San Diego County’s First Heart Transplant Operation Performed

A 48-year-old retired construction contractor was resting comfortably in the intensive care unit at Sharp Memorial Hospital Saturday night, one day after he became the first person to receive a heart transplant in San Diego.

A team of Stanford University-trained cardiac physicians who successfully transplanted a donor’s heart into San Diego County resident Gary Grissom on Friday night plans to conduct about 15 more of the operations in the next year, said hospital spokesman Ed Crawford.

Crawford said Saturday that Grissom spent a good first night with his new heart after surgery that lasted four hours. He said that Grissom was awake and alert Saturday and all of his vital signs were strong. The procedure went so well that Grissom did not require a blood transfusion, Crawford said. Grissom is expected to remain in critical condition for at least another day--a normal period for heart transplant recipients.

The medical breakthrough in San Diego means that Southern California residents suffering from serious cardiac problems may become eligible for a new heart without having to travel to Stanford, where 357 transplants have been done since 1968, or to one of several East Coast hospitals that regularly perform such operations.

“Both from a humanistic view of being able to be near home and from a cost point of view, we hope this will be a new service for people in San Diego who can benefit from heart transplants,” Crawford said.

Only three other California hospitals have performed heart transplants. While Stanford has conducted more than any hospital in the world, Pacific Presbyterian Medical Center in San Francisco and UCLA Medical Center have only performed two dozen of the heart surgeries between them.

Dr. Pat Daily, head of cardiovascular surgery at Sharp, announced two years ago that he planned to recruit a team of top heart surgeons that would begin conducting transplant surgery in San Diego. Daily, who has performed open heart surgery since 1973 at Sharp and UC San Diego Medical Center, was on the team that performed the nation’s first heart transplant at Stanford in 1968.

Daily’s cardiac team in San Diego consulted several potential transplant patients over the summer and last month initiated a search for compatible donors.

The first San Diego heart transplant took place shortly after 7 p.m. Friday after a heart was found from an adult male who died in the Southwestern United States. No other information was released on the donor or the cause of death.

The operation was performed by Drs. Aidan Raney and Douglas Zusman, both Stanford-trained cardiac surgeons who between them performed 50 heart transplants before joining Daily’s private cardiac surgery group. Both Raney and Zusman also serve on the medical staff at UCSD, where Daily is director of the cardiac surgery unit.

Crawford said that Daily could have chosen the UCSD medical center as the site of the heart transplant, but decided to use Sharp, where physicians perform 1,100 cardiac surgeries each year. None of the three physicians were available for comment Saturday, Crawford said.

Crawford said that other heart transplant candidates have been approved by Daily’s group, but could not say how many. In order to become a candidate, patients must be otherwise in good health, emotionally stable, between the ages of 13 and 60 and diagnosed as having less than six months to live. Their ability to pay for the surgery, which costs between $57,000 and $110,000 also is a major consideration, Crawford said.

Grissom, who waited nearly a month before a suitable heart could be located, worked as an electrical and construction engineer until he was forced to retire three years ago because of his failing health.