Dr. Miller said, "Your heart is responsible for delivering oxygen and blood to every organ. When it weakens too much, your body doesn't get enough blood flow, fluid backs up into the lungs, dangerous heart rhythms happen, and.. your heart can eventually fail. That's why we said that you need a transplant."
"Can we do something else beside a transplant? There must be something that we can do," Mama asked.
"Yes. But it's too late. It's been here in Ana's heart for long. Treatments won't help," Dr. Miller explained.
"Months," he said. "Without a transplant, Eliana, your heart will simply stop working. We are looking at a window of six to eight months at most."
And I remember, I always said it was just normal pain to my parents. I was too busy focusing on my dreams and didn't even really look after my body.
"Jesus Christ," said Papa.
"If she doesn't get any transplant, I'm afraid she won't make it, Sir," said the doctor.
Mama cried. Loud. I never saw her cry that way.
"Please. Do anything to save our baby," she said.
She buries her face in her hands. Her shoulders shake, but she tries to keep her sobs quiet, hiding them from me.
Papa was so silent. What's in his mind? He stood perfectly still, his jaw locked so tight I could see the muscle twitching near his ear.
I was so sad. And seeing them cry and look lost made me feel..
I felt emotionally blunted.
"We'll be waiting right outside," said the doctor.
The doctor went outside. He waited outside with the nurses.
And there we were.
"Ma. Pa," I said.
"I don't know what to do. I feel like I'm gonna die."
"Hush. Don't say that," Mama said.
"I think I still need to try, Ma, Pa."
"I'm really sad about this… it feels like I failed my own body somehow. But it's not time to give up yet, right? I need your strength too," I said quietly, trying so hard not to fall apart.
Because if my parents are already like this…
I don't think I can do it alone. I can't break down. Not right now. If I scream, Mama will collapse. If I cry, Papa's stoic face will shatter, and I can't see them like that.
"Six months is a long time," Papa said. "New York has the best doctors. We'll find a donor. "
We both just nodded into our hands, because we all knew the truth. Finding a heart in New York City isn't like finding an apartment. You can't just pay more or wait in a longer line. Someone else has to die for you to live.
For me to get a second chance at life, someone else has to die. I was officially waiting for a tragedy to save me. Is it cruel?
An hour passed.
Papa opened the door and talked to the doctor.
"The intravenous medications we gave her earlier have stabilized her heart rhythm for now," Dr. Miller said. "Because the transplant evaluation and waiting list registration take a few days to process, I'm going to let you go home tonight so you can process this together and prepare."
He looked strictly at Papa. "But she must modify her schedule immediately. No heavy lifting, no stress, and complete bed rest. If she feels even slightly shorter of breath or if the swelling increases, you must come straight to the Cardiac Care Unit. Do you understand?"
"We'll try our best. And please inform us if there's any transplant available," Papa said.
"Alright. We hope the best for your daughter," said the doctor. "We'll discharge her for now."
The discharge process took hours, dragged out by endless paperwork, signatures, and insurance verifications that felt completely pointless.
By the time Papa finally drove back over the bridge and into Queens, the sun was already setting.
The city was alive all around us, people were rushing home from work, yellow cabs were honking angrily at the intersections, and the neon signs of the local delis were flickering to life. The world was moving at its usual frantic pace, entirely indifferent to the fact that my timeline had just been cut short. But here I was, was I waiting for a miracle..? or a calamity?
Papa parked the car in our garage.
They both helped me walk inside our house. And walking back into our house felt.. completely wrong.
The heavy wooden front door creaked open, and the familiar scent of old wood, laundry detergent, and old dust hit me, but it didn't feel like home anymore.
Just twelve hours ago, at six o'clock this morning, I was practically floating down these exact stairs. I was shouting "Good morning, New York!" to the empty air. I was picking out my clothes, wearing my favorite necklace, and thinking about my very first day as a librarian.
I had a plan. I had a degree. I had a future.
Now, the air inside the living room felt heavy, thick with an unspoken silence that screamed louder than any noise. I walked into the kitchen and stopped dead in my tracks. It looked like a museum exhibit of a life that no longer existed. It was. It was the ghost of my morning, the ghost of the girl I used to be before 7:00 AM.
"Go upstairs and rest, Ana," Papa said from behind me. His voice was incredibly quiet. He didn't look at me as he spoke; his eyes were fixed firmly on the floor.
"Okay, Pa," I whispered.
