Frank 

Well, the big day is here: February 16, 2027.  I’ll have the transplant and, in a very strange sense, I will be reborn.  It has been a long time coming, with hard decisions to be made.  With all those lengthy interviews, taped for ‘my own good,’ I felt for a while like I was a criminal in a cop show: “The interview is suspended for ten minutes while the interviewee goes to the bathroom.  He has to pee.  He is an old man.”  I was almost surprised that they did not have anyone go with me, just in case I had ideas of escaping when their guard was down. 

I know that those interviews were necessary in order for the transplant to work for my future benefit.  That didn’t mean that I had to like doing them.  I wish that I could have remembered more.  Too much has slipped away.  But that’s a large part of my problem – faulty memory.   

As I walk down the sidewalk leading to the hospital, attendants at my side to guide me along, I see members of the press flocking to me like crows to a carcass.  The questions they are asking are predictable.  The young doctor who is the lead researcher told me that I should have answers prepared beforehand.  That way I would be less likely to be flustered in coming up with answers.  She had me rehearse my answers with her.  At first it seemed kind of insulting, but I now know that I could not have faced the press without those sessions.  I would just be standing, drooling into my shoes, as a friend of mine in the home describes it.  I stop to answer the questions for a few minutes, then the doctor tells them to go.  Unlike in the movies and on television, they do. 

They asked no questions of the person being wheeled into the hospital at the same time.  He appears to be barely conscious.  He must be the other player in this transplant operation.  I am sure of it.  The doctor told me that he didn’t have long to live – liver problems.  His name is Jim. 

As we enter the hospital, I think about what I had learned about first transplants a long time ago, when I took a university course on Medical History.  Sixty years ago, there were two heart transplants: one in South Africa performed by Christiaan Barnard on an adult male and a few days later, the first American one by the much less famous (it pays to be first) Adrian Kantrowitz, from a baby to a baby.  Both recipients died shortly thereafter, the first living only for 18 days more before dying of pneumonia.   

Funny about that 18 days survival.  The same was true of the first lung transplant, which took place in the U.S. by James Hardy in 1963.  His patient, a prisoner, died 18 days later with liver failure.   

It’s fairly typical now, that I can remember this information from long ago, while I often cannot bring to my conscious mind where I put my glasses, why I am standing in front of an open refrigerator, or why I thought that I could sweep the snow off of the front porch of the home while only wearing my pyjamas.  At my age, and in my condition, memory is highly selective and is something of a bully of denial. 

The Operating Room 

I am in the operating room now, lying down on the table, literally being ‘tied down.’   I can still look around, though.  Not far away is the other person who will be involved in the operation.  His decision must have been almost as difficult as mine.  I wonder if he was asked, like I was, whether he was of ‘sound mind.’  He looks rather pale and sickly.  I really hope that he survives.  Everything I hope for depends on that. 

The Second Part of the Operation 

Jim 

The first part of the procedure was a success.  I am on another table now.  This one reminds me of the one in the Frankenstein movies, with me hooked up to wires and strapped in, waiting for lightning to strike.  Except I won’t be given life.  I received that in the first operation.  This one will load up my brain. 

I am thinking about the old joke of students walking out of class because their ‘brains are full.’  I thought my brain was nearly full before, what with all the medical reading that I did over the last few months.  That is nothing compared to its state now.  My brain is sizzling with new thoughts frying in my brain pan.   

Leaving the Hospital 

They are rolling me out of the hospital now in a wheelchair.  At least I am aware of my surroundings now, which I wasn’t when they carted me in, barely conscious on a stretcher.  I am still a little too overwhelmed to walk without falling.  The media is here.  It seems that they only have one beginning for every question: “What does it feel like to…,”  I want to say, “There is no short answer for that.  Wait until my book on the transplant comes out.”  I think I might write that book, not something I ever thought that I could do. 

I do answer the reporters by saying that there are many pictures in my mind that have never been there before, that it is like I have experienced two lives in one lifetime. 

 I know that there will be people someday who will mistake me for Frank.  I don’t want to have to explain the long story of the first brain transplant.  I don’t want to say to people that I have his body, but only part of his mind.   

I know from his memories that he was losing contact with that part of his brain.  My own connection with them is better than what he had when he walked into the hospital.  Apparently, his dementia was like a virus – taking over more and more parts of his brain. I have the quite vivid memory of his fears about that in my mind now.  His brain was like my liver – something that was going to stop functioning within mere weeks.  Frank and I could have been a vegetable and a corpse, respectively.  We separately decided that one of us should be a thinking human with a chance for relatively long-term survival.  Hence the transplant of my fully functioning brain into his healthy body.  I am reborn.  But in a very real sense, in the rebirth of his memories, so is he.  I will write that book.  It will have two authors named on the cover.