Transplants No Longer Make Hearts Skip a Beat

When Orange County’s first heart transplant programs began last year, the news was splashed across the front pages of local newspapers.

And when the first two transplant candidates emerged from their germ-free isolation rooms, they became instant celebrities as, fighting tears or making jokes at bedside press conferences, they exulted in their new lease on life.

Wearing a crimson T-shirt bearing the message “And the Beat Goes On,” the county’s first heart transplant recipient, Scott Headding, 26, of Huntington Beach, talked eagerly of plans to get back to fishing and playing the electric guitar. Headding had the surgery at UCI Medical Center last April 8.

The county’s second transplant recipient, physician Norton Humphreys, 58, said he thought at first that his surgery “would be like putting a new engine in an old car, but it hasn’t worked out that way.”

Rather, said Humphreys, who received his new heart last April 20 at Hoag Hospital, “I feel better than I have in a year.”

But 1 year later, heart transplants no longer grab front-page headlines. Heart transplants in the county are treated almost as routinely as kidney and bone-marrow transplants.

Hoag in Newport Beach has transplanted donor hearts into eight people, seven of whom survived.

UCI Medical Center in Orange has had six transplants, with three of the five patients still living. (Headding needed a second heart, then died after that second major operation after what his surgeon called “a very courageous battle.”)

Neither hospital has performed the 12 transplants a year that the United Network for Organ Sharing, a membership organization for transplant centers based in Richmond, Va., recommends for keeping a transplant team’s skills finely tuned. United Network also sets a standard of a 73% survival rate, which Hoag has bettered but UCI falls below.

However, United Network spokeswoman Kelly Straw noted that the recommendations are guidelines. Given the national shortage of donor hearts, not all transplant programs can meet them.

Both county transplant programs will be formally reviewed at the end of their second year, said Robert T. Turner, a United Network manager.

Initially, both Hoag and UCI had seemed in a race to perform the first transplant. But these days, the edge on the competition is gone.

At Hoag, transplant surgeon Aiden Raney and cardiac surgeon Douglas R. Zusman “do not look at competition,” Zusman said. “Our feeling is (that) centers who can do high-quality transplants should be allowed to do them.”

Both Hoag and UCI are doing more than transplants. Both centers have increased all open-heart surgeries, with 250 last year at Hoag and 61 at UCI. And since November, UCI has been one of 20 U.S. hospitals allowed to implant an experimental “ventricular assist device” that acts as an artificial heart, keeping patients who might need a transplant alive. Hoag expects to offer the VAD technology within the month.

Hoag also offers a support program for transplant patients. Twice a month, 20 to 40 heart recipients or potential recipients meet in a hospital conference room for low-fat snacks and conversation.

“They show each other their scars . . . they alleviate the fears” of undergoing a transplant, coordinator Mary Jane Jones said.

A leader in the group has been Hoag’s first transplant recipient, Humphreys. “They laughingly call me their poster boy,” he joked.

Humphreys was bedridden and dying of degenerative heart disease when the transplant gave him new life. Now, at 59, he has taken to the lecture circuit to describe the medical miracle of his survival.

The surgery exacted a price, however. “When you get a transplant, there’s no free lunch,” Humphreys said. “You trade dying for rather intensive medical care for the rest of your life.”

UCI has a parallel to Humphries: its second transplant patient, Gene Reynolds, 45, who skis, plays golf, walks 5 miles a day and is back at work as a Pacific Bell customer service manager. Reynolds has counseled nine transplant candidates and their families and has arranged to be called to the hospital the night of a transplant.

All the volunteer work is a small pay-back to the medical center, Reynolds said, for the miracle of his transplant. He said a transplant is “very scary,” but having been through one, he knows firsthand that this is a “very viable alternative to death.”