Change of Heart
Loss of a loved one offers life for another

In the mid- to late-1970s, almost a decade after the first successful heart transplantation, I was the primary paramedic trainer for a large, municipal fire service. As a registered nurse and certified paramedic, I worked shoulder-to-shoulder with dedicated people, who, in addition to risking their lives fighting fires, wanted to advance their life-saving skills.

In 1979, as I continued to train paramedics, I received a request that challenged my professional ethics and my personal sensibilities. The local university hospital had performed its first successful heart transplant.

I never dreamed I would be personally touched by these seemingly futuristic events. The request? To train the paramedics to identify those patients who were close to death, but could be considered organ donors.

While I relayed the information to the paramedics and asked them to be mindful of the potential for heart transplantation, my heart was not in it.

To look at a patient as a source for spare parts seemed to fly in the face of everything I had learned during my nursing training and infringed on my personal sensibilities.

I thought long and hard about how I would feel. Would I want my family to donate my heart? How and who would ask my family for my spare parts? It made me shiver.

I continued to train paramedics and provide information about transplantation to them, but all the while I questioned where I stood. Then, the unthinkable happened.

My father, a victim of severe heart disease since he was 42, heard from his personal physician that his only option for living longer than one more year was to undergo heart transplantation. In support of my father's desire to live, we began to search for a heart transplant center that would perform the operation. At 55, many facilities believed that he was too old. After being turned down by the most prestigious and well-known transplant center because of his age, the local university hospital-the very one that had requested my service-accepted my father as a potential heart transplant recipient and placed him on the waiting list.

My thoughts turned immediately to those paramedic training sessions. Had I taught them well? At the time, I no longer trained paramedics but worked as an emergency department nurse at a hospital in another state. In what felt like cruel irony, I found myself in the position of having to speak with family members about organ donation.

Would they consent to the removal of heart, corneas or kidneys from their brain-dead teen-ager who was being kept alive by artificial means?

Weeks and months went by while my family and I waited for that life-altering phone call. The longer we waited, the more I began to resolve my professional and personal issues. I thought: People are going to die. Old people. Young people. Senseless deaths that belie reason create viable donors every day.

I found out from the families of these potential donors that the prospect of organ donation could actually attach some meaning to a seemingly senseless tragedy. I tried hard to learn from these grieving families and to understand how donating organs celebrated the life of the person they were about to lose.

My father received his heart transplant March 1, 1981. His was the 12th to be performed by the surgeons at the local university hospital.

He now was part of an elite group of nine living transplant recipients. Two had died during the procedure and a third died several months later from an infection. My father had pink cheeks for the first time in 13 years.

My father died a year and a half after his heart transplant from an electrolyte imbalance, not the typical organ rejection or infection that usually takes the lives of organ recipients.

In that time, he participated in exercise programs, rode a bicycle, played racquetball, took trips, valiantly fought Medicare regarding payment of his medical bills and helped me plan my wedding. While the quantity of his life was less than we had hoped, the quality was everything we had hoped for and more.

You could say that I had a transplant, too-or maybe just a change of heart.

I experienced a tremendous amount of professional growth throughout this ordeal. I have evolved to a new understanding of life's inequities and injustices, but most importantly, its rewards and opportunities.

I don't know where it will go from here, but I am open to the possibilities.

My signed donor card is in my wallet.

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