I turned away from the kitchen and walked toward the stairs. Every single step felt like an immense physical labor. My legs were heavily swollen, tight against the skin, and they felt as though they had been filled with wet, heavy sand. It took everything I had just to lift my feet and climb to the second floor. When I finally reached my bedroom, I pushed the door open and looked around.
Everything was exactly how I left it. The library books I was supposed to return were stacked neatly on my desk. My graduation cap hung from a pin on the wall, its tassel swaying slightly in the draft. The clothes I rejected this morning were still scattered across my unmade bed.
It looked like my room, but it felt like I was trespassing in a stranger's space.
I shut the door behind me and turned the small lock until it clicked. The moment that sound echoed through the quiet room, the fake strength I was holding onto for my parents completely evaporated. My knees gave out, and I sank onto the edge of the mattress. I curled my body into a tight ball, pulling my knees up toward my chest despite the dull ache in my joints.
My hand flew to my throat, gripping my favorite necklace so hard that the metal edges dug painfully into the flesh of my palm. The full weight of reality hit me like a physical blow to the stomach, knocking the remaining air right out of my lungs.
I was sick. I was really, truly, terminally sick.
Midnight came to New York City, but the metropolis outside my window didn't sleep, and neither did I. From my bed, I could hear the distant, rhythmic rumble of the elevated subway train a few blocks away, vibrating through the floorboards. Every now and then, the sharp, lonely honk of a car echoed from the avenue. Millions of people were out there, living their lives, hailing cabs, meeting friends, or sleeping peacefully.
New York didn't care that Eliana Thompson was breaking down in the dark.
I reached out into the shadows and pulled my phone from the nightstand. The screen light ignited, blindingly bright in the pitch-black room, casting a ghostly, pale blue glow over my face and the white walls. My fingers were trembling so badly that I mistyped the letters twice, my heart thumping erratically against my ribs as I opened a browser window. I knew I shouldn't do it. Every doctor tells you not to look up symptoms online, but the ignorance was a fire burning in my mind. I needed to know what I was up against.
I typed the words into the search bar: Dilated cardiomyopathy survival rate.
The search engine populated hundreds of thousands of results in a fraction of a second. My eyes blurred with hot tears as I began to scroll through page after page of cold, unfeeling medical jargon. The statistics were cruel, laid out in sterile percentages and clinical charts. I tapped on a study from a major medical journal.
"Advanced dilated cardiomyopathy carries a high mortality rate, with approximately 50% of patients surviving less than five years without aggressive intervention... "
"Patients presenting with an ejection fraction below 15% are at immediate risk for severe complications, including pulmonary edema, thromboembolism, and sudden cardiac arrest."
I scrolled further, my thumb moving frantically down the glass screen. Heart transplant waiting list New York statistics.
The numbers only got worse. The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) database showed thousands of active candidates in the state of New York alone. The average waiting time for a matching heart could span from several months to years, depending on blood type and body size. The article noted, almost casually, that many patients on the list passed away before a suitable organ ever became available due to the severe shortage of donors.
Sudden cardiac arrest. The phrase looped continuously in my head, a terrifying mantra.
I violently shoved the phone under my pillow, desperate to block out the light and the information, but the darkness offered no comfort. The silence of my room only made the internal noise louder. My heart was hammering violently against the mattress, a chaotic, wet engine sputtering inside my chest.
Thump-thump. Thump... thump-thump-thump.
It skipped a beat, paused for a horrifying second that made me hold my breath, and then raced ahead at a terrifying speed, like a frantic animal trying to claw its way out of a cage.
I closed my eyes tight and pressed my face into the pillow, trying to force my brain to shut down, trying to drift into sleep. But every single time I got close to the edge of unconsciousness, a sharp jolt of pure adrenaline slammed me right back into a state of panic.
My survival instinct screamed at me from the dark corners of my mind, a terrifying thought that kept my eyes flying open: Don't sleep. If you fall asleep, what if your heart forgets to beat? What if it just stops? What if you never wake up?
An existential crisis settled into my bones, cold and heavy. I turned onto my back and stared up at the dark plaster ceiling, watching the faint shadows of traffic move across the room. I thought about my degree, the years of hard work, the books I wanted to take care of, the life I was supposed to start today. It all felt so incredibly distant now, reduced to nothing by a broken organ. I lay there completely frozen, listening to the erratic, broken clock ticking unevenly inside my chest, helplessly wondering how many ticks I had left before the battery ran out completely.