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Seven years after receiving the first heart transplant at URMC, David Beatson is still going strong.
David Beatson confesses that he was never nervous about the remarkable role he played in the history of the University of Rochester Medical Center as it's first heart transplant patient.
"Those doctors have an amazing ability to instill a lot of faith in you," David relates. "Besides, it was the difference between life and death."
"Those doctors" were Dr. Todd Massey and Dr. Leway Chen. In 2000, the pair began working together toward a very specific goal: To create the area's only center dedicated to heart transplantation and other treatments for heart failure.
For months, Massey and Chen had been laying the groundwork for their very first transplant: Procuring equipment, setting up procedures, hiring key specialists and training their team. By late 2000, they were prepared to work with their very first patient.
Around that same time, David Beatson was given the most disturbing news of his life: His cardiologist told him he had just six months to live. David had a condition known as cardiomyopathy, which had caused his weakened heart to swell to the size of a football.
David had been in and out of various hospitals for the previous five years. At first, doctors had been unable to identify the cause of his heart attack-like symptoms. When his condition was finally identified, he was put on an intravenous blood therapy that required three five-hour hospital visits each week. His heart continued to weaken, though, and it seemed there was little chance of slowing its course.
David's cardiologist, Dr. Joan Thomas, thought there was one more option for him. She had heard about the new program that Drs. Chen and Massey had started, and she recommended that David meet with them. Soon after, David was invited to come in and hear more about their program.
"They were very good," David says. "They explained the whole thing, what was involved and all. I was very excited about the possibility."
David was put through a battery of tests to ensure that he was healthy enough to undergo the transplant procedure. Then, in January 2001, David was admitted to Strong Memorial Hospital, part of the University of Rochester Medical Center. His heart had weakened to the point where he needed to receive medication intravenously full-time.
His name was added to the heart transplant waiting list. David was initially listed as Status 2. Within about a week, though, he was changed to Status 1B, putting him near the top of the list. Still, there was no telling when a heart would become available. At this point, David and his wife, Marianne could only do their best to be patient and wait. They knew that some patients waited months—even years—for a donor heart.
Just four weeks after being admitted to Strong, David was about to eat his dinner when a nurse came into his room. "She told me, ‘Don't eat that!'" David recalls. "A heart had become available. They were ready to do the transplant."
The transplant was completed in a seven hour operation led by Dr. Massey. When David awoke, he was in the Intensive Care Unit of Strong Memorial Hospital with a host of tubes, wires and monitors attached to him. He didn't know it at the time, but Dr. Massey had slept in the ICU bed right next door. Dr. Chen had also slept close by, in his office at the medical center.
"Their goal is to get the tubes out of you as fast as possible," says David. "But to tell you the truth, even at that point I felt great! I had a new heart, and it was pumping to parts of my body it hadn't pumped to in a long time. It was like putting a brand new engine in an old car!"
"Heart transplantation is the gold standard of care for heart failure," explains Dr. Massey. While other advanced treatments are available, heart transplants give the sickest patients the greatest chance of returning to active, healthy lives.
David would spend three days in the ICU at Strong. After several weeks of recovery under the care of a cardiac team David simply describes as "marvelous", he was back home. "I had to go back and forth to the hospital for tests for a while," says David. "But within six weeks, I was driving myself."
David's progress would continue at a rapid pace. Now, he says, "I can do anything. I snowblow the driveway. And I'm in the process of remodeling our house. I had an appointment with my doctors the other day. They told me they don't need to see me for another five years."
Not surprisingly, David still has nothing but praise for the doctors who gave him a new heart.
"Dr. Chen is great,"says David. "He's very personable and down to earth. His ability to instill a calmness in you is astronomical. And Dr. Massey, well, he saved my life. How do you put qualifications on that?"
"This was a big milestone for them. This was the one that got their program up and running. And that makes me feel special," David says. "I was their first one. But I was never apprehensive, I never had any feeling of doubt. And neither did Marianne."
Some seven years after the operation that David calls "his miracle," Dr. Massey and Dr. Chen continue to give patients the most precious second chance of all through heart transplants. In February 2008, they transplanted their 100th heart.
