On Thursday, February 18, I awoke at 4 AM to take a shower and use the antibacterial soap one last time. My husband and I got into the car for the 30 minute or so drive to the hospital, leaving my two older children still sound asleep (the youngest had been taken to a former babysitter’s house the night before). You know when you are so nervous about something even the littlest deviation can seem monumental? No? Just me then? The directions for how to enter the hospital ended up being wrong. A little monkey wrench in the whole scheme of things, but I remember being annoyed that even the hospital staff didn’t exactly know what would happen in terms of us trying to get in through the correct door. My anxiety level shot through the roof. I also remember being amazed at just how many people–family and patients–had shown up at 5:30 AM for a surgery. Were we all transplant people? Everyone walked the empty corridors together, stood in a long line to check in, and vied for seats in the surgical waiting room, where our spouses would sit for hours on end.

My BIL (brother-in-law) and I were called pretty quickly. We were each assigned a nurse’s aid, mine, bless his heart, shaved 4 pounds off my weight for my clothes. He was a good, good guy. We then were assigned to different large holding rooms, which, to this day, made no sense to me. There had to be at least eight beds in each room, but c’est la vie! After an hour of questions, pills, and general health tests–temperature, blood pressure, etc, we went down to pre-op. Here, thankfully, we were placed next to one another. Our respective surgical teams visited us–asking questions, giving explanations.

So I know I mentioned in my previous blog, My Year of 50, that my BIL is goofy, but I need to appropriately characterize him. First of all, I have known him longer than my sister has. We met at TGI Friday’s where we both worked, I would guess, sometime in 1992. He is, without a doubt, one of the funniest and fun guys I have ever known. He is light-hearted, always has a positive outlook on things, and is generally one of those people you want to be around because it is impossible to be in a bad mood with him in the room. He actually won’t allow it!

So there we were in pre-op, being prepared for what would be the most invasive surgery one could imagine. He would endure a Mercedes Benz insignia-shaped incision, having his old liver and many of the systems of veins and arteries around it removed while they constantly douse the area with water (if you have a strong stomach and an odd fascination, look up videos on liver transplants). Simultaneously, I would be given a six-inch straight incision and pried open while they removed approximately 60% of my liver and tossing my gall bladder in the garbage. Doctors would then “rebuild” a new system, using cadaver veins/arteries, inserting this into my BIL. And even though he recalls our time in pre-op as when “the shit got real,” he, inevitably, started joking around. “Hey, do you come here often?”, “Why don’t we just leave right now and go get day-drunk?” Deciding for sanity purposes, I should definitely join in the merriment, I mentioned that normally when we lay next to each other like we were, it was on a beach with cocktails, at which point the young anesthesiologist working on us both decided he should contribute, “well, this is just a different kind of cocktail…and maybe a better kind!” The jokes and banter between us and the surgical staff continued for the hour we lay, prepping for what would come. When we reminisce about this time, my BIL and I like to believe that the entire hospital staff loved the two of us. We were able to have fun despite what was about to happen.

The last thing my BIL said to me as they began wheeling him to the operating room was, “it’s not too late to back out,” and I laughed, knowing I was all in at that point.

Eight and a half hours later for me and roughly 11 hours later for him, our spouses were told we were out of surgery, stable, and in the Transplant Intensive Care Unit.

As of today, we are about as close to 100% as we could be. It is almost unfathomable to me that after something so major, we could be back to our normal lives with not much more than some scars and our memories to show for what we endured that day, six months ago.