The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae by Stephanie Butland - #TuesdayTeaser

Hello and welcome to this week's Tuesday Teaser. The place where we take a sneaky peek at a book that has caught my eye.

This week we are looking at The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae by Stephanie Butland.

Stephanie began her fiction writing career in 2014 with Letters to My Husband. Her previous two books were non-fiction titles and described her experience of cancer.

She lives with her family near the sea in the North east of England and writes in a studio at the bottom of her garden, and when she’s not writing, she trains people to think more creatively. 

The Blurb

Ailsa Rae is learning how to live.

She's only a few months past the heart transplant that - just in time - saved her life. Life should be a joyful adventure. But . . .

Her relationship with her mother is at breaking point and she wants to find her father.

Have her friends left her behind?

And she's felt so helpless for so long that she's let polls on her blog make her decisions for her. She barely knows where to start on her own.

Then there's Lennox. Her best friend and one time lover. He was sick too. He didn't make it. And now she's supposed to face all of this without him.

But her new heart is a bold heart.

She just needs to learn to listen to it . . .

The Beginning

6th October 2017: Hard to Bear

It's 3 a.m. here in cardio-thoracic.

All I can do now is doze, and think, and doze again. My heart getting weaker, my body bluer. People I haven't seen for a while are starting to drop in. (Good to see you, Emily, Jacob, Christa. I'm looking forward to the Martinis.) We all pretend we're not getting ready to say goodbye. It seems easiest. But my mother cries when she thinks I'm sleeping, so maybe here, now, is time to admit that I might really be on the way out.

I should be grateful. A baby born with Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome a few years before I was would have died within days. I've had twenty-eight years and I've managed to do quite a lot of living in them. (Also, I've had WAY more operations than you everyday folk. I totally win on that.) OK, so I still live at home and I've never had a job and I'm blue around the edges because there's never quite enough oxygen in my system. But - 

Actually, but nothing. If you're here tonight for the usual BlueHeart cheerfulness-in-the-teeth-of-disaster, you need to find another blogger.

My heart is failing. I imagine I can feel it floundering in my chest. Sometimes it's as though I'm holding my breath, waiting to see if another beat will come. I've been in hospital for four months, almost non-stop because it's no longer tenable for me to be at home. I'm on a drip pumping electrolytes into my face. I'm constantly cared for by people who are trying to keep me well enough to receive a transplanted heart if one shows up. I monitor every flicker and echo of pain or tiredness in my body and try to work out if it means that things are getting worse. And yes, I'm alive, and yes, I could still be saved, but tonight it's a struggle to think that being saved is possible. Or even likely. And I'm not sure I have the energy to keep waiting...

Wow, that's quite an intense beginning. I wonder what happens next?