The Wait: Love, Fear, and Happiness on the Heart Transplant List

As a new year approached, Jennifer Bonner embraced college life and flourished as a visual artist. Childhood heart problems rarely clouded her thoughts. Then, unusual fatigue led to terrifying news. Without a heart transplant she would die soon. As she put it, “The bomb dropped today.”

While she waited most of 1988 for a new heart, she lived. And as she relished each day, she wrote. Her diary entries frankly address love, sex, friendship, art, and mortality, and reveal a young woman determined to thrive.

Poignant, irreverent, and bold, The Wait is Jen’s diary, framed by the stories of her remarkable family and heart surgery advances. Steady medical progress brought her two decades of life and hope for decades more. But Jen’s continued survival depended on chance events that she and her doctors couldn’t control.