Sick Girl
Amy Silverstein was a Phi Beta Kappa scholar who had just finished her first year of law school at New York University. She was madly in love with a fellow law student who was a summer associate at the same prestigious firm. When a palm reader in Atlantic city told her she would have four children and along, health life, she was only months away from experiencing the tightness in her chest, the fainting spells, and the episode of temporary blindness that heralded her rapid, harrowing descent into early heart failure. After an eight-month wait, Silverstein had a heart failure. After an eight-month wait, Silverstein had a heart transplant and was told she could expect to live no more than 10 years. The new heart, she learned, had come from a 13-year-old girl.
Now 44, married to her law student love, with an adopted son now in his early teens, Silverstein had lived with her transplanted heart, far beyond all expectation, for almost two decades.
The odds confronted in Silverstein’s memoir, Sick Girl, are daunting, and the crowning miracle is that she wrote this feisty, insightful, improbable book at all. A daily regimen of immunosuppressant drugs makes her sick while keeping her alive. She has endured unending rounds of doctor appointment, painful and invasive procedures, and emergency hospitalization.
In her words, “The illnesses that managed to get resolved did so in spite of never having been diagnosed and understood in the first place……Even the way in which I managed to stay healthy……remained unexplained mysteries that challenged my doctors and made them feel uncomfortably less than omniscient.”
What is clear is that Silverstein has cheated death to thrive in her post-transplant existence and to write about it with incredible courage, determination, self-scrutiny, and verve.