I worry about my foreign body. The foreign body part, rather, that is now keeping me alive. Some days I feel like its dead, just sitting lifeless inside of me where the surgeon stitched it in. “Perfect,” he had said – it all went perfectly. Every time I go to have it checked, the consensus is that it’s still perfect. And some days – most, in fact –I feel it is. Most days now I can breathe without thinking about breathing. Walking up and down stairs the way I used to before my God-given lung gave out or rather scarred over smothering literally smothering me to death. Yep , that’s what Pulmonary Fibrosis does. It spreads tumors all over your lungs that burst then scare over blocking air from coming in and going out. Smothering.

 

I’m grateful I live in the age of medical miracles. Out with the old, in with the new.

 

But on the days – those days I still have, when walking up the stairs from the bedroom to the kitchen is exhausting, the days I have to stop and work hard to find that breath, I worry. Strange things go on inside near my stitched in foreign part. Strange pains and random swellings. When I yawn to get a breath and feels it won’t come, the breath I’m needing I  wonder if the foreign part is broken. If like the replaced insides of an old clock it is faulty and doesn’t fit so it’s just sitting there not doing its job.

            Like the clock, I’m not my original self. What is that called – remade – reworked. I know the word. It’s somewhere but I just can’t grasp it. In transplant lingo that’s called “med fuzzy.” Of the 26 pills I take every morning ( and 11 at night) that help keep my lung safe and sound from an immune system that thinks its job is to attack it and get rid of it, some make my brain fuzzy, some my eyes blurry and some have a good old time with my stomach. There aint no free lung, Baby!

Is there really a good as new? What did I expect? What is the history of my foreign part anyway? I’m feeling the need to know. It came from a nineteen year old girl. I think she died in a car accident but I may have dreamed that up. I do know that a 14 year old boy who was a few doors down from me in the hospital got her heart. Every night for the two weeks I was there I’d whisper goodnight to him before falling asleep.

 

 If it’s talking to my other parts, what’s it saying? If it’s speaking to or for me, what‘s it saying? The trouble is I just can’t forget about it. What was she like, this generous dead girl? Was she smart? I think so. Funny? Dunno. Was she wild? Hmmm, think maybe. I hope she was kind and as a mother myself, hope she was good to her parents. The big question that won’t go away though is how. How did she die? That question’s become a question of need, which is never a good state to be in.