Tag Archives: transplants

book reviews, healthcare

A review of Amy Silverstein’s My Glory Was I Had Such Friends: A Memoir…

On April 18 of this year, the New York Times ran a beautifully written op-ed by the author, Amy Silverstein. I knew who Amy Silverstein was, because about 15 years ago, I read her amazing book, Sick Girl, which she published in 2007. Reading Sick Girl was life changing for me. At the time, we were living in Germany the first time, and I had ordered the hard copy of the book, because I didn’t own a Kindle. I’m not even sure if Kindles existed at that time. I think I decided to buy Silverstein’s book about her experiences as a heart transplant recipient after reading a review of Sick Girl in People. I love books about real life health crises… or, at least I used to love them when I was younger and the crises seemed less like something I might experience personally.

I read Sick Girl in 2008 and reviewed it for Epinions.com. I reposted my review here, combining it with another review I wrote about a book called Change of Heart, which was written by Claire Sylvia, another transplant recipient. The two books were very striking to me, as they had such different moods to them. Claire Sylvia’s book about being a double transplant recipient (heart and lung) was overwhelmingly positive and grateful. After she wrote her book, Claire Sylvia went on to also receive a kidney transplant. She died August 19, 2009, 21 years after her heart and lung transplant.

Amy Silverstein’s book, Sick Girl, by contrast, was a lot more negative and honest. Silverstein wrote a no holds barred account of what it actually means to be a transplant recipient. She received her first heart in 1988, when as a 25 year old law student, she had health problems that revealed a congenital heart defect. In Sick Girl, Silverstein explained that many people believe that organ transplants are miraculous cures for people whose organs fail. But really, organ transplants just trade one health problem for another, as recipients have to take medications that keep their immune systems from destroying the foreign organs. Amy Silverstein had a life expectancy of about ten years in 1988, after she accepted a heart belonging to a 13 year old girl who happened to die in an accident at just the right time to save Amy’s life.

In 2007, when Sick Girl was published, Amy had already defied her doctors’ expectations for her survival by an additional ten years. But even though she’d had 19 years, when she was expected to only have ten, and even though she’d become a wife and adopted her son, Casey, Amy had seriously contemplated suicide. She was tired of being a “sick girl”. In 2005, when Amy was thinking about taking her own life, she was fixated on how difficult the regime was, and how she didn’t want to live that way anymore.

When I read Amy’s book, written a couple of years after she had those suicidal feelings, I empathized. I could totally understand why she was so tired of being sick and tired all the time. She had to submit to a grueling regime that included procedures like heart biopsies, and taking medications that made her throw up and put her at risk for every virus in the atmosphere. A simple cold could leave her bedridden for weeks. And people didn’t understand what it was like for her and made clueless comments that were infuriating in their innocence… and ignorance. So she wrote her book to educate the masses.

Not everyone liked Sick Girl. A lot of people thought Amy Silverstein was ungrateful and unpleasant. Some people found her whiny and self-absorbed. Quite a few folks seem to believe that anyone who gets an organ transplant should shut up and be eternally grateful, even if they are constantly sick and having to see doctors for painful, invasive, and expensive treatments and screenings. I, for one, heartily disagree, because if no one ever complained about the experience of having transplanted organs, scientists and doctors would never know what to improve about the experience for future patients. Moreover, I don’t think that just because someone gets a new lease on life, they should be expected to just shut up and act happy. I also don’t believe Amy Silverstein was ungrateful.

Amy’s first heart lasted an astonishing 24 years, before it started to fail due to the ravages of her immune system, antibodies that her body developed to attack the heart, and the many powerful anti-rejection drugs she had to take to stay alive. She needed another heart transplant, but having undergone one already and knowing what receiving a second heart would mean for her, Amy Silverstein hesitated. But then she got by with a little help from her friends.

