, not tears mind you, holes that could have only come from some sort of worm eating through the fabric. His jeans, although at first appearing to be black, were really just so soiled that they became black, and actual clumps of mud were scattered about his body. His face was sunken in to such a degree that it appeared, on first glance, that his head was just a skull. This is not an exaggeration, as the other people who saw him later will testify. The pupils were so dilated and so large that it looked as if he didn’t have eyes at all, only when he shifted his gaze did the whites appear and confirm that there were, in fact, eyes in that skull. His breath reeked of so much dirt that, as he breathed into my mouth, he was literally breathing dust into my face, the smell was unbearable, it smelled of rot and decay and death. His face was covered with the dirtiest, scraggliest beard that was also clumped and matted with dirt. His lips were parched and cracked. We held each other’s gaze for a few seconds before I finally inched backward to give myself some space. He never moved.

“Can I help you?” I asked.       

He inhaled deeply before finally, what, speaking? No, speaking’s not the right word. He made sounds that sounded like rocks scraping together. His words came from the lungs and not the mouth, if that makes any sense. His speech was more breath than sound.

“I’m here to see Jerry Allen,” he said in that disturbing non-voice.         

            I’d seen zombie movies before in my life, in fact I’d watched “Dawn of the Dead at least 30 times. So that’s probably where I got the first notion of what this thing might actually be. But at the same time, this was the real world and not a movie theater. So rather than blindly running or reaching for the phone to call security I decided to just be as professional as I could and see where this went before making an ass out of myself and calling security to tell them that a potential zombie was in the hospital. I studied his body for a second before saying anything.

            “Are you okay sir? You look like you’ve suffered some injuries,” I say with all the sense of normalcy I can muster. “Why don’t you have a seat and I’ll get some people to…”

            “I… want… to see… Jerry… Allen…” it interrupted me. It was going through great pains to make its intentions clear.

“Just a second,’ I said back, “I’ll look up his room.” I moved away from him and back behind the desk to find where this Jerry Allen was at in the hospital. I had to take my eye off the guy for a few seconds while I rifled through the room assignments, but I could feel his gaze burning a hole through my back the whole while. I finally found the room assignment and I whirled around to tell it to him.           

“Mr. Allen is in room 115,” I said with a stutter. The thing was staring at me and he had a weird half-cocked smile on his face. He didn’t say anything or make any noises. He only moved around the outside of the desk, never taking his hollow eyes off of me, never dropping his creepy smile.            

At this point, everything in my body was telling me to run away, just run as far as you can as fast as you can. Just bail, get the fuck out of there, NOW! But my professional side was telling me to stay put, be a man, you’re a doctor for Christ’s sake. I stood there, glued to the floor by panic. In my mind I was trying to process all the different directions that this situation could go at any second, and each one scared me. He shambled around the outside of the desk, staring me down silently, smiling. After a few seconds, he made it to the other side and disappeared around the corner, into the hallway that transected ours.

Adrenaline was still dumping into my bloodstream for a few seconds after all of this. My sight locked at the exact spot where the thing had gone around the corner, because I think I expected to see him pop around any second and say “Just kidding, I am going to kill you.” It was then that I felt a hand grab my shoulder.

I’d say I shrieked like a little bitch, but that’d be understating it. I gave the most unmanly scream that’s ever been given by anyone with a set of testicles ever. I spun around, staggered backward and tripped over a chair, knocking my head against the lip of the desk, putting me out cold.

———————————————

When I came to, Doctor Kim was standing over me and examining me to make sure I hadn’t suffered a concussion. Doctor Kim was the chief surgeon and oversaw all of us interns.

“Well you don’t have a concussion,” he said.

I asked him, “How long was I out for?”

“Minute or two, you feel alright? Dizziness? Nausea?”

“No, I’m alright.”

“Think you can stand?” he said while extending his hand to me. I took it and he pulled me up. “There, now what the hell had you so frightened?”

I took a second and debated whether or not I would try to describe the thing to Doctor Kim. I decided to just leave it alone.

I told him, “You just startled me, I guess.”

“Huh. Well… ok. Look, I was actually looking for you. I just got a call from my wife and she’s stuck at work so I have to go pick up the kids from their after-school party. I shouldn’t be more than an hour, hour and a half. There aren’t any procedures scheduled for the rest of the night. So unless we get an emergency you should be fine. Alright?”

“Yeah. Yeah, cool.” I was feeling the lump on the back of my head. It was huge and throbbing. A little bit of blood came onto my fingertips when I pulled my hand around to look.

“You should get a nurse to stitch that up.” Doctor Kim said.

“I will.”

