“Are you still coming?” Very early on the morning of Saturday, March 24, 2018, as Tony was driving along O’Shaughnessy with me in the passenger seat, I answered a call from UCSF. That was the question the nurse in the liver transplant unit had for us: She wanted to know if he had changed his mind. As much fear and dread as we had felt on the 22nd, when Tony received the call, we were way beyond saying “no” to a transplant. He felt great, but we knew his cancer would return without a transplant.
The day before, while Tony was doing all the pre-op, the surgeon had told us that the liver was from a 26-year-old who had been placed on life support after a car accident. We each froze and looked at each other. Tony’s daughter Cole and my son Trevor were about that age. Long after the transplant, when Tony was on the road to recovery, we learned his name: Robert Anderson (August 8, 1991 – March 20, 2018). I am posting this story on what would have been Robert's 30th birthday.
The surgery began at 2:20 in the afternoon and took nearly eight hours. While it went well in terms of the liver functioning, a chain of multiple complications had begun. He had lost a lot of blood, causing his kidneys to fail. His lungs were not functioning well, so he was placed on a type of life support for three days. Then he started running a fever and became disoriented off and on. He had acquired a bacterium that is resistant to antibiotics, causing an infection around his liver. Then, over the course of the next few months, came inflammation of his pancreas, malnutrition, an intestinal disorder, and blood clots.
Recovery was long and hard, but he focused on what he would do when he got better. He set his heart on getting an RV and travelling. So, we bought one in winter 2019 and took our first trip in it that spring. He continually pushed himself to do more and kept at things till he could do them. He was still striving to do more, to become fully himself again, when he passed away. He got closer to full recovery than most of us would, fueled by joy. In the last photo I have of him, he has set aside his usual headgear, a Niners baseball cap, and is trying on a straw cowboy hat that one of the maintenance crew guys had brought back from Mexico. He has a little chuckle of delight on his face.