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In 2017, Amy Silverstein wrote another book, titled My Glory Was I Had Such Friends: A Memoir. I downloaded the book in September 2020, but never got around to reading it until this month. I read it after reading Amy Silverstein’s obituary in The New York Times, which appeared just a few weeks after her lovely essay, titled “My Transplanted Heart and I Will Die Soon”, appeared in mid April. In the essay, Silverstein wrote that she had taken excellent care of her second heart, which she received in 2012. However, because of the drugs she had taken since 1988, Amy developed several types of cancer. From the op-ed:

Organ transplantation is mired in stagnant science and antiquated, imprecise medicine that fails patients and organ donors. And I understand the irony of an incredibly successful and fortunate two-time heart transplant recipient making this case, but my longevity also provides me with a unique vantage point. Standing on the edge of death now, I feel compelled to use my experience in the transplant trenches to illuminate and challenge the status quo.

Over the last almost four decades a toxic triad of immunosuppressive medicines — calcineurin inhibitors, antimetabolites, steroids — has remained essentially the same with limited exceptions. These transplant drugs (which must be taken once or twice daily for life, since rejection is an ongoing risk and the immune system will always regard a donor organ as a foreign invader) cause secondary diseases and dangerous conditions, including diabetes, uncontrollable high blood pressure, kidney damage and failure, serious infections and cancers. The negative impact on recipients is not offset by effectiveness: the current transplant medicine regimen does not work well over time to protect donor organs from immune attack and destruction.

After I read the New York Times op-ed in April, I remembered that I had downloaded Amy Silverstein’s second book about her second heart transplant, and how her friends had helped her (and her husband, Scott) through the experience. I made a mental note to read that book, but didn’t get to it until I read Amy’s obituary, which ran in the New York Times on May 16, 2023. Amy died on May 5, 2023. Two weeks after reading about her death, I’ve finished reading My Glory Was I Had Such Friends. Once again, I’m left very moved and better educated about organ transplants than I was before I read the book.

Although Amy’s op-ed indicates that transplant science hasn’t changed a lot since the late 80s, when she received her first heart, her second book indicates that things have actually changed somewhat. Because of her unusual circumstances, and the fact that she’d had her first heart for so long, Amy Silverstein was advised to go to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, which has the most advanced transplant program in the United States. Amy’s first heart transplant was done in New York, and she’d spent the ensuing decades seeing doctors in New York. But even though they knew her better than anyone else, her doctors told her she should be treated by Dr. Jon Kobashigawa, a renowned transplant surgeon there. So that’s what Amy did. She packed and went cross country for treatment in Los Angeles. But she needed help, and that’s where her posse of friends came into the picture. They all had their own unique strengths that helped Amy survive in her hour of need.

Amy Silverstein was blessed with several female friends who loved her dearly. And those friends picked up their lives to be with Amy and her husband, Scott, as they waited for a new heart to become available to her. It was a very difficult time, and in the brutally honest and somewhat negative style of her first book, Silverstein explains how difficult it was… and how much a lot of it really sucked. Again, I could hardly blame her. Some of what she endured sounded absolutely horrifying. Also, as Amy got older, she became much less interested in indulging the egos of some of the people who treated her. I found her stories of what she endured both fascinating and dreadful… and again, I could hardly blame her for complaining. Meanwhile, she had these devoted friends who were there for her, in spite of Amy’s apparently difficult and demanding personality. There must have been good reasons for them to love her as much as they obviously did.

When I read the reviews on Amazon.com, I wasn’t surprised to see that, once again, some readers found Amy Silverstein abrasive and ungrateful. And, once again, I think they missed the point and probably didn’t think very long and hard about what Amy was enduring. As the negative reviewers complained about Amy Silverstein’s apparent lack of gratitude, they failed to have any empathy for her situation. It’s easy to think that if you or I were in such a grave situation, we wouldn’t be perfect patients, endlessly patient, sweet, compliant, and never once failing to constantly thank everyone profusely. But the reality is, if you are, yourself, in that situation, cooped up in a hospital room, unable to breathe or sleep, using a pacemaker that constantly sends painful shocks into your body because your heart is so diseased, and not even able to enjoy sunlight or fresh air, your attitude might suck, too. You might become demanding and unpleasant. Moreover, I don’t think Amy Silverstein was, at all, ungrateful.

