Read Starting Over for Free Online

hand. We were in the Intensive Care Unit and she was wearing a mask, gloves and a gown, looking a bit like a superhero. Everyone in there was dressed the same way. But I knew it was her.
    It could not be anyone else.
    ‘You don’t have to say it back,’ she was saying.
    I wanted to tell her that she looked like a superhero, but instead I went back to sleep, wondering if I would ever wake up again. Even in my heavily drugged state, I knew this was the dodgy bit.
    They had filled me with immunosuppressant drugs so that my immune system was weakened, and my new heart could squat in my old body and have a chance of not being annihilated. But by deliberately weakening my immune system, by sucking the life out of all the blood and tissue and good stuffthat fights bacteria and viruses, they had given me a good chance of being croaked by some killer infection. So it’s Catch 23. Which is like Catch 22, but worse.
    They had given me the first dose of immunosuppressants when I was sparko in the operating theatre, in the night, which is when all transplants take place. Now I would have to take them for the rest of my life. However long that might be.
    I slept. I woke. Lara was still there, dressed as a superhero. This went on for quite a while. Slept. Woke. I wanted to ask her, Haven’t you got a home to go to? I wanted to say to her, Sorry about all this, I know it’s a bloody pain. I wanted to say, I like you, you’re nice.
    But instead I slept, and if there were dreams then I couldn’t recall them.
    I was in the ICU for three days and then they moved me to my own little room on what they called a step-down ward. The ventilator had gone. By then Lara had stopped dressing like a superhero and stopped telling me that I didn’t have to say it back, and I sort of missed it.
    But that was a good thing.
    Because it meant she thought that I was going to live.
    When they give you a new heart, your body tries to destroy it.
    Bit stupid that.
    But the body really goes crazy trying to annihilate what it sees as this invader. They call it rejection but it is actually a lot more than that. Rejection sounds as though your body is snubbing the new heart, refusing to acknowledge its presence, not wanting it to move into the neighbourhood and lower property prices.
    And it’s not like that at all. Your body really wants to kill it.
    It is like you wake up in the middle of the night and there is an intruder in your home. You chase the stranger around in the darkness, slashing at it with kitchen knives and broken milk bottles and anything else you can get your hands on. You feel like you are fighting for your life. You feel that your survival depends on killing this stranger.
    Then you turn on the light.
    And the stranger is you.
    When I woke up my dad was there.
    I automatically scanned the room for my mum – the kind, smiling, tea-making moderator between my father and me for these last forty-seven years – but there was no sign of her. Our five-foot-high buffer was gone, no doubt in search of tea, and my dad and I looked at each other.
    ‘You’re all right,’ he said, the familiar voice soft and gruff. It wasn’t a question. And I found that I was pathetically grateful for his optimistic diagnosis, even if it was coming from a retired copper with no formal training in heart surgery.
    I could feel the pain in my chest flexing with every breath.
    ‘It hurts,’ I said, wincing as the breath came out of me. I arched my spine and the tube in the back of my hand pulled at me, as if urging restraint. I sank back into a pillow that was far too soft, like a giant marshmallow.
    My father pulled his chair closer and took my hand. The one without the drip. The touch of his hand felt strange. Soft and rough at the same time. Like his voice.
    ‘Close your eyes,’ he said. ‘Have a kip. Have a little kip now.’
    And I wanted to sleep. The mere act of waking seemed to exhaust me. But instead I stared in wonder at my hand in my father’s hand. I