“Alright then, I’ll be back shortly,” he said, “Oh hey, did you hear on the scanner? About the cemetery near here?”

“No. What happened?” I asked,

“Some kids vandalized a grave, dug it up and everything. Tried to make it look like zombies were coming out, sick huh?” he said, arching his eyebrows at me, backing towards the main entrance the whole time.

“Yeah, sick.” I said. I was getting sick to my stomach. I don’t have to say what was going through my mind when I heard this. It’s going through your mind right now as well. Right then I instantly regretted not calling for security when the thing was near me.

“See you in a little while.” Doctor Kim said as walked out the main entrance. I waved at him and kept checking the bleeding in the back of my head.

The nurse who was doing the paperwork before came back around the corner and sat down at the desk. Her hands were shaking and her eyes were kind of misting up. She sat down in her chair and went to grab a pen but instead knocked the entire pen cup over, spilling pens and pencils all over the floor.

“What’s wrong?’ I asked.

“Well for one, I was just checking on little Reed and in comes Doctor Desmond…’ Doctor Desmond was our cardiology specialist, heart doctor, if you will “and he just got the back the latest tests for the kid. Without a transplant that kid isn’t going to make it another week.” She was fully crying then. This nurse, like me, was still new to the medical profession, she had only been nursing for a month and a half, and hadn’t had a chance to build up that callous wall of ‘who gives a shit’ that everyone in our profession has towards tragic things like this. It’s a survival tool.

“And then,” she continues, “I ran into the creepiest son of a bitch that I have ever seen in my life. He really, really scared me.”

At this point, my nerves and everything in my body were ringing and all my senses were shivering and pulsing. “Let me guess,” I said, “dirty as all hell, horrid breath, looks and smells like death?”

“Oh my god,” she said, “you saw him too?” I told her about my entire encounter with the guy.

“I was leaving Reed’s room,” the nurse says, now in a panic “I was leaving Reed’s room when I saw the guy creeping around room 115, right across the hall. So I asked him if I could help, and he didn’t say anything, he stared at me and smiled. I thought about calling security but I didn’t want to be rude to the guy. He said he was just there to visit a friend. So I just left him!”

“I’m calling security right now,” I said. No sooner had I picked up the phone and started to dial the extension, than a flashing light was going off over the desk, indicating that room 115, Jerry Allen’s, the room that the potential zombie was lurking around, had just had a heart monitor flatline. The nurse and I took off in a dead sprint to see what was going on.  What we saw when we got there, was so disgusting, that I, a surgeon who deals with blood and guts daily, almost threw up.

———————————————

There, on the bed, was Jerry Allen. He looked almost normal except for one thing, the huge fucking hole where his heart should’ve been. There was something there, in that hole, only it wasn’t a heart. Somebody, and I suspect that you’re thinking the same thing I did at that moment, had ripped open his chest and torn his heart out, and then filled that hole with dirt. It was the dirt that made my stomach churn. It was filled all manner of maggots and worms. The hole moved and convulsed as the little things churned around inside Jerry Allen’s heart cavity. The nurse was the first one to speak.

“Oh my god,” she said. The color had completely drained from her face. “If that’s where the heart used to be, where’s the heart?” she asked. We both looked at each other for a second, trying to decide what the hell we were supposed to do next. She was the one who acted first.

“Reed,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. We both ran across the hall into the little kid’s room.  Reed was there, unharmed for the moment, but he was awake now, and his heart monitor was going through the roof. The reason for his excitement, was that the walking dead was standing beside his bed, holding a freshly extracted bloody heart.

———————————————

The nurse and I were completely frozen in place. Reed was sitting up in his bed, his eyes and his mouth both wide open. He was just as unable to move as we were. The zombie was inching towards the little kid, that same crooked smile on his face that had terrified me to no end. Reed finally muttered something I’ll never forget

“Unc… Unc… Uncle Mike… Don’t…” he whispered between shallow breaths.

I can’t speak for the nurse, but my mind was telling me to do something, anything, to stop the guy from eating this poor kid. My body was having none of it though. It was a sheer, blind, immobilizing panic and fear that likes of which I’d never felt before and never hope to feel again.

The zombie was only centimeters away from Reed’s face, breathing dust all over the kid’s cheeks, its mouth wide open and its sharp rotting teeth exposed to bite and tear the flesh from the kids’ skull.

Reed snapped out of his panic and let out a loud piercing scream. At the last second, the zombie snapped its jaw shut with a loud click and slowly backed away. It laid the bloody and dirt clodded heart on Reed’s chest and started shambling towards me and the nurse, who were still locked in place by panic, right in the way of the door. I can’t tell you how long it actually took for the thing to reach us. I can tell you that it felt like eternity, watching it creep towards us; its jaw clicking excitedly, me trying to comprehend how it would feel to be eaten alive.

