Page 53 of Near Miss

Liver transplants can take anywhere from five to eight hours, depending on a lot of factors.

This one only took six from the time I opened to the time I closed. It was routine as far as a transplant goes, but this one was special.

It wasn’t just the fact that it was for a patient I’d been with for years. Someone who wanted to live so much—to see another sunrise and sunset and breathe fresh air and love—it wasn’t that I held his hand and cried with him when other organs fell through. That I promised I’d do everything in my power to make sure he lived.

It was the fact that my heart beat differently when I was performing the surgery. The fact that I smiled so wide behind my mask when the new one was placed in his abdominal cavity, my eyes started to water. It was exactly the right size—a better match probably didn’t exist anywhere in the world.

I didn’t feel so much like I was stealing or taking something someone might not really want to give. I don’t get to ask donors if they’re like me. I don’t get to ask them if they’re the only choice for someone who’s hurt them immeasurably, and if at the end ofthe day, they’re just a young girl who wants their family to stay whole, so they give up one more piece of themselves.

I remembered what it was all about today—that it was a special, important, magical gift given—and I made sure it was treated with care.

It might have had to do with the fact that hours earlier, someone traced my scar with reverence and told me I was brave.

Not broken and desperate. Not a little girl giving herself away piece by piece.

I found an empty on-call room afterwards, and I think I slept better after a surgery than I have in over a year.

When most surgeons say they don’t sleep well, it’s because they just don’t sleep—resident schedules are cruel. It’s not something to be glorified, and everyone is walking around sleep-deprived almost ninety percent of the time.

But I stopped sleeping well when I started my fellowship and realized I was dedicating my entire life to the very thing that hurt me immeasurably.

I didn’t go into surgery with the intention of performing transplants.

It wasn’t some sort of calling that was stitched into me when the surgeon excised my liver and sewed me up all those years ago.

It just sort of happened.

The whole thing has felt a bit like I’m still stuck in the car. The water inching higher on my legs, the seat belt jammed and compressing all my air while my hands claw at the buckle, trying to get out.

This morning feels inexplicably bright—like maybe the way the water looked in the early morning after the crash. When the sun slowly blinks awake and its rays aren’t quite down to earth yet, but it’s starting to warm everything.

It feels peaceful and lovely when I leave the on-call room. It’s seven a.m.—not a notably busy time, but it’s nice that the lobby isn’t crawling with people or medical staff in search of caffeine yet.

It was only four hours of sleep, but I feel like a new person.

Early-morning sunshine spills through the floor-to-ceiling windows lining the cafeteria, warming the back of my neck when I sit down in one of the chairs in the corner.

I don’t have to round until nine, and usually I start reading charts and reports from the night before when I’m at home, but it feels nice to do it here. I don’t agree with romanticizing surgical schedules or the residency system in general, but it feels like another quiet reminder—sitting here in the sunlight, with coffee that’s better than most hospital coffee, reviewing patients’ labs and charts—that even though I chose to do this thing that had already defined me, it can be beautiful.

I’ve barely opened the first one when my sister calls.

She doesn’t say hello or good morning. “I stopped by your place last night.”

“Oh. I got a call around—”

“I know,” Stella cuts in, and even though she’s not here, I can see her mouth curling up into a saccharine smile, the way she would prop her chin up on her fist and blink at me. “Beckett told me.”

My mouth dries out and my heart, expanded beyond its borders, shrinks in my chest. “He—”

“Save it. I saw your claw marks.” She cuts me off again, words dripping and smug when she keeps going. “Imagine my surprise, throwing the door open to my older sister’s house, just to yell in and ask if she wants to come down to our father’s for a Sunday night movie, and who walks out of her bedroom as he’s pulling a sweater on? Red welts across those beautiful shouldersthat could really only be from someone’s nails. Sleeping with a professional athlete and you didn’t tell me? I’m hurt, Greer.”

“I’m not sleeping with him.” I try to swallow. “It was a one-time thing.”

Stella scoffs. “Don’t pretend. You’ve spent weeks gallivanting around the hospital with him. You took him to that gala, and now this? What’s next? Marriage? Did your boundaries and plans to focus on yourself disappear and evaporate when he took his shirt off? I think mine would, too. I mean I only saw a glimpse of the abs last night, but I’ve seen the commercials enough to know.”

She thinks she’s joking. She thinks she’s being sisterly and fun. And maybe in another world, she would be. But in this world, my sister doesn’t live in a body she can’t help but give away. To know what it’s like to be the kind of abhorrent person who gives her father part of her liver and sometimes wishes she hadn’t. To be such a fucking hypocrite that she dedicated her entire life to the thing that hurt her.

“Stop,” I whisper.

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