One of my best friends has had a double lung transplant because of disease.  He kept in contact with the girl who coordinated the transplant, mostly because she was hot, and introduced her to me several years after the fact.  Not a week later I got a call at about 8pm wondering if I’d like to witness an organ harvest.  “You’ll have to lie, though,” she told me. 

Let me digress a moment and answer the question that inevitably comes up at this point, namely, “Why would you want to say yes?”  Well, because I’m a writer.  And I believe that as a writer, you need to experience as much as possible, and know at least a little bit about as much as possible.  And when an opportunity like showing up at a hospital in the middle of the night to be changed into scrubs, silly booties, a bad hat and a mask to witness a terminally injured man be scooped out comes up — you take it.  It might come in handy one day, it might not, but at the very least, now I know what happened to my friend.  I know, in fact, a lot more than he does about what happened to him.  That part anyway.

Back to the heart.  I was worried about my reaction.  I was encouraged to take pictures, which I saw as a godsend because when you look at something through a lens, you’re removed from it, and I figured if I got too upset and weirded out, then I’d just bring the camera up to my face and take a break that way.  It turned out that I didn’t get nauseated and I didn’t get freaked out.  I got really, really hot.  For whatever reason, that’s how my body reacted.  My skin felt like it was on fire.  Several times during the surgery — it took hours — I backed up and rested my bare arms against the cool tile of the operating room.  That was all the relief I could get.  I also had to step outside to take that awful mask off occasionally because it traps your breath and that’s hot, too.