Book Excerpt: Older Brother by Mahir Guven

“September eighth was my first transplant. I’ll never forget it. Because it was the day mom died, and the day we gave some poor guy his life back. It was an opportunity i was given, but I didn’t feel totally ready. Transplants take concentration, endurance, experience. They take a long time, sometimes ten or fifteen hours. One day, during bypass surgery, Guendou asked me if I wanted to do a transplant with him. Switching out somebody’s heart is a huge deal; you’ve got to show up in a big way. That’s how it is at hospital; you’re in a department, and you gain confidence, and little by little you find your place.

So, on one September eight at around six o’clock in the morning, I got a call to get to the hospital as first as I could. I’d trained for this operation. Guendou had been badgering me for weeks to brush up on my nursing protocol. Usually, the patient who’s receiving the transplant comes in first, and the nurses start “preparing“ him for the donor organ’s arrival. Then we, the surgical team get the patient once he’s under anesthesia. Lying there in a smoke of gurney, under the white neon light, the patient looks dead. It’s up to us to fix him, to get the machine up and running again. The patient waiting for a new heart that day was a North African man. Big head, big lips, short kinky hair. Not old; forty-five, maybe. My colleagues were acting as if it were just another day, but I kept thinking about the guy’s life-his wife and kids, his job, his apartment, his mom and dad, his neighbours. His face was pale. I thought to myself. Holy Shit. When we close this guy’s chest and he wakes up, he’s going to have a new heart. With some scars, maybe, but brand new. A second chance, man. He’d better spend the rest of his life thanking God.

Guendou told me to focus. he knew the first transplant causes a sort of emotional freak-out in your head. Surgeons always act as if everything is fine, you know, calm as a butcher slicing steaks.Work with precision, be quick without rushing, and eliminate any unnecessary movements, because from the time a donor organ is harvested and assigned to a recipient, you’ve only got a matter of hours to get everything done. Otherwise, it all goes in the trash."

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