Stuart takes a deep breath and musters all the calm he can. The first call is of course to me and Kristi, then the very next to Nurse Lizzie and the third to my rock and neighbour, Mary Berry. After making the first few calls, he pads softly into Jenna’s room to wake her and share the news. I don’t think there can be a more significant moment for a parent. He is very surprised to see Jen sitting up in her bed in the dark, waiting, her soft brown eyes watching the door expectantly.
“Jen, my love, it was Angela from Milpark Hospital. We’ve got lungs, Jen. They found a match. This is it, my love. It’s time to pack for Johannesburg.”
She looks at him with those intelligent eyes and says, “I heard the landline and I knew, Dad, I just knew.”
My stomach lurches when I imagine what was going on in Jenna’s mind at that precise moment. She was under no illusions. This was her one and only chance at life … but she also knew that lung transplants are extremely complex, and that she was desperately sick. The truth was that she might not survive the transplant – but she couldn’t live without it. A terrible, gut-wrenching conundrum. For months she had been living in both expectant hope and terrible dread of this call. She had fought so hard for this miracle. Just a few weeks earlier, as we lay cuddled up together on her bed, she had turned to me and said, “Mom, one of the hardest parts is that I don’t know if I am preparing to live or preparing to die.”
And there it is, the ultimate gut-twisting paradox of hope and fear. She is 20, just 20 years old. This call is her ultimate chance at life, and yet it is so risky.
Getting Jenna safely to Johannesburg, within four hours, requires military precision. At this stage she is on high levels of supplemental oxygen and a 24-hour-a-day pump of volatile intravenous medication. She is too weak and compromised to walk, never mind travel in a commercial aircraft cabin. But we have a clear and well-thought-out plan, with every detail documented.
Except I am not there. Barrier number one. Stuart continues executing Operation O2 without me. He has no choice.
With her golden-red hair, large light green eyes, friendly face and calm comforting manner, my trusted friend, confidante and neighbour of 15 years, Mary has become an essential and life-affirming support system for me. She lives directly opposite our driveway and is one of the first people on the list to call. I wouldn’t have gone away with Kristi if Mary wasn’t on hand and available for the time I was away. Within minutes she arrives at the house to help. Stu desperately needs to continue with phone calls as he has much to arrange (including the small matter of a plane! The city of Johannesburg is a two-hour flight from the city of Cape Town), and so it is the trusted Mary who goes into Jen’s bedroom to be with her at a moment I always believed would be me. Jen, who in all the years Mary has known her to remain rational and full of smiles, is unusually anxious, but she keeps her tone calm.
“Jen,” she says, “we can’t control whatever is unfolding here today, but what we know for sure is that this is going to be one of the most interesting days of your life.”
Even at the most challenging of times Jenna’s intellect and curiosity are always at play, and this perspective appeals to her. Selfishly, I wish with all my heart that it had been me with Jen at that moment, but on reflection (apart from the fact that I can’t change it) I think that the severity and significance of the moment would have been harder for her to cope with if I had been there, because Jenna would have felt responsible for the full weight of my fear and I would have felt responsible for the full weight of hers.
Stuart continues systematically executing Operation O2 without me. He hits a second barrier almost immediately. Months and months ago, Jonathan Ackerman and his family, out of the goodness of their hearts, had promised that when the moment came they would help get Jen to Johannesburg. He phones Jonathan, who picks up right away, and explains quickly what is unfolding. The Ackerman jet which has been on standby all those months is currently away in Europe. So is the head pilot. Stuart returns to methodically making his way down the list … every plane and every pilot is not on the ground in Cape Town. He phones option after option, getting more and more determined with each call. Meanwhile, unbeknown to him, Jonathan is activating his network, asking just one question. “What jets are on the ground in Cape Town?” Within 15 minutes Stuart’s phone rings. The caller is the pilot of the owner of a jet, whose urgent call caught him in his swim-shorts just as he was about to get into the ocean at Bloubergstrand for a long paddle-ski with his co-pilot and best friend. This incredibly kind man – who we don’t even know – is giving us his jet to take Jenna to Johannesburg.
“We are on our way to the runway,” the pilot tells Stuart. “We will be ready and waiting in 20 minutes.”
Stuart is still talking on the phone when Jonathan pulls up in our driveway. It is a colleague of his who has made this happen. His two pilots have quite literally dumped their paddle-ski, grabbed their car keys and are driving to the private runway at Cape Town International Airport. We have a plane.
Nurse Lizzie arrives at the house. She has her own gate-opener and lets herself in. Originally from the UK, blonde, blue-eyed lovely Lizzie is in her late 20s. She is a fully qualified nurse and has a youthful, wise soul. Serendipitously, she found her way to us through a long-standing former work colleague of mine from my magazine days. For the past year, Lizzie and I have spent every morning together mixing and administering the medication (an intravenous vaso-dilator called Eproprostenol) that goes into Jenna’s right heart chamber via a medical pump and a port in her chest. The mixing – a precise 35-step sterile process – takes an hour and a half (well, we eventually got it down to an hour) and requires both of us to concentrate throughout and double-check accuracy for safety’s sake. While I am away with Kristi, Lizzie has been doing the mixing either on her own or with Stuart at her side, both of them clad in their gloves and masks. Lizzie had been about to leave for our house to do the day’s mixing when she got the call from Stuart to say we’ve got lungs. She now arrives packed, calm, ready to fly and help.
Lizzie busies herself immediately with the medical side of things, checking on Jen, closely watching her vitals, and cross-referencing our detailed lists to ensure that she and I have packed everything we need. We already have a bag packed and waiting in the drug den (Jen’s affectionate name for our mixing room) on standby, but she triple-checks it anyway to make sure it includes extra medication for emergencies and that nothing is missing. What if the organs don’t arrive in Johannesburg on time? What if Jen is all prepped and ready for surgery and it can’t go ahead for some reason? These are valid and real possibilities that will require extra supplies of her daily intravenous and oral medications.
While Lizzie bustles and preps, Jenna tells Queen and Mary what to pack for her. She is physically weak, and her breathlessness doesn’t allow for physical exertion of any kind, so she sits on her bed quietly while the team helps pack. The meds are one thing … but the transplant also means we will be in Johannesburg not just for surgery but for recovery,