If Amy Silverstein had really been an ungrateful patient, she never would have lived for as long as she did. Amy Silverstein respected both of her donors by taking excellent care of both hearts. An ungrateful person would not have done that. They would have simply given up, stopped taking their medications with the unpleasant side effects, quit seeing their doctors, and just up and died. Amy’s second donor was also a thirteen year old girl, who had been an athlete. After she received her second heart, Amy recovered within weeks. She went running, because she felt well… In fact, she felt better than she had since before her first transplant. Of course she was grateful! And she got another ten years to enjoy that heart before she died… not because the heart failed, but because of the drugs she had to take to keep it beating. I would imagine that the COVID-19 pandemic was especially hard for Amy, who was regularly wearing face masks years ago, because she was a transplant patient.

When I read My Glory Was I Had Such Friends, I could relate to Amy Silverstein’s story, and I knew she wasn’t blowing any smoke up my ass about what it’s like to be a transplant recipient. Yes, it’s important to be grateful, but as I mentioned up post, if no one ever complains, then improvements can’t be made. No one would ever see the need for improvements. That makes it harder for the patients of the future. Moreover, sometimes people should be told the brutally honest truth, so they can have a more realistic perspective. Yes, organ transplants are kind of miraculous, but they aren’t a cure. Amy Silverstein helped me realize how fine the line is between life and death for transplant patients. She would have turned 60 on June 3rd of this year, and she managed to accomplish so much in her lifetime. No one expected her to live beyond age 35, yet here we are. Maybe the reason she did live for so long is because she was so very “difficult” and “demanding”. Not complaining might have meant giving in… and giving up.

Anyway, I really enjoyed both of Amy Silverstein’s books, and I am grateful that she shared her experiences so candidly. I agree that sometimes she was negative, and I’m sure some staff at the hospitals she attended thought of her as a pain in the ass. But, I found Amy’s accounts of her experiences authentic, realistic, and important, and she is a very expressive writer.

I’m glad Amy didn’t simply shut up and stop whining. Those who found Amy insufferable can now take comfort that she won’t ever bother anyone again with her “negativity”, but she no doubt taught countless healthcare professionals through her remarkable case and astonishing longevity. Anyone who regularly reads my blog probably knows that I’m big on being real and occasionally “inappropriate”, warts and all. For me, Amy Silverstein’s books check all the boxes. I highly recommend them both.

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expressions, music, obits

April truly is the cruelest month for some people…

I woke up this morning to read a gorgeous, heartfelt, loving tribute my cousin, Clark, wrote for his wife, Chris. Today would have been their 38th wedding anniversary, had his wife not passed away on April 10, 2022. My cousin has spent the past fourteen months taking care of Chris, who had cancer that spread throughout her body. I know my cousin and his family have faced cancer too many times. What makes the timing of this loss especially cruel for this couple is that Chris passed just days before their daughter’s wedding. But, as my cousins in that part of my family are very devoted to their Christian faith, they did note that Chris probably had the best view of her middle daughter’s spring wedding.

I’m not the most religious person myself, but I like to think that Chris was watching her beautiful middle daughter walk down the aisle to her new husband. It’s a comforting thought. As we’re all in need of comfort lately, I see no harm at all in believing fervently that Chris is celebrating among the angels with other loved ones.

A few days ago, one of Bill’s high school friends also departed this life. His circumstances were very different than Chris’s. Mark decided to die on his own terms. I don’t know the exact details surrounding Mark’s death, other than that he committed suicide. He evidently left no clue to his family and many friends that he was choosing to die. Based on what’s on his social media, many people were left in total shock and grief. I see that in the days before he died, Mark tied up some loose ends. He spent time with friends and loved ones, and took pictures, which he posted on his profile.

While I am generally in favor of letting people exercise free agency and self-determination, I can’t help but wonder how those people who spent those last moments of Mark’s life feel about his decision. Granted, there is nothing they can do about it now, which probably makes this even worse for them. Maybe it’s pointless to be angry about Mark’s final actions on Good Friday. I can only speak for myself when I say that Mark’s decision probably would have devastated me, if I had known him better. As it was, I never met the man in person, although I know Ex knew him. I wonder if she knows what he did. I’m not about to tell her, of course… But I do wonder.

