I’m in a race with my lungs. Well, not so much with them as against them. They haven’t been very accommodating lately. And for full transparency, they’re not really my lungs, I’m just using them to the best of my abilities. They belonged to someone else once, someone who, I heard unofficially, didn’t survive a crash with a drunk driver but who, fortunately for me, had checked off the organ donor box on the back of their driver’s license (I don’t know if it was a he or a she or a they) indicating a willingness for their body parts to be made available to others in the event of not surviving a crash with a drunk driver or any other life-ending tragic event.

I’m using someone else’s lungs because, two years ago, I fainted in my kitchen while making eggs for dinner. It was as simple and non-dramatic as that. I got dizzy all of a sudden and my breathing got laboured and I slumped to the floor. I hit the frying pan on the way down and scattered the almost-cooked eggs everywhere. My wife heard the noise, ran in, shrieked, turned off the stove, and tried to revive me. The eggs stayed on the floor. She tried a cool cloth on my forehead, she tried lightly slapping my face, she tried yelling and calling my name. Then she called for an ambulance. I’m relating this whole story in hindsight, obviously. The details of it were explained to me later in installments, in my moments of clarity. How else could I know? I was unconscious at the time.

When I woke up a few days later, if you could call it waking up, I was in a hospital bed attached to a machine that was breathing for me, with a tube going down my throat and intravenous going into one arm and other tubes going into other orifices that I’m not going to describe. My wife was there. She saw my eyes open and smiled and cried at the same time.

“I love you,” she said quietly. “Can you hear me?”

I nodded and, with great effort, moved my non-tubed arm to my chest and patted my heart to non-verbally express that I loved her too. She cried some more.

I was in the hospital for several months. My lungs didn’t work and only a machine could keep me alive. I lost a lot of weight. I lost muscle and the ability to be mobile. I also lost a bit of hair. That came out because of stress supposedly, even though I was fairly sedated most of the time. Apparently it’s possible to feel subconscious stress. That was an interesting discovery that I learned in exchange for some tufts of hair.

The doctor broke the news to me and my wife that I was going to need someone else’s lungs on a day when my cognitive abilities were satisfactorily functional and he thought I’d be able to understand. Without surgery, he said, without a transplant, eventually the machines won’t be enough. It’s risky but it’s the best option in a bad situation.

“We have a whole team of doctors who will be involved,” he explained. “Then we’ll provide therapists and councilors once it’s done. We want you to have the most normal life possible under the circumstances.” He stopped and looked at me. “What do you think?” I looked at my wife and blinked twice. She shrugged.

“He says I guess so,” she said to the doctor.

“It will be a long haul, once the surgery is done, but I’m glad you agree,” he replied. “I’m sorry it has come to this but we’ll do our best. This sickness is mean.”

So the sickness, it was a massive understatement to simply call it mean. It was like saying Charles Manson was just mean or Jack the Ripper was just mean. The sickness was devastating and sadistically unpredictable and new. The doctors couldn’t say with any certainty where it came from or how it spread or why some people got it and, after a few days with a headache and a sore throat, they recovered completely while others, like me, were decimated. I was an anomaly though. The only people who got it worse than me were already dead.

The surgery, when it happened a couple weeks later after my new lungs were located, took almost twelve hours to complete. The medical team worked tirelessly and I’ll be indebted to them for as long as I continue to exist, whatever that may mean. I know there are no guarantees.

The recovery period was definitely, to use the doctor’s words, a long haul. I stayed in the hospital for two more months, very slowly gaining confidence in my ability to breathe, learning how to take small steps again, learning how to use a wheelchair. It was arduous and inconsistent and painfully frustrating. There were periods of progress interrupted by infections and pneumonia, relegating me back to being a sprawled-out bed-occupying lump. My new lungs, it seemed, loved letting me know that they didn’t like their new home. But there was no longer a tube in my mouth and gradually my breathing improved anyway.

