Transplant Patient Doing OK, Doctors at Sharp Say

“My hands are warm and my fingers aren’t blue.”

With those words, Gary Grissom last week embarked upon a new life as the first recipient of a heart transplant in San Diego County, doctors said Tuesday. Later, he settled down to some food and ate “like a little kid.”

Speaking publicly for the first time since the Friday night transplant at Sharp Memorial Hospital, Grissom’s four doctors on Tuesday said the operation was a success--but the real test is likely to occur early next week.

At that time, and over the next 10 weeks, Grissom will run the greatest risk of rejecting his new heart, and probably will reject it at least once, the doctors said. The drugs that counter rejection will raise Grissom’s chances of infection, they said.

The first biopsy--a test for damaged heart-muscle tissue--is likely to be done Friday, they said. Additional tests will be done each week, and Grissom is likely to remain hospitalized for the next month.

“His moods vary . . . from being quite elated to being somewhat overwhelmed,” Dr. Aidan Raney said at the press conference. Steroids and the conditions in Grissom’s isolation room contribute to cycles of elation and depression, the doctors said. Grissom has also complained of nausea.

Grissom’s four-hour operation culminated years of planning for Sharp’s transplant program, which the doctors described as the natural extension of the hospital’s open-heart surgery and cardiac-care program, said to be the third-busiest in California.

Two more people suffering from the final stages of heart disease--one from San Diego County and the other from Anaheim--have been approved for transplants as soon as compatible organs are available. The doctors said they hope to perform 12 to 20 heart transplants a year, and believe they can get most of the organs from the San Diego area.

Grissom, 48, a retired contractor from San Diego, had suffered repeated heart attacks and his heart was “barely functional,” Raney said. When Grissom fell ill while on vacation in Idaho last summer, he was taken to the nearest cardiac center, in Utah.

Because Grissom did not want to move to Utah to wait for a transplant, he was referred to Sharp. The doctor in charge of the Utah program knew the doctors at Sharp through their past transplant work at Stanford University Medical Center, which did the first heart transplant in the United States and has done more than any other hospital.