Even though I never met Mark, I have been affected by his decision to kill himself. Bill hadn’t seen Mark in many years, but he remembered him fondly and was still upset by his decision to kill himself. I have been here to comfort him, which means that Mark’s death touches me, too. Yes, there were tears shed for him in our house, if that matters to anyone.

Bill and I both understand that there were obviously things going on in Mark’s life that must have been too much for him to take. What went wrong was obviously none of our business… and, when it comes down to it, death is something we all have to face at some point. Maybe it gave Mark comfort to go out on his own terms. I am a bit concerned for his survivors, though… especially the ones who were there at the end. He apparently never let on to what he was planning, and he never gave them a chance to voice to him how they felt about it. Maybe they feel cheated or angry… although so far, I’ve seen nothing but an outpouring of love and good wishes. Personally, while I’ll be the first to admit that I sometimes fantasize about doing what Mark did, I also think it was kind of a selfish thing to do. But then, I also remember that it was his life, and when it comes down to it, he wasn’t obligated to live for anyone. As far as I know, he had no children and was no longer married. His parents predeceased him. Maybe he just felt “done”. Or maybe he was very depressed or suffering from some ailment no one else knew about. I guess we’ll never know.

This morning, I noticed that I was getting a lot of hits from North Carolina. People are hitting a post I wrote back in February about a man named Chad Carswell. I had read about him in the Washington Post. Mr. Carswell was making news for needing a kidney transplant, but refusing to get vaccinated against COVID-19. To be honest, I wasn’t, and am still not, very impressed by that choice. However, I do recognize that not getting a vaccine is his choice to make. It’s his life.

My post about his case was admittedly a little snarky and, perhaps, even kind of rude. It’s been interesting to see the delayed reaction to that post from early February. I can see that the people who have found it are sharing it and clicking it repeatedly, also hitting the disclaimer link, and even my travel blog. I’m not sure what they’re looking for. My mind hasn’t changed about that situation, although I still agree that people should always have the right to make choices. That right extends to everyone, though. A surgeon has the right to refuse to perform surgery on someone who isn’t medically qualified to have surgery. I don’t know what’s currently going on regarding Chad Carswell’s case. It’s none of my business, and frankly, doesn’t necessarily interest me at this point in time. But obviously, something has triggered people to read my post about him. I do wish him well, even if I disagree with his decision not to get vaccinated. Hopefully, his decision doesn’t lead to his loved ones and friends mourning his passing in April, too.

Anyway, since death is on my mind today, I decided to record a song. I actually discovered this very simple song by John Prine only this morning. I thought it was kind of poignant and fitting, given how many losses I have experienced this April and in past Aprils… For some reason, April really is the cruelest month. It’s the month when it seems like so many people have died senselessly in school shootings, bombings, wars, suicides, and due to illnesses… As I watch flowers and trees literally bursting into bloom on a daily basis, I can’t help but think of people who have departed life in April, or have had their lives completely changed or ruined due to someone else’s choices. So below is my rendering of “I Remember Everything”, which was apparently released after Prine’s untimely and gruesome death from COVID-19. It gave me some comfort to sing it, even if it may not be among my better performances.

Incidentally, Switzerland is a place where people can legally choose to die… and it does appear to be a heavenly place to be in some areas.

I tried to do another video featuring my homely, middle-aged, mom-bodied visage on camera, but I couldn’t get the video to sync properly with the audio. I don’t look particularly great on camera as it is, and wasn’t wanting the video to look like a poorly dubbed martial arts film from the 70s. I got tired of screwing with it and decided to just use some photos from our visit to Switzerland last summer. The shots are of Lakes Zurich and Lucerne, which I found very peaceful to look at. “I Remember Everything” is yet another song I could probably do on guitar if I put my mind to it. Maybe I’ll try that at some point. But for now, here’s my latest musical effort. I hope someone enjoys it. I’m sure John Prine would have appreciated the chance to get vaccinated against COVID, although I really don’t know how he would have felt about it. I do know that a lot of people miss him, including relatively new admirers like me.

Edited to add… It occurs to me that John Prine died in April, too… and I just discovered another one of his songs. This one was about what he planned to do after death. It made me smile, especially since the chords are super easy and I could play along with it. Wonder if this is what came to pass for him when he did finally die in 2020…

I can actually play guitar to this one, and it’s quite fun to do so!

