“Protect yourself.” As a transplant patient, this is a refrain you hear often. From your doctors, nurses, family, friends. You have to be protected from a lot. The new organ, or organs in my case, have to be protected from your own immune system, which will attack without prejudice if it realizes said organ sitting in your abdomen is not made of the same stuff as the rest of you. To do this you take medications that suppress your immune system, make it weak, so that it won’t recognize the intruder happily filtering your blood or pumping in air. However, this process creates a new meaning to “protect yourself”. The outside becomes inherently dangerous. A cold or flu can hospitalize you, a lapse in hand washing can leave you debilitated for weeks, and a simple sinus or skin infection can easily find its way into your bloodstream.
Because of this transplant patients are taught protection early. As our doctors manage the medications that will protect our insides we are given instructions on how to be safe from the outsides. Masks, for anywhere from the first two to six months after your transplant you will walk around with a mask. When I had my transplant at seven I wore Mickey Mouse patterned disposable masks religiously for nearly half a year. Carry hand sanitizer everywhere, watch those around you carefully for coughing, and when in doubt? Avoid large crowds. And in this way, myself, and thousands of other transplant patients, are feeling eerily comfortable in our new COVID environment.
Don’t get me wrong, the prospect of COVID terrifies us more than many in the general public. Transplanted lungs and kidneys are notoriously fragile and many of us have strange reactions to illness in the first place. Speaking for myself once my body gets overwhelmed my digestive system often shuts down and I’ve been left on artificial nutrition for weeks after illnesses weaker than the coronavirus. But many of us have spent years, if not decades, playing by the rules that the rest of the world is just starting to learn as COVID Caution reigns supreme. Our hand sanitizer bottles are full, our long hospital stays have trained in us a slightly higher tolerance for masks, and when in doubt, doors and buttons are best to be touched only with an elbow. It’s been a hell of a time for the whole world but from a transplant patient of eleven years to the general public I have one thing to say. Welcome to the club.