Transplants and Gravity

Yesterday was one of those wonderful, wierd, awesome, awful days. I got a call from my mom about 8:15 am, telling me that they'd been summoned to Covenant Hospital from Amarillo by the Lubbock Transplant team - that they believed they had a transplant kidney available for my dad. He's been on kidney dialysis for 8 years and has gone through the gamut of emotions and physical ailments resulting from it.

All the crossmatches were good and by 10 am he was prepped and ready for the surgery. Then we waited. Hard stuff, waiting! It didn't take long to realize, from the posture of the staff, that the surgical suite was ready, the transplant team was ready, my dad was ready, we were ready...the delay was in the harvesting of the kidney. The elation of having our prayers answered after eight long years of struggle and hardship was tempered as we realized that somewhere else in the same hospital a family was making the decision to let a loved one go, and that had to happen before my dad could live.

All we were allowed to know is that it was an accident victim - 18 years old - from over in New Mexico. How do you pray for that? How do you pray selflessly? What do you ask our wonderful, Creator God to do? How do you approach the giver of life and ask Him to hurry up and take a life? Ummmm. How wonderfully awful life can be. How horribly beautiful can be death.

At 4 pm we were told the kidney was being harvested. At 5 pm the transplant surgery began. It is VERY rare, we were told, for someone in my dad's condition to receive a LIVING kidney. My mom and dad were even allowed to see the life sustaining organ prior to surgery. It was the perfect storm of healing technology. At 8 pm the surgeon told us that the transplant surgery was a success. And now we bask in the glow of a successful surgery and wait prayerfully to see if the body receives the transplanted organ, and we work feverishly to prevent infection and promote healing.

My emotions are sapped...crushed for a family who gave up their son or daughter so that my father can live "normally" again. All I can tell them is that they did the right thing. They did a great thing. They did a heroic thing. Their loved one's death saved a good man. In fact, at least two people are alive with new hope today because of this family's tragedy yesterday.

I'm elated for dad and look forward to the day when he can eat a normal meal and maybe, just maybe, enjoy the life that was been taken from him for most of the last decade.

But all this gravity makes me land in the knowledge that my Heavenly Father gave up His perfect Son so that I could have my heart transplanted and live again. I/we daren't miss the Jesus in all of this. So I listen to my beating heart and marvel at His life within.