Now, as it’s Thursday and we’re about to leave town, I better close this post and get on with my chores of the day, such as they are. Gotta vacuum, you know… and walk the dogs.

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book reviews

Repost: Two books about what it’s like to have an organ transplant…

Reposting two Epinions reviews about what it’s like to receive a donated organ.  I just thought of them today because I was looking up Amy Silverstein, author of Sick Girl.  I remembered I read and enjoyed her book… or maybe I didn’t enjoy it as much as I found it interesting.  I also read Claire Sylvia’s fascinating book, a change of heart.  Claire Sylvia’s book is a bit more on the new age side, plus she got more than one organ.  Fascinating read!

(Actually, this was reposted on the original blog… and because we were talking about Amy Silverstein last night, I’m posting them again.)

Heart transplant… the lousy gift of life?

Credit People magazine once again for inspiring me to read something new. A few weeks ago, I was reading the book reviews and came across one for Amy Silverstein’s 2007 book, Sick Girl. The review in People mostly praised Silverstein’s book about her life seventeen years post heart transplant, but warned that at times, Silverstein wallowed a bit in self-pity. I was intrigued by the description and was already ordering another book anyway. I threw Sick Girl into my virtual cart on Amazon.com so I could see for myself.

At the beginning of Sick Girl, Amy Silverstein describes helping her husband, Scott, and son, Casey, prepare for a long awaited trip to the Super Bowl. As she packs Casey’s suitcase, she contemplates ending her life. It’s 2005. Amy Silverstein is in her early 40s and has, for seventeen years, lived with someone else’s heart transplanted in her chest. She has far exceeded the life expectancy her doctors gave her when she got her heart transplant back in 1988. They told her she’d have ten years. She’d lived seventeen, enduring endless medical crises and procedures. Through it all, she’d never gotten well or felt like her old self. She’d been nothing but sick and tired. She doesn’t want to suffer anymore, so while her husband and son are out of town, watching a live game of professional football, she plans to stop taking her immunosuppressant medications. She hopes to be dead by the time they get home.

I read this introduction and inwardly groaned. The reviewer in People magazine had not lied; I thought to myself. The writing did seem a bit melodramatic and self-pitying. But I felt compelled to keep reading and by the time I finished, I had a rudimentary understanding of why Amy Silverstein wanted to reject the precious gift she received from an anonymous 13 year old Ohio girl back in 1988.

Amy Silverstein was a pretty 24 year old law student at New York University when she fell ill. She’d been having trouble with fainting and went to see her doctor, who told her to start salting her food because her blood pressure was very low. The salt cure hadn’t helped and Amy got worse. She went to the doctor again, who sent her for a battery of tests, the results of which ultimately revealed cardiomyopathy. It appeared that a virus had attacked and pretty much destroyed her heart. That was the end of Amy Silverstein, healthy girl.

Doctors told Silverstein that she needed a heart transplant. She managed to get one before her time ran out. Exactly one year after her transplant, she married her loving husband, Scott, who had fallen in love with her when she was still healthy. I found Amy’s description of her wedding day very poignant. People were so happy for her. They thought that 13 year old heart had cured her and she was the picture of health. They didn’t know that Amy had to break away from her party to take powerful immunosuppressant drugs that would make her feel ill and poison her immune system. The immune system is designed to keep a person well, but to Amy, the immune system was an enemy. She swallowed the poison and went back to her reception, trying hard not to vomit and spoil other people’s fun.

Later, Amy writes about having coffee with a friend and complaining about her recurrent sinus infections. She’d had eleven sinus infections in that year alone and was on yet another powerful round of antibiotics. Amy’s well meaning friend told her that she should do what AIDS patients do– take drugs to bolster her immune system. Amy told her friend that bolstering her immune system would kill her because it would destroy her transplanted heart. She tried to explain, but the friend just didn’t understand and wanted to change the subject. In fact, it seemed that no one understood what having a heart transplant was like. It seemed that everyone expected Amy Silverstein to be nothing but happy that she was still living, even though living meant that she was always sick and could rarely enjoy life.

