Amy Silverstein’s Sick Girl is the amazing memoir of a long-term heart transplant survivor. Silverstein lays bare her experience as a 24-year old struck by heart failure in the prime of her life. In the ensuring 2 decades, she learns (or manages?) to live with the heart transplant that both saved her life and made her life so difficult. During these years, Scott, her boyfriend and then husband remains a constant source of love and support.
Silverstein’s writing is crisply honest and tightly fluid, at times sarcastic and funny. Without melodrama, she narrates vignettes from her life illustrating fears, tantrums, relationships, strength, weakness, and frustration. We see how she navigated the medical maelstrom of her condition and learned to be a patient who takes charge of difficult decisions. Silverstein is eminently grateful for the transplant—what she ably struggles with is the high toll the anti-rejection medications take on her body, mind, and her quality of life.
This is the true face of heart transplant not the Hallmark version. There are no heroes or villains, just human beings who react in their roles as family, doctors, nurses, and friends—sometimes they are helpful, sometimes they are not. Silverstein is a survivor who endures what she must for herself and her loved ones because the alternative is darkness, which can wait. I highly recommended it.
Amy Silverstein begins “Pre-Game” the prologue chapter of Sick Girl with,
As I stand here counting out three pairs of underwear and four pairs of socks, I think of the little boy who will reach into his suitcase and find them waiting there for him—as if by magic—along with everything else he might need for this weekend. I thank the slow passage of time for keeping this son of mine young enough still to see the world as a seamless sleight of hand: a quarter behind the ear, the tooth fairy’s dollar, a perfectly packed bag that appears out of nowhere. He doesn’t yet need to know the trickery behind the wonders that come his way. He doesn’t need to know how hard it is for his mother to stand here packing this bag: how tired she feels. How sick.
Today I create an illusion with a suitcase. On another day, perhaps, I might draw upon my famous French toast. I am the mother behind the curtain, after all. My son is my constant audience.
And thank goodness my hand is still quicker than his eye. I’ll be sure to pack a book and a deck of cards, grape-scented kids’ shampoo and a rain poncho—just in case. I will think of everything so this ten-year-old boy will be free to think of nothing: not my life expectancy, which ran out eighth years ago, nor the handful of big-gun medicines I took this morning that forced me to the floor, a mommy-ball of nausea curled up on a damp bathroom rug. No, there will not be any trace of my heart transplant in the suitcase I pack for my son today.
I’m one hell of a great magician. [...]
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