But when it got to us, it didn’t attack. It just pushed us out of the way and walked out into the hall. The nurse and I stared for some moments at it, dumbfounded by what we’d just seen. What finally snapped us out of our malaise was the sound of Reed’s heart monitor flatlining.

———————————————

            The excitement had been too much for the kid and his heart had had to work too hard during that time where he was being literally scared to death. We brought out the crash cart and shocked his heart back into the weakest of beats, enough to keep him alive for a little bit. The security guys showed up at the door right then.

            “We heard a scream. Is everything ok?”

            “No. Everything is not ok,” The nurse snaps at them. “What the hell took you so long?”

            “Well we got here as quick as we could…” the guard trailed off spotting the heart lying on the kids chest. “Jesus,” he said, whispering, “Is that a –a –is oh Jesus is that a fucking heart?”

            “YES!” the nurse and I yell in unison, annoyed by the guards’ presence as we were trying to get life support set up on Reed.

            “Well what in the world is it doing outside of someone’s body?” the guard asked, his voice rising in pitch toward the end. The other guard beside him was just staring at all of us with his mouth open.

            “It’s a long story,” I said. I looked at the heart and then back at the nurse. She was thinking the same thing I was thinking. We didn’t have to say it out loud. She knew what to do.

            “What tests do you need me to run?” she asks.

            “First of all, wash the dirt off it and put it on ice. We can only hope it hasn’t been out of the body for too long. Then go find Doctor Desmond. He’ll know…”

            “What will I know?” Doctor Desmond, the cardiology specialist, the heart doctor, had shown up and pushed his way past the two security guards. “You two do know that the guy across the hall has flatlined and has probably been dead for at least ten to twenty minutes right? I would have gone in there and pronounced him myself, but it just didn’t feel appropriate.”   

“Here,” the nurse says, shoving the heart into his hands. “Do whatever you have to do to see if this is a match for Reed.”

            He took the heart and immediately got disgusted and outraged. “What the fuck is this? Why is there a human heart covered in dirt in my hands? Huh? Jesus I’m not even wearing gloves. Is this thing still warm? Where did you get this?” he snaps at us.

            “JUST SEE IF IT’S A GODDAMNED MATCH!” the nurse screams at him. In a hospital, the doctors may make the money, but the nurses run the show. If you, as a doctor, have a nurse with a grudge against you, your life will be a living hell. This is why Doctor Desmond shut his mouth and immediately ran to do the tests.

            We finished setting up life support on the kid. The Nurse leaned over him and pushed his bangs back off his forehead. She was whispering to him, calming things, hoping he could hear them. The rest of us, me and the security guards, were just standing there waiting to hear if this heart was what we thought it was.

            Ten or twenty minutes later, Doctor Desmond ran back to the room with a manilla envelope in his hand. We looked at him and he looked back at us.

            “Well?” the nurse said. Doctor Desmond took a few seconds to catch his breath before responding.­­­

———————————————

            I probably don’t have to tell you what the test results were. The heart, in spite of all probability, in spite of being out of a living body for a good 5 minutes, was a perfect match. The heart of a 37 year old obese male had been a perfect match for a skinny 14 year old kid. We prepped Reed for surgery right there and Doctor Desmond and I performed the transplant. If Doctor Kim had been there he would have assisted but since he was picking up his kids I got to do the honors. Reed made a full recovery and is still alive today. I later asked him about his Uncle mike. Reed, god bless him, told me that they had never been particularly close and that all he really knew about his uncle was that he died in a bar fight twenty years ago with some guy named Jerry.

            “The guy broke a beer bottle in half and stabbed him in the heart with it,” Reed told me.

            Jerry Allen had no immediate family alive at the time of his death, so even though he never signed an organ donor agreement, the nurse and I forged one for him. His body was given a burial at the cemetery near the hospital, in a small grave that lay right next to the grave of the zombie.

            The zombie, Uncle Mike. If it did anything else that day, we don’t know about it. It just sort of disappeared and was never heard of again. The hospital and the police opened an investigation as to how Jerry Allen died and how his heart was removed. We were the main suspects, but we were cleared due to a lack of evidence. We never told anyone about the zombie. So no one ever went to look for it.

            When Reed was out of recovery he asked us where his heart had come from. I told him that was something no-one was allowed to know. He had a hard time with that. He wanted to thank them. He wanted to say “Thanks for this swell new heart!” But something tells me that in this case, it is completely for the best.

~ by thethingswethink on April 9, 2007.