Life With New Heart Isn’t Easy for Jim Benbrook--but It’s Life

Jim Benbrook used to be chief financial officer of an Irvine medical care firm. He used to work long hours, travel frequently on business, ski and play tennis and basketball.

But three years ago, Benbrook, then 39, contracted an unusual, flu-like virus that infected his heart. It nearly killed him.

Benbrook, who was admitted to Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach in October, 1985, recovered from the infection, but it left his heart so badly damaged that doctors gave him only a month to live. But that November, he got a new lease on life--a heart transplant at Stanford University Medical Center.

Unable to Work

The 42-year-old San Clemente man is no longer able to work. He tires easily, has hypertension, and, to stay alive, he must take 25 pills a day.

Still, “it’s a good life,” Benbrook said. “I’m learning to play the piano. I’m doing a lot of reading, and I do public speaking for the heart association” four times a year.

When Benbrook had his surgery, the nearest heart transplant centers were at UCLA or Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego. But Newport Beach cardiologist Joel H. Manchester, seeking the best, sent Benbrook to Stanford University Medical Center, where pioneering cardiac surgeon Norman E. Shumway had perfected heart transplant techniques.

Like most Stanford patients, Benbrook, accompanied by his wife, rented an apartment in Palo Alto for four months. He waited there until a donor heart was found, then used the apartment during three months of recuperation.

“The surgery was no big deal,” Benbrook recalled. “I had my gallbladder out two years before that, and that was more painful than this.”

A More Complex Procedure

But recovery from heart transplant surgery was far more complex than from a gallbladder removal. Benbrook has rejected his new heart twice in the past two years. Both times, his doctors treated him by quintupling his daily doses of immunosuppressive drugs.

And those drugs--cyclosporin and a steroid called prednisone--have caused their own problems. Benbrook must take the cyclosporin twice a day--with orange juice to mask an unpleasant taste (“kind of like olive oil”)--but that drug has caused a serious case of high blood pressure. The prednisone, meanwhile, upsets his stomach, so Benbrook now also takes eight antacid drugs a day. The prednisone has also weakened his bones, so they could break easily. “You can probably ski, but don’t fall down,” Benbrook said his doctors told him.

Though insurance covers most of the costs, there’s nothing cheap about this drug regimen. Cyclosporin is $250 a bottle, and Benbrook goes through three bottles a month. His medicines cost about $10,000 a year, he said. Still, he doesn’t regret the heart transplant. “It didn’t bother me at all,” he said. “I just wanted to be alive; 75% of it is attitude, and I’m a fighter.”