IRVINE : Transplant Difficult but ‘Worth It’

Dr. Norton Humphreys, who 22 months ago received the transplanted heart of a 19-year-old man, said his appreciation of life has “profoundly changed,” although his recovery has been more difficult than expected.

“I thought my recovery after the heart transplant would be a great deal easier than it’s turned out to be,” said Humphreys, a former staff member at Hoag Hospital and later the hospital’s first heart transplant patient. “I may have a 20-year-old heart, but I have to keep remembering the rest of the body is 60.”

Humphreys received his heart on April 20, 1988, from a man who had been discovered on a Costa Mesa sidewalk with massive head injuries. It doesn’t bother him, Humphreys said, that he is carrying around another man’s heart.

“You don’t think about having somebody else’s heart,” he said. “It’s always there, but it’s not something you dwell on. You do think about having a second chance at life. And your priorities are definitely changed.”

For Humphreys, who for the past 17 years has lived with his wife, Lori, in the Fountain Valley home where they watched their five children grow up, life has changed dramatically. For starters, Lori Humphreys, who at one time did not have to work outside the home, is now a full-time executive secretary. When he feels well enough, Humphreys works around the house.

He has traded his full-time staff position at Hoag for occasional work at the Woodbridge Medical Center and Newport Walk-In Medical Group. Soon, he said, he hopes to resume volunteer work at the charity Share Our Selves.

And Humphreys, who has made speaking engagements a regular part of his post-surgery life, spent Valentine’s Day speaking to students at University High School in Irvine.

The once self-described “second generation workaholic” said giving up his practice at Hoag has actually been easier than he thought it would be.

“I don’t particularly miss the hassle and stress of hospital pressure, and I don’t miss the hassle and stress of running my own office either,” he said.

Other problems, however, have become fixtures in his daily life--the medicine, for example. Humphreys is tied to a regimen of pill-taking, including three anti-rejection drugs, aspirin, a calcium blocker and vitamin and mineral supplements. The drugs themselves are another threat to his well-being. As a result of the high doses of cortisone he has taken, he now must have cataract surgery.

The cost of the anti-rejection drug cyclosporin alone can run from $1,000 to $1,200 a month, Humphreys said.

“The saying is that you trade dying for intensive medical care for the rest of your life, and that’s a pretty accurate statement,” he said. Still, he said, it’s been worth it.

Humphreys credits his community, family and especially his wife with helping him through the past two years.

“It’s a severe stress on a relationship, and every time a relationship is subject to severe stress like that, it either destroys it or it is made stronger.”

The cosmetic fallout from a surgery where “somebody cracks your chest and opens you up like an oyster” has been minor, Humphreys said. Recently, he compared scars with a Vietnam vet who had taken four rounds in the chest from an AK-47. Humphreys said his scar looked better.

For the most part, Humphreys said, he now has little pain. And he has adjusted his life style to his new reality. He reads when he used to work. Since he can no longer pilot an airplane, he has taken up sailing.

Still, the last three months have been discouraging. Various influenzas have kept him from the regular walks he craves. Physically, he loses ground quickly.

But on April 20, Humphreys said he and his wife will celebrate once again.

“People don’t appreciate fully how much life-threatening illness changes a person,” he said. “Your appreciation of life itself is rather profoundly changed.

“You really get in touch with what is important in life and what isn’t. The people on the freeway for whom one car length is a matter of life or death get to be nothing short of absurd.”