Sick Girl offers a fascinating look at what it’s like to be an organ recipient. It really opened my eyes to concepts I had never considered– not that I had ever truly considered what it’s like to live with a vital organ that used to belong to someone else. On an intellectual level, I knew that transplant recipients had to take powerful anti-rejection drugs. But I never knew that living with those powerful drugs meant living with extremely unpleasant side effects. Though it certainly makes sense to me now, it had never occurred to me that those heavy duty drugs would force transplant patients to deal with endless infections, constant nausea, and eventually, the possibility of cancer. Essentially, having a transplant means trading one major health problem for at least one other.

One of the most interesting passages in Sick Girl is when Silverstein describes what her transplanted heart feels like when it’s beating inside her chest. Silverstein explains that transplanted hearts are not connected to a person’s central nervous system. The nerves are all severed when the heart is cut away from its original owner. So, something could startle Amy Silverstein, but her heart would not react until a couple of minutes later, when her adrenaline kicked in. By that time, the scare might have ended, but the heart is only just starting react to it in an odd delayed response.

I also enjoyed reading about how Amy Silverstein’s perspective changed as she learned more about her body. For years, she thought she was sick because she was suddenly stricken by a virus that had attacked her heart. She felt bitter because she felt like she’d been targeted by an unlucky random event. But one day, one of her old doctors surprised her with the news that she’d actually been sick from birth and no one ever knew it. As it turned out, she’d had twenty-four years of good health against all odds. She hadn’t been unlucky. In fact, she’d been extremely fortunate.

Despite my initial thoughts that Sick Girl would be a real downer, I ended up really liking it. Yes, it’s true that Silverstein does a fair amount of whining and is often very negative, particularly about the people charged to take care of her. But she admits that she complains a lot and, under the circumstances, it seems like she’s justified in doing so. Everyone seemed to think that she should be grateful for the gift of life, given to her by an adolescent girl whose life was snuffed out in a car accident. People seemed to think that Silverstein should soldier on without complaint, enduring every inconvenience and obstacle that confronted her, all the while with a smile on her face and courage in her borrowed heart. No one seemed to care about what it was really like for her. And no one wanted to hear that she was sorely tempted to reject her precious gift in favor of death. Suicide talk was definitely not cool.

Amy Silverstein was suffering. Had she just been dealing with garden variety depression, people would have told her to talk about her feelings with a therapist. But because she’d had a heart transplant, people seemed to think that Silverstein had every reason in the world to be grateful and happy. She had no cause to be depressed because she’d been given a second chance at life. It’s my belief that Sick Girl is Amy Silverstein’s chance to finally have her say with an audience of people who want to hear her and understand. In a way, perhaps writing Sick Girl helped Amy save her own life so that she could be there as long as possible for her husband and son and offer something to the world that would make living her difficult life more worthwhile.

I devoured this book in just a couple of days, finding it very hard to put down. Yes, there’s a lot of bitterness, self-pity, and whining in it, but I came away from it feeling very inspired. I would definitely recommend Sick Girl to anyone who likes good stories. In my opinion, Sick Girl gave Amy Silverstein her own purpose for living– to tell the world about her heart transplant and give them a new perspective instead of just living for the sake of other people. And that’s what makes it a very special book.

Amy Silverstein is still living and has written another book.

You took the part that once was my heart…

A few weeks ago, I happened to find a human interest story on the Internet about Claire Sylvia, a woman who underwent a heart-and-lung transplant to save her life from pulmonary hypertension, a deadly lung disease. I read with fascination about how, once Sylvia got her new organs, she found herself craving foods she had previously hated and was drawn to activities she once never dared to try. Further into the article, the author mentioned that Sylvia had written a book back in 1997. Intrigued by her story, I immediately went to Amazon.com in search of A Change of Heart: A Memoir, a book Sylvia co-authored with William Novak. I was surprised to find Sylvia’s book out of print since it was so recently mentioned in an Internet article. Luckily, plenty of used copies are still around.