I’ve always been a very positive person and I’ve always tried to use my time wisely. Laying in a hospital bed for months, even with all the challenges, there’s a lot of empty time to fill and there are two options to fill it, either wallow in self-pity while struggling to heal, or try to accomplish a bucket-list goal while struggling to heal. I chose the latter.

For years, as a hobby, I have worked on a screenplay. It’s a fantasy/horror/science fiction blend that would get my attention a little bit here and a little bit there. My new reality in hospital recovery, whenever my body and mind allowed, consisted of hours of available time. My wife, bless her, consulted with the doctors and got their permission to bring in my laptop. Inclining my bed to an approximate forty-five-degree angle, I was able to balance the computer on my chest and type somewhat comfortably while still being able to breathe, laboured as it was.

My mind opened, thoughts camouflaging, for the most part, my pain and discomfort, and I entered my own internal non-hospital world and wrote as freely as my body allowed. Often I had to stop to rest and move the computer off my ailing chest to give myself the chance to breathe more easily. Often it was a battle to continue.

The irony of writing descriptive scenes of bloody horror while trying to heal in a hospital bed was not lost on me and made me smile whenever I thought about it. In my screenplay, hostile aliens sucked the life out of earthlings in the most disturbing ways, universal laws like gravity and inertia were upended, nothing made sense and nobody was safe. Water suddenly became poison, air blackened, the aliens thrived, and humans died in grisly ways while the officials, hunkered down in former nuclear fall-out centres, tried to figure out what to do. My prolificacy pleased me and I progressed well.

The doctor came in one morning as an alien in my mind was gnawing on the leg bone of a corpse. “Guess what, my friend, you’re going home.” His words shook me out of my imagination and my immediate response was, really? I looked at my wife. We were flooded with emotions and thoughts and immediate extreme concern. “You’ll still have daily therapy,” the doctor continued, recognizing our anxiety, “and very frequent check-ups. We’ll provide you with everything you’ll need. It’s not going to be easy but, based on what you’ve gone through over the last few months, I’m sure you figured that out already.”

There was a hospital bed in my living room when I got home. A small table under the window had been transformed into a medicinal buffet. The curtains were open so I could enjoy the view outside with the understanding that I probably wouldn’t actually be feeling the outside for a while. My wife wheeled me to the bed and helped me slither onto it. She offered me my laptop but I declined it and fell asleep. After all this time, it was nice to be home.

It was not easy to be home. Every day, personal support workers helped me walk the halls, stretched my arms and legs, tried to increase my stamina. Sometimes during the night I couldn’t sit up in time to use the bed pan and my poor wife had to clean me and change the sheets. Sometimes I was sick from the medication and she had to clean me again.

Slowly, it seemed, my improvement started to outweigh the messiness. My breathing was getting less laboured and I could walk a bit longer. We even, on occasion and with the doctors’ approval, left the house and went for drives, solely for the pleasure and a change of environment. I looked out the car window, feeling enthralled. The only other times I was in the car was to get to rehab sessions and check-ups.

In my confident mental state, my screenplay developed nicely. Ironically, as I continued to feel better, the scenes I wrote got more and more horrific. As I breathed more easily, aliens decapitated humans, humans sliced up aliens, blood streamed in the streets and still the officials had no idea how to alleviate anything. But they were starting to develop some new theories.

I had to put the new theories on hold when the sickness came back. As suddenly as it had hit me while I had been cooking eggs in the kitchen so many months before, one night, just after I had fallen asleep, my chest constricted and my breathing became almost impossible. Imagine taking a very deep breath, holding the air in your completely filled lungs, and then trying to inhale again. That’s what it was like and I was immediately petrified. I rang the little bell that was on the table next to my bed and my wife came running. She called for an ambulance and, within half an hour, I was back in the hospital, sedated and hooked up to another machine and invaded by tubes once again.

I was in and out of consciousness for the next two weeks, unable to breathe naturally, intravenously medicated and fed, and too drugged to be worried about any of it. My wife, who sat next to me for hours every day, was not so lucky. She had to deal with the anxieties on her own. The doctors explained to her that several blood clots had developed in my lungs causing them to malfunction. It’s not good, they said. We can’t really explain it.

