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I was getting ready for a date when the email came: “Sorry for the delay. We are doing an infant heart transplant right now. Just starting.”
It was 8:55 p.m. on a Friday in September. I immediately grabbed a jacket and sprinted to the subway station, collecting my thoughts — and breath — as I rode the No. 1 train uptown through Manhattan.
A week earlier, I’d spoken with Dr. Emile Bacha, now NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital’s surgeon in chief, and gotten his permission to watch an infant heart transplant. As a health reporter at The Times, I wanted to tell this surgery’s story not by the numbers, but by bringing readers into the room as the operation unfolds. I didn’t know I’d get the chance so soon: There are about 100 infant heart transplants in the United States every year — and only two or three at NewYork-Presbyterian.
I’ve long been drawn to surgery — the concentration, choreography and controlled violence in the name of healing. But a heart transplant carries a particular charge: chance and calculation, loss and reanimation, two families’ grief and deliverance stitched together. In such a small baby, the whole thing feels especially uncanny: a life hardly started, already dependent on another’s.
On the subway, a practical concern set in: How was I supposed to get inside the operating room? The pediatric heart surgeon who had emailed me, Dr. Andrew Goldstone, was presumably already operating, and security wasn’t going to let some reporter wander in.
Luckily, I had Dr. Bacha’s phone number. After a brief misunderstanding — he thought I was with the team delivering the donor heart — he arranged for another doctor to meet me in the lobby.
By around 9:20 p.m., I was in maroon scrubs, a surgical mask and bouffant cap — essentially a blue hairnet — and was shuffled into the O.R. On the table was Luna, a tiny 6-month-old girl whose heart started failing in May.
Dr. Goldstone and Dr. Maureen McKiernan, the lead surgeon, were in limbo when I arrived; they had opened Luna up and isolated her beating heart. But heart transplants are all about timing, and it was a bit too early to swap out Luna’s blood. I took my place at the edge of the sterile field, shoulder to shoulder with the anesthesiologists, careful not to touch anything.
Although I’ve shadowed surgeries before, both as a pre-med student and as a reporter, there’s still something surreal about the O.R. I never really saw Luna — only her chest, lacquered orange, the rest of her swallowed by blue drapes. And despite what you might imagine, the room was never particularly hushed or reverent. Between bursts of concentration, ordinary conversation slipped in — small superstitions, quick jokes.
“There’s always delays; the name of the game is delays, delays, delays,” Dr. Goldstone told me during the operation.
“There’s actually less delays on this case than usual,” one of the anesthesiologists replied.
“SHHHH,” Dr. Goldstone retorted, not wanting to tempt fate.
I hadn’t known that this was Dr. McKiernan’s first heart transplant as the lead surgeon. But as the night wore on, it became clear that the story I’d come to tell wasn’t just Luna’s; it was also hers — the story of what it means to take on a procedure that almost never happens, and to carry its weight in real time.
Certain images from that night still linger in my mind: the doctors snipping away the old heart; Luna’s body suspended, emptied of its usual verve; all the waiting before the donor heart arrived; the gloved hands hovering over this bruised-looking strawberry; and then watching it come to life — that first confident beat. I could hear Luna’s heart thudding, see its ashen pallor give way to pink, watch the rhythm catch and hold.
But with the strict privacy rules around organ donation, there were moments that were more elusive: I never got to speak with the donor baby’s family or to share their story, their extraordinary generosity alongside a grief most of us can never imagine.
When Luna’s parents, Jessy and Gerson, saw their baby girl return to the intensive care unit, they hugged each other, teary-eyed, having waited for Luna all night.
“She’s a fighter,” Jessy said to the I.C.U. team.
Almost four months later, Luna is doing really well. A lot of readers were worried, given the setbacks she endured before the surgery, including weeks of seizures and a stroke. But children are incredibly resilient, said Dr. Colin O’Reilly, chief medical officer at Children’s Specialized Hospital in New Jersey — the rehab facility where Luna rebuilt her strength. In fact, Luna is already rolling over, sitting upright and learning to stand with assistance.
Starting this fall, I’ll be training to take care of patients like Luna as a medical student at Stanford University. But this September night felt like my first lesson: Medicine is part science, part improvisation, part unsparing love. And every so often, it offers the privilege of seeing life restart in someone else’s hands.
Simar Bajaj covers health and wellness.
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