Paul Manafo - Living On The Edge

 

Memorial Day weekend, 2014. My wife Mary and I are in bed, and we get a phone call at midnight. Wakes us out of a sound sleep. It was Mass General Hospital calling to tell me they had a liver available and I needed to get to the hospital by 03:00 AM. I'd been on the liver transplant list for almost two years, and this was the first phone call I'd gotten telling me I needed to get to the hospital. 

 

Now, I live on Martha's Vineyard. [audience chuckle] There are no ferries or planes running at that time of night. So, Mary decided to make some phone calls. She called Angel Flight. She called our local hospital. She called our local police department. She called the state police. She called the Coast Guard. No one was able to help us. She then said, "Honey, I got a great idea. Let's call our buddy Jay Wilbur. He's our local harbor master. Maybe he can take us over in a zippy fast boat over to the mainland." So, we call Jay, wake him up out of bed, and he says, "Absolutely, I'll get you guys over. He said, “Meet me at Owen Park boat dock in 15 minutes." 

 

We get in the car, grab our gear and we're heading over to Owen Park. On the way there, Mary's phone rings and it's the state police calling. They've had a change of heart. They're going to meet us in Falmouth with an ambulance and a police escort and get us up to Boston. We get into Jay's boat, and within minutes, we are in Falmouth. We'd gotten there so quickly, we had beaten the state police and [chuckles] the ambulance.

 

When they got there, they loaded me into the back of the ambulance and put Mary up front with the driver and off we went. By the time we hit Route 3, we were going 110 miles an hour. [audience chuckle] We had a police escort in the back, a police escort in the front and the blue lights were blazing like crazy. We got to Mass General just before 03:00 AM. [audience cheers and applause] 

 

We had made it from my house on the Vineyard to Mass General in under an hour and a half. [audience laughter] A record in any book. When we got to the hospital, they started prepping me for surgery. Doctors and nurses were coming in and out like crazy. And then, our friend Martha called a while after we were there and she said, "You guys, I just saw you on the Channel 5 early morning news show." [audience laughter] She said the headline read, "Vineyard man rushed to Mass General for life-saving liver transplant." [audience chuckle] And then, it quieted down. 

 

A surgeon walked in a while later and I thought to myself, all right, the waiting's over, here we go. He came in, sat down at the edge of the bed and he said, "Paul, I have bad news.” He said “The liver that we thought was going to be available for you turned out not to be any good. You won't be getting a transplant today." I was devastated. Early on, they'd warned me this might be a possibility of not getting it the first time out, but still, I was devastated. We had just accomplished this herculean effort to get to Boston and it turned out to be for naught. So, I got dressed, we got our gear, we headed down to South Station to catch the Peter Pan bus back to Woods Hole on the ferry home. 

 

In the early 1980s, I had been diagnosed with hepatitis C. And over 30 years, my liver took a beating. Finally, with advances in medicine, a cure became available that took care of my hepatitis virus. But the damage was done. I had cirrhosis, and liver cancer, and I needed a liver and I needed it soon. After that first phone call, I had four more calls over the next several weeks. I had one more trip to Boston, and had three phone calls that kept me on standby. Each one would raise my hopes up high, and each one ended the same way, “Sorry, not today.”

 

I was beginning to think maybe this wasn't going to happen, and I could die. One night, while watching The Jon Stewart Show, I had a complete breakdown. The rejections had built up so much that I couldn't handle it and I sobbed uncontrollably in my wife's arms. She just cradled me, and kept saying over and over again, [sobs] "Have faith, Honey. Don't give up hope." She's one of those glass-half-full kind of people. [audience chuckle] But I was losing hope. She just kept holding me in her arms, saying, "Honey, hang in there. Don't give up. Keep the faith and have hope." 

 

Towards the end of August, the phone rang again at midnight. This time, it didn't wake us up. But it was Mass General Hospital. I knew instinctively who it would be. I heard those familiar words, "We have a liver available and you need to get up to Boston." I just took the phone and handed it to my wife, “I couldn't deal with this. Not again.” Conversations went back and forth for a while, and then finally the surgeon called to talk to me directly. He said, "Paul, I know you've been through this several times now, but I have a good feeling this time.” He said, “If I were you, I'd get up here." So, once again, it's midnight on Martha's Vineyard. [audience laughter] How are we going to get to Boston this time? 

 

I then remembered a conversation I had with film director Doug Liman, who has a house on the Vineyard, and we talked at an event we were both at over the summer. We talked for a while, and at the end of our conversation, he said, "Paul, I have a plane. And if you need to get to Boston while I'm still on the island, I'll fly you up any time of day or night." I'm thinking to myself, this is Doug Liman, right? Sure, he's going to fly me up to Boston. So, I decided, what the hell, I'll give Doug a call. [audience chuckle] I called Doug. When he got on the phone, the first words out of his mouth were, "Is it time?" And I thought, wow, this dude's the real thing. 

 

We met Doug at the Martha's Vineyard Airport at 02:30 AM. It was a beautiful, starlit night with not a moon in the sky, and there wasn't a breath of wind. It was perfect. Mare, my daughter Janique, myself and Doug got into his plane and we headed out to the runway. It was pitch black. Doug flipped the switch on his dashboard and the air-- This was amazing. The airport lit up like a pinball machine. All the runway lights came on just like that. It was the coolest thing ever. It was magic. We took off in silence and flew up into Boston. There wasn't any radio traffic and there wasn't another plane in the sky. It was just so perfect. 

 

When I got to the hospital, I knew the drill by heart. Doctors, nurses, in and out. But this time, something happened that hadn't happened before. A doctor came in and said, "The organ is on its way." And I thought, the organ is on its way. Wow, I'd not heard that before. I thought to myself, maybe this time it's going to happen. At 08:30 AM, they came in with a gurney, loaded me up and they were going to take me off to surgery. I gave my wife and my daughter a kiss and said, "See you on the other side." 

 

I woke up around 08:30 later that same day in the evening. The operation had taken eight hours to complete. When I opened my eyes, my wife and daughter were standing at the foot of the bed. [sobs] My wife looked at me and she said, "Honey, your eyes are white. I can't believe it." For the first time in almost 30 years, my eyes were white instead of a dull yellow. And you know what? I felt amazing. I know I was on a morphine drip, [audience laughter] but really, I felt amazing.

 

It wasn't until I returned to the Vineyard that I realized how bad my life had been because of my liver disease. And now, it's more than a year later, I'm stronger than I've ever been in my whole life. [audience cheers and applause] 

 

Yeah. I've got muscles. I've got muscles where I never had them before. I'm happy, I'm healthy and I'm living my damn life to the fullest.