magic

This is a story about magic.

This is the old fashioned kind of magic, the very old kind. The type of magic before we read about witches and wizards, before owls that could deliver letters, before anyone ever considered riding a broom or making a ring to rule them all.

It’s a primordial magic, the kind that stews in the background of our lives, the kind that if we really looked at it, we would probably lose our minds, like dividing by zero, or trying to understand the proportions of space between protons and electrons, between our galaxy and the pillars of creation, like trying to understand child birth or our mother’s love.

This is a combinatorial magic. A magic of ethics, science, laws, biology, physics. But magic is what it is, because it supercedes what our imagination can make of the facts. There was water, now there’s wine. And in that comma, a miracle. In the space between two states of being, an indefinable thing.

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The first time I saw it, I almost missed the whole thing. But that’s the nature of magic, if you spend too much time trying to see it, you’ll miss it. I was 24, I was grasping for meaning. I went for an organ procurement with a relative stranger, we flew in a jet, like some sort of movie, to a different state. We retrieved an organ from a young man who had died of head trauma. I remember the moment of silence for his gifts. I remember seeing his wide open anatomy, the fearful, wonderful spaces where no eyes or hands had ever been except God’s and now ours, somehow.

I remember flying back. I remember the pilot greeting us with a couple of burgers from Applebee’s on the ride back, and I remember not having a concept of being tired at all. The transplant surgeon went to sleep on the plane.

I remember coming back and scrubbing in for the first time while the transplant surgeons put the liver in. I don’t recall the moment it happened, so much was happening, so fast, but I remember seeing the gray liver become rich, purple, and alive. How?

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I spent three and a half years in a lab, based probably on just that night, trying to understand just one part of the mystery that is organ transplant. Just the very small sliver of the mystery, and what I found was that there’s just more wonderful mystery, every answer leads to wider array of questions. That’s the magic.

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A few months ago, I sewed in my first kidney transplant. The clamps came off the blood vessels that allowed blood to go in and out of the organ, and it turned a purple and then pink as it came back too life. It was magic. And no one can convince me otherwise.

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Sometimes the miracle is not so straightforward. Sometimes there are twists, turns, there are setbacks, there are losses. Sometimes a heart stops during surgery, sometimes the body rejects the organ, sometimes you’re so weak after surgery you choke on your own vomit and nearly die. Sometimes the magic is mired in heartache and failure. That’s when you realize it’s magic.

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magic is not an excuse, it is not a lack of serious and disciplined investigation, it is not a panacea, it is not a shrug. it is the thing that happens when the sum is greater than the parts. When you look up at the ceiling and realize that the small blue square you were painting is part of a massive, glorious whole, a vista that a single mind couldn’t independently hold if it tried. Magic is not a scapegoat. It’s the respect you give to the unnamed fifth element, the unknowable ingredient. magic does not downplay or denegrate the hard work and sacrifice of the many minds and bodies that worked for the miracle.

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