Slowly the almost-lethal doses of medication destroyed the blood clots and I re-entered the conscious world. When it was safe, the doctors transferred me to a rehabilitation clinic which, I learned later, was to be my new home for another couple months. I felt frustrated for myself but devastated for my wife, who had to endure the endless torment as a powerless witness. My breathing though, I had to admit, was improving marginally once again. It was a lovely, although short-lived, acknowledgement because, when the doctors observed that I was less laboured, they reduced the potency of my medication and, within hours, my chest was constricted again and I was painfully gasping for breath, so they increased it back to its previous level to keep me alive. This was the new game. Breathing improves, meds are reduced. Breathing suffers, meds are increased, breathing improves. But as this balancing act continued, we noticed that the improvements were less dramatic and the worsening was lingering longer.

Three doctors entered my room quietly one morning. My wife looked up from the book she was reading and tried to smile. I looked up with a feeling of uncertainty. The head doctor spoke.

“Well, the first thing I’d like to say is that you’re going home tomorrow,” he began. My wife was about to be happy until he continued. “I wish I could say it was because you’re improving and don’t need us anymore. But I can’t say that, I’m so sorry. You know your breathing gets more difficult every time we reduce your medication.” I nodded. “Well, it’s because your new lungs are failing.” I looked away, out the window. It was appropriately raining.

“What does that mean?” my wife asked.

“If we keep the medication’s dosage at the level your husband needs for much longer, it will start to damage his other organs. But if we lower it, his lungs will stop functioning. I’m so sorry.”

My wife and I glanced briefly at each other. “What are we supposed to do?”

“Go home. Make everything as comfortable as possible. And, I have to say it, make sure your affairs are all in order. We will arrange a palliative care service for you for as long as you need. The medication to assist your husband’s breathing will continue at a medium-dosage. And he will also have prescriptions to address his pain and sleeping issues. We all did our best but, this sickness, well, you know.”

“Yes, we know.”

My breathing now, laying in my bed in the middle of my living room, is shallow and difficult. There’s a bag of morphine tablets on my table and I take them whenever I want but I try to keep it to a minimum. My bed is inclined to a forty-five degree angle so I can type on my computer because, a few days ago, I had an epiphany and, despite the discomfort, I’m typing like a madman to complete the concluding scene of my screenplay. The aliens have lost their momentum because Earth’s officials have finally figured out what to do. The final battle is monumental and gloriously bloody. When I’m done, my wife and I will, I hope, edit the screenplay in its entirety and, once we feel it’s satisfactory, we’ll start submitting it to production and media companies.

This is very optimistic thinking on my part. There are no guarantees that I’ll even make it to the submission process. My wife, though, she knows where we can submit. I shared the details with her in my moments of clarity so, in the event that I don’t make it that far, she can continue. The chances that I’ll still be here to learn whether or not it is ever accepted are virtually nil. I know that my journey is coming to an end.

In the introduction to this narrative, I said I was in a race against my new lungs. They didn’t like being in me from the beginning and soon they’ll get their way. But my goal, right from the start, was to complete my screenplay, my long-imagined bucket-list endeavour, before they stopped functioning and rejected me entirely. I’m in terrible pain a lot of the time and I have frequent periods of incoherence and I’m sometimes morphine-high. But I struggled through it all and now my work is done and I’m still here. I won.

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Chris Klassen lives and writes in Toronto, Canada. After graduating from the University of Toronto and living for a year in France and England, he returned home and worked the majority of his career in print media. He is now living a semi-retired life. His stories have been published in numerous journals including Across the Margin, Fleas on the Dog, Vagabond City, Dark Winter, Unlikely Stories, Ghost City Review, The Raven Review, The Coachella Review, Sortes, Toasted Cheese, and Mobius, among others.

Chris’s previous piece: The Failure Gene (Issue 77)