A large digital clock on the corridor of the hospital section was written at 22:47. I saw it in seconds and probably remembered that moment and that watch for a lifetime. Looking at the white, freshly painted ceiling, a heavy wave of flashlight switched on and off as they drove me into the hospital bed through the hospital corridor and stayed on the way to the basement where there were operating rooms. The hand of my sister who was driving me along with her once again drew my forehead. I was silent and struggled to remain calm, at the same time I was surprised to be able to do so and remain so. She told me along a couple of times that everything would be all right, that they had gone a hundred times and that the doctors were experts.
I was thinking about everything then, all kinds of thoughts passed through my head, but not the negative one. I knew there was no escaping from this situation, that it was all in the hands of doctors who are great experts.
Entering the operating room I came across only anesthesiologists and nurses. Everyone with their eyes, with the help of a smile, wanted to let me know that everything was under control - not to panic. They wanted to move me from the bed to the operating table, to what I rebelled. I stood up and switched on my own.
For a minute, I was asleep and about 11 PM of the last day of June, my liver transplantation began. It was four o'clock in the morning when they ended up with my surgery, and three more liver transplants and one kidney were taken that night.
So I joined the recently-made 1000 liver transplant team as far as the transplantation team of KB Mercury has taken over the last 18 years in Croatia.
These thousand were performed last year, and more than a hundred of them are doing this year at the hospital only.
And in all the indications, from donating organs to the success of this tough operation, the team led by Primary Branislav Kocman who is at the very top of the world. For a reason.
Because apart from their great expertise their great results lie in their humanity and love for this business.
Transplantation is not an operation in which the old and sick liver is removed and placed with new one in a human body. It is a complex process that begins long before the operation itself and lasts long after it. Throughout the process, a great team of great people and experts participated by Dr. Kocman with the motto of his apostrophes in his statements.
Apart from that, all the nurses and technicians are part of an important part of the team, anesthesiologists and internists led by Dr. Tajana Filipec.
Right from her department begins the process of transplantation, which implies placing the person on the transplant sheet. It is necessary to do a series of examinations and finds, from ultrasound and heart transplants, ECG to spirometry and psychiatric examination. Otherwise, simple searches in the moments when you do them for a life-changing operation that changes your entire life in those few days becomes a serious burden. But the way that Dr Philipec's interns conduct them brings a great calm and conviction that everything will go the best.
The heaviest moment in all is just putting on the translatory list. Prior to the signing of the doctor's consent, they face a brutal reality that at that moment does not have the courage or persuasion. Then they need to explain how dangerous a surgical procedure is being performed, how it is done, the danger of being able to remain without spleen during surgery.
The word death is mentioned several times in that conversation and it sounds loud, as if someone screams and stays in memory. After that consent, every potential patient is placed on the Eurotransplant leaflet, the international network of donors and patients.
That moment when the doctor says that you were injected into the computer, I was sincerely the hardest. I felt like losing the ground under my feet and walking and not feeling in a few seconds. It continued with the sentence that from now on my cellphone can ring every minute, in a few minutes, for fifteen minutes, in the evening or in the morning, and considering the condition will be fast. Although they do not like to talk about how much on average they pass through to that moment, in confidence I have been told that it lasts two to three days in cases like mys.
The cell phone rang in eight days from that moment. On the other hand, about 5 PM , I heard only the doctor saying, "Can you come to the hospital for two and a half hours, we have a liver for you?" At the same time, the relief and tremor filled up these two and a half hours until I came to the hospital.
Entering the department next to the entrance to the hospital beside me, the doctors with metal boxes told me that there were organs in them. I figured she looks in one and my new liver.
Until 11 PM when the operation started, I did not have too much time to think because I went through the last searches and preparations for the operation. In addition to me there were two other patients who waited for the same fate that night. No one spoke between the search, we were silent and watched everyone in their point.
Although I knew for two years now that my illness was diagnosed as a result of transplantation, I was completely unable to complete it at all. But at one point I did not think this was my last one, that something would be bad. Convinced to a good outcome I was calm. There was a fear, everyone who says that he is not at the moment is lying, but the belief in myself and these people was completely dominant to stay extremely calm.
Whoever does not believe I did not tremble, a lost sight can freely tell me to show him an ECG and a heartbeat shot half an hour before surgery. I find this finding as proof that everything should always be brave and calm, no matter how difficult and unpredictable it is.
And that operating table seemed unpredictable, as well as the reflector I saw last before I completely fell into the operating room.
On the second day of the afternoon I woke up in the shock room, full of tubes and tubes that went from my body to several machines. The sound of my pulse was soaring in the room where the young anesthesiologist tried to make contact with me.
Literally through the fog I came to the word that everything went fine and I was on an intensive post-transplant unit.
I responded with my eyes and tremors because that was the only way possible with regard to the big and ugly respirator in my mouth and lungs. She begged me to shake her hand as much as I could, and I literally understood it, though I thought I did not have strength because I did not feel her hands or feet, she almost smashed her palm and shoved from her a loud smile and a hand with a laugh and a comment That I understood it intimately.
After one day and a half I moved from the intensive department where recovery, except through therapy, started with work with a physiotherapist and various additional examinations to make sure that the body works properly with the new organ.
Already in the department I could and did a lot of walking and doing the exercises for the arms and legs that I was looking for physiotherapists, the same important part of the transplant team, said Dr. Kocman who along with Dr. Stipic Jadrijević had full hands of work. Transplants are routines there and they do them almost every night, but with the same unselfish approach to every individual. It is impossible to describe their calm smiles, jokes, serious warnings, and the instructions that everyone goes through.
Dr. Kocman has led by his charm in optimism and recovery, and as a result of leaving the home care hospital just eight days later, the result is a great team of young nurses, technicians and doctors at the post-transplantation department that is 12-hour shift and take care of 30 of the risky patients ran completely relaxed and laughed. Everyone had time to question, detailed instructions about therapy, injections, and sometimes nervous outbreaks of patients.
The care and warmth of these people culminated every time the patient left home for home care. In those greetings and wishes for faster recovery and return to normal life, the best of the emotions between the patients and these people in the team are best seen.
Complete healing throughout this process after transplantation requires a lot of control at moments when immunity is extremely low and many steps to strengthen with a special regimen of therapy and nutrition.
The new life these people provide to each of the thousands of those who have got new liver pride is for each and every individual of this team and throughout Croatia.
But the very first day at home with the idea that life is resumed with a new body that enables you to enjoy a quality life, leads to healing of the mind and body.
By returning to everyday routines, laughter, socializing, and often stress and nervousness. Six months after my transplantation on a night that has changed my life, after thousands of reports written across European countries, South America, the Middle East and other continents, I can relax this literal life. It's about a small, successful team from the immediate neighborhood who is going to make 1001 transplantation and give a new life 1001 as long as you lie down. And I'm looking for a topic for the 1001 reportage.
Post scriptum: While someone dawn, another daybreak. Unfortunately, so is the whole life, especially in that transplantation.
The most common question to ask me is whether I know whose liver is now my new one. I do not know, but whoever I am, I am grateful to this person who is in peace and that family who agreed to a great deal extraordinarily. All I know is that the liver is a person of my age and that it is exceptionally healthy. My previous unhappiness was not my fault but the autoimmune disease that caught me.
For this reason, I consider my new life as a responsibility not only to myself, my family and friends who have passed by me and supported me, a team of great people from KB Mercury, but also to the person who gave me a healthy body to do something else in my life. And someday I might want to find out who this person is and meet the family who gave me a new life, but also the possibility that this person still lives through me in some way.