Courtesy: Medical Miracles, from Readers Digest 1981.
November.
From the frontiers of science and the far horizons of
personal courage, these stories of medical triumphs and miracles will reaffirm
your faith in the awesome powers of the human spirit. Dramatic victories and
human triumphs.
Selected and edited by the editors of Readers Digest
Life began for Linda Buritsch on September 10, 1945, on
Staten Island, New York. When she was
two, the Buritsch family, which also included Linda’s older brother, Kit, moved
to Riviera Beach, Maryland. Although
Linda was born with a heart murmur, she lived a completely active
life—swimming, fishing, and playing tennis.
When she was a child, she dreamed of becoming a gym teacher, but as she
grew older her interests turned to music, art and writing.
She wrote poetry and stories, some of which were published
in student anthologies. Death seemed to
preoccupy her. “What is death?” she once
wrote. “Death is eternity—but how can I
be sure?” Was it her awareness of death
that made life so precious to her? “I love
life,” she wrote. “I wait for life. Will
life wait for me?” She was always
falling in and our of love. Although
some of her attachments were serious, none was lasting, perhaps because the
love she ultimately hoped to find existed only in her dreams.
This is suggested by a rather curious incident. One afternoon in 1963, just after she
finished high school, she suddenly sketched a portrait—the first she had ever
done. It was of a boy of about her own
age who bore no resemblance to anyone she ever known.
“Who’s the boy?” her mother, Polly, asked.
‘My dream man,” said Linda.
“Oh, come off it,” Polly said. “Where did you get such an idea?”
“I don’t know,” said Linda.
“I just had an impulse to draw somebody, and that’s who I came up
with.” Then she walked into her bedroom,
removed a photograph from a frame, and replaced it with the portrait.
Linda attended Hoot College in Frederick, Maryland, where
she majored in English, continued her writing, and edited the school literary
magazine. Upon graduation in 1967, she
taught English at Annapolis junior High School, and became one of the most
popular teachers.
She had begun getting headaches while she was in
college. But because they usually
occurred at exam time, they were diagnosed as migraines triggered by
pressure. Neither Linda nor her parents
were alarmed.
In the spring of what was to he the last year of her life, she
went on vacation to Puerto Rico and took several weekend trips to New England
with friends. She was sparkling at her
brother Kit’s wedding in May and, after school was out in June, she dated
almost every night.
“It now seems she sensed her time was running out,” her
mother recalls. “She kept going
constantly.” At one point she surprised
everyone by thoroughly cleaning her room, throwing away old love letters and
other mementoes. But she saved the
portrait of her “dream man,” removing it from the frame and carefully placing
it in a portfolio with her other sketches.
She was still troubled by occasional headaches, but the
attacks did not seem to incapacitate her.
Or it may be that Linda was simply not one to complain. Otherwise, she seemed in perfect health.
The end came with terrible suddenness. On Sunday, July 21, Linda came home from a
weekend trip complaining of an unusually bad headache. Despite continuing pain, she worked at her
temporary summer job most of the week, but on Thursday night she became
violently ill, and threw up. “She may be
allergic to codeine.” The doctor told Polly over the phone, and prescribed
another painkiller. It enabled Linda to
sleep through the night. But Friday
morning Linda was far too sick to go to work.
And during the day she started throwing up what appeared to be
blood. Seriously alarmed, her mother
phoned the doctor, who told her to take Linda to nearby North Arundel
Hospital. “Oh Mom,” Linda cried on the
way, “I feel terrible. I think I’m going to die.”
Almost the same time, 400 miles away in Charleston, South
Carolina, another 22-year-old faced tragedy of a different sort. If Linda might be described as the
All-American girl, George [Woody] Johnson, Jr., was in many in many ways the
All-American boy. Like Linda, in his
growing-up years he had wanted to be a gym teacher and then—again like Linda he
found his interests turning to reading, drawing and music.
But Woody was always plagued with poor eyesight, and when he
was twenty he learned that he was suffering from keratoconus, a rare disorder
that may markedly distort vision and is characterized by bulging of the
membrane covering the front of the eye.
At first, contact lenses flattened out the bulge in the left cornea and
enabled him to see normally. Later, as
the disease progressed, the lenses no longer did the job. By the spring of 1968, the aliment had
progressed so far that Dr. William Vallotton, a prominent Charleston eye
surgeon, told the boy a corneal transplant was needed to save his eye.
Woody agreed to the operation. Now the problem was to obtain an eye from a
donor with little delay. Dr. Vallctton,
who had performed several hundred such transplants, filed his request with the
South Carolina Eye Bank, which in turn contacted the nation’s other eye banks.
