Heart To Heart

By TAD BARTIMUS

You make my heart beat faster, says the lover.

You are my heart's desire, says the spouse.

You are the joy of my heart, says the parent.

Our hearts are the center of our being, our first and last impulse, the metronome of life. We press our pounding heart to our mate's to express love, put our hand over our heart to show devotion, put an ear to a pregnant mother's belly to listen to the heartbeat of creation.

When our hearts fail, we see our end coming.

My friend's type-A husband was 55, a businessman of brilliance, wealth and public stature. For a decade, he'd struggled with arrhythmia. Then, last fall, his irregular heartbeat attacks started coming one on top of the other. Experts said his only hope was a transplant -- a terrible miracle that would bring him continued life through someone else's death.

In a surgeon's perfect world, worn-out body parts would be replaced with the ease of a mechanic removing out a dead battery and dropping in a new one. Such dreams of spliced together bits of life are as old as ancient Greece, where a mythical creature named The Chimera had a goat's body, a lion's head and a dragon's tail.

But real transplants didn't take place in animals until 1906, and it wasn't until Dec. 3, 1967, at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, that myth and reality merged. Dr. Christiaan Barnard put a young woman's heart into a 54-year-old grocer's chest, and even though the patient died 18 days later, medicine and ethics were forever changed. Barnard proved that transplants are possible alternatives to death.

According to the United Network for Organ Sharing (http://www.unos.org), 141 U.S. medical institutions operate heart transplant programs, and 2,198 people got new hearts in America in 2000. Still difficult and uncertain, transplants are performed every day, with increasingly positive long-term results.

My friend's husband entered the hospital prepared to wait 10 weeks for his new heart.

"I spent 20 hours a day in the Intensive Cardiac Care unit by myself, thinking," he said. "Everyone around me was desperately sick; half of them were unconscious. It was grim.

"I thought about the magnitude and the miracle of a transplant, about how the heart plays a mystical part in humanity. It's a counterpart to the soul. Receiving a new heart seemed impossible, like receiving a new soul. Such a profound thing is hard to grasp."

With the death of a 51-year-old woman three weeks into his ordeal, his wait ended. 

My friend remembered her beloved being wheeled in for surgery at midnight.

"I was there with the children. We said the Lord's Prayer, and my husband reminded us we must pray for the family of the donor."

A transplant is a medical alternative that not only extends the life of a doomed patient, but offers a better one. Six weeks after his operation, my friend's husband was walking two miles and spending a few hours at the office every day. He knows his body could reject his new heart at any time, for any reason. He knows he must obey dietary restrictions and take lots of high-powered medications the rest of his life. But that's the point -- he has a life.

"I am finding what happened to me to be much more a spiritual event than a physical one," he said. "The pain and fear are fading, the scars are healing. But you don't just receive the blessing of a new heart and then go back to living the way you always lived. You must make more of your life, enjoy it more. More giving is expected of you."

More. It's a word that recurs again and again in a transplant recipient's conversation: more life, more compassion, more giving, more balance, more gratitude, more love flowing from this terrible miracle. 

"A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you," proclaimed the Lord, according to Chapter 36, Verse 26, of the Book of Ezekiel.

And so it came to pass.

© 2002 The Women Syndicate

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