Gianna Paniagua was born in New York in 1991 and is the recipient of two heart transplants (1992 & 2021). She pursued a BA and MFA in the arts and used her career as a professional artist and master papercutting sculptor to find unique ways into the medical world where she had originally wanted to work since infancy.
Carefully, as to not bump the IV still in my arm, I sat down on the bed and said, “I have organ rejection.” My boyfriend at the time was still waking up and without turning to face me, sleepily slurred the most comforting of responses before falling back asleep: “OK.”
At 18 years old, I found myself in severe organ rejection for my transplanted heart that I’d had since the age of 14 months. None of my friends comprehended what that meant, and in my graphic medicine comic “Human Experience” (Intima, Fall 2022), I ask the question if others can ever understand what it is we physically experience with illness.
I was transported back to my teen years while reading Margaux Danby’s “I Carry Your Heart With Me” (Intima, Spring 2021) that takes the reader on her journey towards a deeper understanding of death (and life) after witnessing a heart transplant surgery. She contemplates “the phenomenon of simultaneously living and dying,” which is exactly how it felt to be existing in the world with such a brutally high grade of rejection after being told heart patients like me can die at any moment from any resulting damage to the organ. My friends were incapable of grasping what any of these words meant, let alone their consequences. Mortality was something they studied in Philosophy 101 as a distant concept, while I learned to live with the knowledge that now death was just a few steps behind me.
Once I finished treatment, friends expressed they were “glad I was done with all that.” In my comic, I note that invisible illness leaves no clues as to what is happening to the body, and this case was no different. Danby, knowing the young organ donor committed suicide, tries to “imagine a scenario” that would lead someone to such an act. It is never possible to know what is happening in someone’s life from the outside and what affects them to their core when behind closed doors. For the donor and the recipient, Danby writes that they had “friends and memories and a favorite song.” While it can bring us immense happiness, our favorite could also be what saved us from going off the edge.
As an adult, I’ve accepted that not all will be understood. There are those who will look you in the eye as you tell your story, listening and learning. Sometimes all we need—or want—is for someone just to try to understand us and say the surprisingly comforting word “OK.”
Gianna Paniagua was born in New York in 1991 and is the recipient of two heart transplants (1992 & 2021). She pursued a BA and MFA in the arts and used her career as a professional artist and master papercutting sculptor to find unique ways into the medical world where she had originally wanted to work since infancy. She creates work about dualities within the human body such as fragility vs. strength or growth vs. decay as inspired by her own body. She has exhibited at the Smithsonian in Washington, and worked with SFMOMA, Genentech, Square, and The Cleveland Clinic. Now, Paniagua studies at Columbia University and creates Graphic Medicine comics about her life in medicine from Manhattan and Nashville, Tennessee. TW: @tragicdarling IG: @tragicdarling and @giannapapercutting giannapaniagua.com.