Heart Transplant Patient Gets Wish to Be Home for Christmas

Almost two months ago, when doctors at UCLA Medical Center put 19-year-old Ryan Flaherty on the highest-priority waiting list for a heart transplant, he started counting hours.

Hours stretched into days; days into weeks. A month later, Ryan was close to death. But still no compatible heart could be found for him.

“Ryan said he hoped to be home by Christmas,” said Rocky Fandrich, heart transplant coordinator at the medical center’s Cardiothoracic Surgery Unit.

“We tried to discourage him from getting his hopes up like that. We didn’t say it would be impossible, but, well, he actually knew what his condition was. We were really afraid of losing him.”

Doctors found Flaherty a heart on Dec. 14. And after a successful transplant and 10 recovery days, Flaherty was headed home Sunday to Manhattan Beach for a quiet Christmas with his parents and brother.

“I’m just thinking about getting home and being with my family,” a subdued Flaherty said as his father packed his belongings.

Flaherty first learned in February that he suffered from cardiomyopathy, a non-congenital disease that attacks the muscle tissue making up the heart. At that time, the diagnosis was not critical and Flaherty, after briefly being hospitalized, responded well to treatments. He seemingly had recovered, Fandrich said.

This fall, Flaherty, a freshman at El Camino Community College, placed second in an amateur skateboard competition

But Ryan’s father, Patrick Flaherty, said doctors had warned the family that there was a high probability that complications from the disease could occur. And in October, he was hospitalized with a viral infection of the heart.

“Ryan was doing well after the first treatments. When he got the infection, though, he went downhill real fast,” the father said.

Flaherty’s nurses said the hospital had an unusually difficult time locating a donor with matching blood type and similar body size.

Said Fandrich: “Doctors never told him exactly how critical his condition was, but he knew. He would say to the nurses, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to die; Am I going to die?’

“After a while, all we had to do was go into the room and tears would start streaming down his face.”

Six donor candidates who had close, but not perfect, heart matches were rejected. Then, on Dec. 14, the family of a 19-year-old man who had been killed in a car accident in Long Beach offered a compatible heart. The transplant was performed that day.

“It was a very emotional time for both the patient’s and the donor’s family,” Fandrich said. “When people suffer a loss, their first thoughts aren’t about providing transplant organs. But some families think of organ donating as the only positive outcome to result from losing a loved one.”