When Woody got home from college at the end of June, he was
told to leave word where he could be reached at all times (corneal transplants
must be performed within 72 hours of the removal of the eye from the
donor). All that remained was for someone
to die
When he arrived at North Arundel Hospital, Linda was barely
conscious. That evening a diagnostic
spinal tap indicated some pressure on the brain, a condition the hospital
wasn’t equipped to handle. Linda, now in
a coma, was sped by ambulance 15 miles to University hospital in
Baltimore. There she was rushed into
surgery. Not until 1 a.m. Friday night nearly five hours later—was
Linda brought into the recovery room.
The surgeon was grim and gray with fatigue. “Your daughter had a brain tumor,” he told
Linda’s parents. He added that he had
done everything he could; that what happened now was up to God.
Linda never regained consciousness. At 1:45 a.m. Monday morning, the phone rang
in the Buritsches’ bedroom. “I knew
immediately what it was.” Recalls Polly—“the hospital telling us it was over.
In the dazed confusion that followed, she recalls only
hazily being asked if Linda’s eyes could be donated to the eye bank. “I agreed,” she says. “I felt Linda would have wanted me to. I remember once when we were discussing heart
transplants, she said, ‘I wish I could give my heart.’ She knew that she couldn’t, because her heart
wasn’t that good. But she said, ‘I’d really
like to leave something. It would be
great to leave something.’”
Shortly after Linda’s death, her eyes were delivered to the
Medical Eye Bank of Maryland. At the top of the bank’s list was the request of
Woody’s doctor in Charleston. Within
minutes, Woody, who was working as a lifeguard at a Charleston swimming pool,
got a message to phone his doctor.
“We’ve got the eye,” said Dr. Vallotton.
“It’s being flown in from Baltimore.
I want you at the hospital by six this evening.”
By 11 a.m. the next morning, the cornea of Woody’s left eye
had been replaced with one of Linda’s.
During this week of convalescences, Woody’s thoughts kept
covering the same ground. How lucky he
was to get a cornea so soon. Who was it
that had given him the gift of sight?
Was he ever going to be able to tell the donor’s family how grateful he
was?
Although he knew that the identity of the donors is kept
confidential [all he could learn from the hospital records was that his donor
had been a 22-year-old], Woody wrote to the medical Eye Bank of Maryland in
late August 1968 “If in your judgment, there would be no offense taken, I would
like to say a humble ‘thanks’ to the family.
If they would care to know, I am also a 22-years of age, and I am a
junior majoring in psychology at the University of Tennessee. The operation went very well and I’m
recovering beautifully.”
Frederick Griffith, director of the eye bank, had in the
previous five years shipped perhaps 3000 corneas to all parts of the
country. This was only the second time
he had ever received a thank-you letter.
Moved by Woody’s sincerity, he phoned the Buritsches and read them the
letter. Almost as an afterthought, he
asked if they would like to meet Woody.
They said yes.
On Saturday, October 6, Woody flew to Washington to be
Buritsches’ guest for the weekend. He
was nervous and apprehensive. After all,
in his head was a piece of tissue that had once lived in the daughter of the
people he was going to visit.
Woody and the Buritsches hit it off instantly. “What surprised me,” recalls a friend who was
present at the meeting, “was that though these people had never met before,
they felt comfortable and warm with each other.
It was not at all like an encounter between strangers.”
Polly Buritsches brought out Linda’s portfolios and
scrapbook and told Woody of Linda’s many interests. He peppered the Buritsches with questions
about Linda. That night—Polly had put
Woody in Linda’s room—Woody found her books as she had left them scarcely two
months before: D.H.Lawrence, e.e Cummings, Emily Dickinson, Rilke, Shelley,
Hemingway, Hegel—many of the books he also had read and loved.
At breakfast, Woody said he would have only black
coffee. But looking Polly’s pancakes, he
changed his mind and filled his plate with a towering stack. How strange, thought Polly? Linda, too, would have done that—first refusing
and then changing her mind. Polly
noticed other similarities between this boy and her daughter. They had the same contagious laugh and bubbly
way of expressing themselves. It was
astonishing to think that anyone else—and particularly this boy—could be
sitting her place at the table.
Before leaving, Woody gave Buritsches a photograph of
himself, which Polly promptly had framed and placed on the living-room
table. As the months passed, she would
catch herself staring at it for no apparent reason. Why did she feel drawn to it? Was it because of the unique events that made
Woody’s life inextricably part of her own?
But, no, it was something about the photograph itself. Where had she seen it before?
In the spring of 1969—six months after Woody’s visit the
Buritsches decided to publish Linda’s poetry and sketches as a memorial to
her. Going through her things, Polly
came across a sketch she hadn’t seen for years—a portrait of a boy.
“My God, I can’t believe it!” she cried out. She called her husband. Who is this?” she asked, showing him this
sketch. “Why, it’s Woody.” He said. Polly rushed to the living room and placed
the portrait next to Woody’s photo. The
resemblances were astonishing. The
portrait was the one Linda had made, five years before death, of her dream man.
In the some portfolio, exactly where Polly had found the
sketch, was a fragment of Linda’s verse:
Of anguish, none is greater
Than the passing of two hearts
That never knew each other.
