Amy Silverstein, acclaimed author of two memoirs, including 2007’s Sick Girl, that chronicled the grueling but enjoyable journey of a life that required two heart transplants, died May 5. bottom. He is 59 years old.
Her husband, Scott Silverstein, confirmed her death but did not say where she died. Her cause was cancer, which Silverstein blamed on decades of post-transplant medication.
Her death was foretold by Ms Silverstein herself in an opinion essay published in the New York Times on April 18.
“Today I’m going to explain to my healthy transplanted heart why in a matter of days, or at most weeks, she — no, we — will be dead,” Silverstein said. wrote. About these thoughts that came to her one day during her regular vigorous jog, she continued: “I’m so sorry, sweet lady.” She’s not used to hearing me like this, outside my head, beyond the bodies we share. ”
By that point, the details of her life, with heart after heart that wasn’t her own (both by a 13-year-old girl), were documented in her many magazine articles and television appearances, as well as her two It became known to many fans through the book. Including 2017’s “My Glory Was I Had Such Friends.”
As Silverstein has often said with deep gratitude, each transplant — the first in 1988, when she was 24 and a sophomore in law at New York University — gave her. gave a new lease of life. But her life never got back to normal.
“People don’t realize it’s hard because I don’t carry an oxygen bottle. I look fine,” she said in a 2007 interview with Marie Claire magazine. rice field. “In a way I live in disguise. After a long dinner with my friends, I get up from the table and they walk straight to the door. is saying, “What are you doing?” Most people take it for granted that their heart rate speeds up as soon as they stand. It’s not the case with me, it just feels “wrong” in my body every time. ”
Amy Jill Sholin was born in Queens on June 3, 1963 to Arthur T. Sholin and Arlene (Fane) Sholin, who were the chief executives of Tops, Inc., a sports card and collectibles company. Born as the youngest daughter. Amy, whose parents later divorced, was raised in Great Neck, Long Island, New York.
A member of the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society, she graduated from New York University in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism before embarking on a legal career.
In her first year of law school, she began experiencing mysterious symptoms, including chest tightness, digestive problems, and fainting. In her “Sick Girl,” she writes, “How many other young women stared at a toilet bowl full of their own bloody vomit, flushed it, and rushed to a two-hour seminar on constitutional law?” I wonder if it was there?” he wrote. ”
A year later she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. “Her chest heaviness turned out not to be from indigestion as I thought, but from a significantly enlarged heart that was literally about to jump out of me,” she wrote.
As her condition worsened, Silverstein rose to the top of the waiting list for heart donors and was donated at New York’s Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. It was only after recovering from her surgery that she began to realize the cost of salvaging her coronary arteries.
“I felt sick at some point almost every day because of the medications I took and the repeated infections,” Silverstein said in a phone interview. The powerful drugs used to keep her immune system from rejecting the donor heart as a foreign body had countless side effects, he said, adding: He was carrying a bag,” he added.
According to her husband, Silverstein has endured treatment for multiple infections, multiple skin cancers and other conditions related to a weakened immune system. The couple were accustomed to waiting endlessly in New York City hospital emergency rooms each month to deal with some complications.
He had to undergo frequent heart biopsies, in which doctors “insert a catheter into a blood vessel and remove a portion of the heart,” to check for signs of rejection, Silverstein said. “She had over 90.”
After the publication of Sick Girl, Silverstein received a torrent of fan mail from other transplant patients and a strange mix of joy and misery living with new organs (what she calls “organ transplants”). admired her courage to reveal “The Gratitude Paradox”.
She’s also been a vocal critic of the medical industry, which has attracted hate mail. “Organ transplantation is mired in stagnant science and outdated and inaccurate medicine that fails patients and organ donors,” she wrote in a recent Times essay, noting that transplant drugs have been around for years or even years. Decades of daily use can cause a host of other life-threatening conditions, he added. Conditions such as diabetes, uncontrolled high blood pressure, kidney damage, and cancer.
Despite her precarious regimen, Silverstein maintained an active lifestyle, returning to complete law school after her first transplant before abandoning her career to raise her son, Casey. I practiced for a short time before and eventually started writing.
She took up guitar and songwriting in a discreet lifestyle that involved regular and vigorous exercise, adherence to a strict diet, and avoiding even the tiniest sip of butter or alcohol. Once, in the late 1990s, she appeared as a solo act at the Greenwich Village nightclub The Bottom Line.
Besides her husband, Silverstein is survived by a son, a father and a stepmother, Beverly Sholin. Her sister Jodie Hirsch passed away in 2020.
She underwent a second transplant in Los Angeles in 2014 when her first donor heart died of vascular disease (vascular lesions that can be caused by some drugs). Her friends across the country maintained a spreadsheet to schedule consecutive visits for most of her period. “She didn’t have to spend the night alone in the hospital,” her husband said, because she was in the hospital for three months.
This experience was the basis for “My Glory Was I Had such Friends,” an adaptation currently being developed as a limited series by Warner Bros. TV and director/producer JJ Abrams and his media company, Bad Robot. . His wife Katie McGrath said:
But in some ways, none of her relationships were as intimate as those with some eight-ounce bundle of other people’s muscles pulsating under her ribcage.
“During my daily run, when my ’70s yacht-rock playlist steps forward,” she wrote in an essay for The Times. oh puri — and we laugh together, picking up the pace to sprint. ”
