Estrich: The miracle and trials of transplants

I felt like I knew her, even though I never met her, because I read every word Amy Silverstein wrote.

Her first book, written after her first heart transplant in 1988, when doctors gave her two weeks to live, was entitled “Sick Girl.” In it, she chronicled both the joy — and the misery — of life with a transplanted heart. The endless round of medicines, infections and biopsies, emergency room visits, all that I understood from my dear friend Pam who, like Amy Silverstein, had not one but two heart transplants. Mine was not idle curiosity; Amy helped me understand what Pam was living through.

Silverstein’s second transplant, in 2014, led to a second book, this one focused on the friends who made a spreadsheet so that, for a three-month hospital stay, she did not spend a single night alone in the hospital. That book was entitled “My Glory Was I Had Such Friends.” I have tried to be such a friend to Pam.

Silverstein’s final article foretold her death from cancer. She wrote in The New York Times: “Today, I will explain to my healthy transplanted heart why, in what may be a matter of days or weeks at best, she — well, we — will die. I slide my hand across my chest and speak aloud, palm to my heart’s crisp beating. ‘I’m so sorry, sweet girl.’ She is not used to hearing me this way, outside my head, beyond the body we share.”

Silverstein achieved the triumph of a heart transplant patient: not a pat of butter, not a sip of alcohol, she managed to keep that heart healthy, even as the rest of her body suffered from the crude transplant science that kept her alive, the anti-rejection medicine that plays havoc with your immune system, the skin cancers and infections that plagued her for decades, the 90 biopsies that snipped a piece of heart muscle.