Claire Sylvia begins her story by describing the illness that had led her to writing. In the late 1980s, Claire Sylvia was dying of pulmonary hypertension. She became the first person in New England to undergo a heart-and-lung transplant, receiving the organs of an 18 year old man who had died in a motorcycle accident. Suddenly, Sylvia’s body began to pulsate with life and vitality. She thought that with the supreme gift of life donated by the young man’s generous family, her worries about her heart and lungs were over. But as she recovered from the operation, Sylvia began to feel that she had gotten more than just healthy organs when she received a new heart and lungs.

Sylvia began to have dreams that suggested that the young man’s spirit was now inside of her. She began to crave green peppers, a food she had previously hated. One of the first things she asked for upon regaining consciousness was a cold beer, a beverage she had never enjoyed before the transplant. She talked to her doctors about these new feelings and they assured her that a heart was just a pump. It wasn’t possible to transplant another person’s spirit along with their organs.

Sylvia began to have vivid dreams about her donor. A few months after her surgery, she dreamt she met a tall, thin, blond young man named Tim. In the dream, Sylvia and the young man were good friends. As they part company, Sylvia feels that her business with Tim is not finished. She kisses him and realizes that they will be together forever. Somehow she knew the man in her dream was her donor. Unfortunately, the rules would not allow the healthcare professionals to reveal her donor’s identity, nor could her donor’s family know who Sylvia was. The officials claimed it was “for the best”. In fact, Sylvia already knew more than she was supposed to know.

Despite the good intentions of the medical staff, Claire Sylvia did eventually meet her donor’s family. She found them through a combination of research, common sense, and the clues given to her by the previous owner of her heart and lungs. And when she did meet Tim’s family, she learned why she was suddenly drawn to men who rode motorcycles and why she wanted to eat chicken nuggets, a food she had once detested. Though the medical staff had warned her that she was “opening a can of worms”, Sylvia found herself welcomed into Tim’s family as if she were one of them.

My thoughts…

I found Change of Heart fascinating to read. With the help of her co-author, William Novak, Claire Sylvia has written a beautiful, heartwarming story about the wonderful gift of organ donation. And while some people may dismiss her story as new age bunk, I found it astonishing and hopeful.

On the other hand, while I found Claire Sylvia’s book very inspiring and interesting, I also wondered if she wasn’t sugar coating her experiences somewhat. A few months ago, I read and reviewed Sick Girl, another book about organ donation that presented it in a very negative light. Amy Silverstein, the author of Sick Girl, was brutally honest and quite negative about her heart transplant experience. Silverstein wrote of horrible side effects from drugs, constant sinus infections, and never ending worries about developing cancer.

Claire Sylvia’s book, by contrast, is overwhelmingly positive. She barely mentions the powerful drugs she must take every day to ward off rejection. She doesn’t mention the inconvenience of frequent visits to doctor’s offices. She almost makes her transplant out to be a desirable experience, as if by having someone else’s heart and lungs, she’s somehow more evolved as a human being.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad Claire Sylvia is so positive about her transplant. I’m am pleased that she’s grateful and she’s been able to make peace with her donor’s family. I am happy that she’s been able to find answers. I still can’t help but wonder if her experience has been all miraculous. I also wonder if her experience is common among transplant recipients. Would someone reading this book after having a transplant also be able to relate?

Anyway, I’m glad Sylvia wrote her story. I found it well written and very moving. It gives me hope that all of the things I learned about faith in something beyond the tangible and obvious could be true. It also gives me faith that perhaps it doesn’t matter what religion a person is. Claire Sylvia is Jewish. Her donor was Catholic, as is the rest of his family. And yet, despite their different religious beliefs, they are still able to share in something amazing and faith affirming.

By the way, according to the news article that prompted me to read A Change of Heart, Claire Sylvia, who is now 68 years old, also had a kidney transplant in 1998. Her transplanted kidney came from her ex boyfriend and ballroom dance partner. Apparently, after that transplant, Sylvia developed a fondness for cooking and started baking things for her donor. He told her that she cooks just like his mother used to.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who enjoys inspirational memoirs and those who can believe that cellular memory can last beyond a person’s death. Claire Sylvia’s got a great story to tell for those who want to believe it.

Claire Sylvia passed away August 19, 2009, 21 years after her transplant.

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