The Darkness Within: A heart-pounding thriller that will leave you reeling. Lisa Stone
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found a donor!’ she cried. ‘It looks a good match. We have to leave now. Come on! I’ve left Jacob getting up. We’ll phone and cancel our appointments from the car. Be quick.’
Mitsy barked as though sharing this good news, and as Andrew hurried after his wife he thanked the good Lord for answering his prayers, and promised he’d never ask for anything for himself again.
Upstairs in the rectory Jacob had managed to wash and partially dress himself and was now sitting on the edge of his bed trying to catch his breath. Stick-thin, pale, permanently exhausted, and out of breath even with the minimal exertion, he’d been off work sick for nearly a year. At 23, having left university with a degree in business studies, he’d been six months into his first job when illness had struck, and a range of symptoms were eventually diagnosed as congenital heart disease. His heart began failing fast and he and his parents were told that a heart transplant was his only hope. While he didn’t have the strength of faith his parents had, he did believe in something – a deity? He too now said a short prayer of thanks before texting the good news to his long-term girlfriend, Eloise.
His parents arrived in his room together. He couldn’t remember a time when they’d looked so relieved and happy. While his mother helped him finish dressing his father checked his bag, which had been packed since he’d been put on the transplant list, ready and waiting for the call. Downstairs they shut Mitsy in the kitchen with food and water (a neighbour would take her out later) and barely thirty minutes after receiving the call they were on their way, overjoyed, but not forgetting that another family had lost a loved one to make this happen.
At the transplant centre a specialist team of doctors and nurses was now assembling as two operating theatres were being prepared, one to remove the donor heart and the other to implant it into the recipient. It was unusual for the donor and recipient to live so close – just twenty miles apart. The transplant programme stretched nationwide and organs often had to be transported miles and at great speed when a donor was matched with a recipient at the other end of the country, although neither the donor’s next of kin nor the recipient of the heart would be aware of this. Their details were confidential and would be kept secret unless they both wanted to know who the other person was. Sometimes the recipient wanted to thank the donor’s next of kin, and if they agreed they were sensitively put in contact with each other, but this was unusual, and often resulted in a heart-warming story in the press or on the news.
It wasn’t just the heart that was being removed. The donor’s family had given consent for all of his body to be used, so as well as his heart going to Jacob, the kidneys, liver, lungs, pancreas, intestine, corneas, skin, nerves, veins, tendons and even the bones from his legs were going to benefit others.
When Jacob arrived at the transplant centre with his parents they were shown to a single room where nurses weighed and measured him, checked his temperature and blood pressure before listening to his chest to make sure he was well enough to undergo surgery. He confirmed he hadn’t had anything to eat that morning; they then took a blood sample and gave him a pot for a urine sample. The anaesthetist arrived, explained what he would be doing and asked him if he’d ever had a bad reaction to an anaesthetic before. He hadn’t – the only surgery he’d had in the past was a tonsillectomy at the age of six. The two surgeons leading the team arrived shortly after and the atmosphere in the room became electric – joyous, with a sense of occasion. They went over the procedure again with Jacob and his parents and reassured them that all would be well. It was a good tissue match, they said, and they would gown up now and see him later. Before prepping began, Jacob’s parents had to say goodbye. ‘We’ll be here when you wake,’ his father told him.
‘And I’ll phone Eloise,’ his mother said, knowing that it could be a few days before he was out of intensive care and could receive visitors.
One of the nurses gently showed them out, reminding them that Jacob was in very good hands – the best. She suggested they went into the city and had some lunch to pass the time as it would be at least four hours before there was any news. She would call as soon as Jacob was out of theatre. They thanked her, but before they left they made a detour to the hospital’s little chapel, where they asked the dear Lord to watch over Jacob and the donor family who had given so generously and were now grieving over their loss.
After the transplant and following usual practice, Jacob was taken directly to the intensive care unit where he was kept sedated, connected to a ventilator to help with his breathing, and given a drip passing fluids and medication into his arm. As with the other transplant patients, doctors and nurses monitored him around the clock until he was stable enough to be removed from the ventilator and brought out of the drug-induced coma.
As Jacob rose up through the layers of consciousness, he began swearing and cursing at the nurses, saying things he wouldn’t have done when fully awake. He told one nurse to ‘fuck off’ and another that he’d like to ‘give her one’, before trying to grab her breast.
‘That’s not very nice coming from a vicar’s son,’ she joked, aware it wasn’t the patient talking but the cocktail of drugs – particularly potent after a transplant.
As soon as he was fully conscious Jacob returned to his normal self and, still slightly confused, asked politely, ‘Where am I?’
‘You’re in hospital, Jacob,’ the nurse said. ‘You’ve had your transplant and everything is fine. We’re moving you to a different ward soon and your family will be in to see you again later.’
Relieved, he thanked the nurse and then fell into a more natural sleep. The next time he woke, his parents and Eloise were at his bedside, his mother, holding one hand and Eloise the other, while his father stood at the foot of his bed, smiling. The glow from the ceiling light caught his hair, circling his head like a halo, and just for a moment Jacob thought he’d died and was in heaven. After a few seconds, reality hit him, and he remembered what had happened.
Jacob’s recovery continued well and after a few days he was allowed out of bed to go to the toilet, and from then on he was encouraged to walk a little each day. He was very weak to begin with but the doctor and nurses told him that was only to be expected. In addition to undergoing major surgery he’d been weak in the months prior to the operation when his own heart had been failing. He’d only been able to take a few steps before he was out of breath and feeling dizzy, and going to the gym had become a distant memory. But that would change once he was deemed well enough to embark on the supervised cardiac rehabilitation programme run by a physiotherapist in the hospital gym. He was looking forward to gaining some muscle strength and getting fit again.
His chest hurt whenever he moved, coughed or cleared his throat but that was normal too. The surgeon explained that he’d had to cut through his sternum to operate and it was now held together by wires, which Jacob could feel clicking slightly when he moved. It would take six weeks for that bone to heal, during which time, it had been emphasized, he mustn’t put it under any stress, which included not lifting anything heavier than a litre of milk. No pushing, pulling, twisting, or driving, as turning the steering wheel put pressure on the sternum. What would happen if he did exert pressure on it Jacob didn’t want to know. He was already having unsettling dreams about being stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster. The less he was told about what they’d actually done in the operating room or the details of what could go wrong, the better.
He was allowed home three weeks later and it wasn’t a moment too soon. Alone in the single hospital room and with only his parents and Eloise allowed to visit – to minimize the risk of infection – Jacob had developed cabin fever, and knew he was becoming tetchy and short-tempered. To have been holed up for much longer would have driven him mad. For the first week he would have to return to the hospital every day for a check-up, then once a week, then every