The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae by Stephanie Butland
Description:
For fans of Josie
Silver's One Day in December, The Curious Heart of Ailsa
Rae is a wholly original, charismatic, and uplifting novel that
no reader will soon forget.
Ailsa Rae is
learning how to live. She’s only a few months past the heart
transplant that—just in time—saved her life. Now, finally, she can be a normal
twenty-eight-year-old. She can climb a mountain. Dance. Wait in line all day
for tickets to Wimbledon.
But first, she has
to put one foot in front of the other. So far, things are as bloody
complicated as ever. Her relationship with her mother is at a breaking point
and she wants to find her father. Then there's Lennox, whom Ailsa loved and
lost. Will she ever find love again?
Her new heart is a
bold heart. She just needs to learn to listen to it. From the
hospital to her childhood home, on social media and IRL, Ailsa will embark on a
journey about what it means to be, and feel, alive. How do we learn to be
brave, to accept defeat, to dare to dream?
From Stephanie
Butland, author of The Lost for Words Bookshop, The Curious
Heart of Ailsa Rae will warm you from the inside out.
6 October,
2017
Hard to Bear
It’s 3 a.m. here in cardio-thoracic.
All I can do for now is doze, and think,
and doze again. My heart is getting weaker, my body bluer. People I haven’t seen for
a while are starting to drop in.
(Good to see you, Emily, Jacob, Christa.
I’m looking forward
to the Martinis.)
We all pretend we’re not getting
ready to say goodbye. It seems easiest. But my mother
cries when she thinks I’m sleeping, so maybe here,
now, is time to admit that I might really be on the way out.
I should be grateful.
A baby born with Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome a few years before
I was would have died within days. I’ve had twenty-eight years and I’ve managed to do
quite a lot of living in them.
(Also, I’ve had WAY more operations than you everyday
folk. I totally win on that.) OK, so I still live at home and I’ve never had a job and I’m blue around the edges because there’s never quite enough oxygen in my system. But –
Actually, but nothing. If you’re here tonight for the usual BlueHeart
cheerfulness-in-the-teeth-of-disaster, you need to nd another
blogger.
My heart is failing.
I imagine I can feel it pounding in my chest. Sometimes it’s as though
I’m holding my breath, waiting
to see if another beat will come. I’ve been in hospital for four months, almost
non-stop, because it’s no longer tenable
for me to be at home. I’m on a drip pumping electrolytes into my blood and I’ve an oxygen tube taped to my face. I’m constantly cared for by peo-ple who are trying
to keep me well enough
to receive a transplanted heart if one shows up. I monitor
every icker and echo of pain or tiredness
in my body and try to work out if it means that things are getting worse. And yes, I’m alive, and yes, I could still be saved, but tonight it’s a struggle to think that being saved is possible. Or even likely. And I’m not sure I have the energy to keep waiting.
And I should
be angrier, but there’s no room for anger (remember, my heart is a chamber
smaller than yours) because, tonight, I’m scared.
It’s only a question of time until I get too weak to survive a transplant, and then it’s a waste of a heart to give it to me. Someone
a bit better, and who would get more use from it, will bump me from the top of the list and I’m into the Palliative Care Zone. (It’s not actually called that. And it’s a good,
kind, caring place, but it’s not where I want to be. Maybe when I’m ninety-eight. To be honest, tonight, I’d take forty-eight. Anything but twenty-eight.)
I hope I feel more optimistic when the sun comes up. If it does. It’s Edinburgh. It’s October.
The odds are about the same as me getting a new heart.
My mother doesn’t worry about odds. She says, ‘We only need the one heart. Just the one.’ She says it in a way that makes me think that when she leaves the ward she’s away to carve one out of some poor stranger’s body herself. And anyway, odds feel strange,
because even if my survival
chances are, say, 20 percent, what-ever happens
to me will happen 100 percent. As in, I could be 100 percent dead this time next week.
Night night, BlueHeart xxx
P.S. I would really, really like for one of you to get your- self a couple of goldsh,
or kittens, or puppies, or even horses, and call them Cardio and Thoracic. My prefer-ence would be for puppies. Because
I love the thought that, if I don’t make it to Christmas, somewhere there will be someone walking
in the winter countryside, let- ting their enthusiastic wee spaniels off the lead, and then howling ‘Cardio!
Thoracic!’ as they disappear over the brow of a hill intent on catching some poor terrifed sheep. That’s what I call a legacy.
From The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae by Stephanie Butland. Copyright ©
2019 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing
Group.
Author Bio:
STEPHANIE BUTLAND lives with her family near the sea in the
North East of England. She writes in a studio at the bottom of her garden, and
when she's not writing, she trains people to think more creatively. For fun,
she reads, knits, sews, bakes, and spins. She is an occasional performance poet
and the author of The Lost for Words Bookshop.
Book-buy link: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250242174
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