Torre’s Brother Doing Well With a New Heart

As if the drama of three close victories were not enough, surgeons on Friday implanted a new heart in the chest of Frank Torre, brother of Yankee Manager Joe Torre, in an operation followed by millions of New Yorkers infected by World Series fever.

For four hours, attention was riveted on an operating room at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan--two miles from the stadium where the Yankees hope tonight to clinch their first championship since 1978.

Relief was palpable when surgeons finally announced that the heart transplant was completed--surgery so successful that Frank Torre may be able to watch on television as his brother--who visited him in the hospital almost daily--tries to win the Series.

“We think he’s much better off watching the game with this heart instead of his old one,” said Dr. Eric Rose, who helped with the operation.

“We are very pleased with how the operation went and expect him to recover quickly. Joe Torre said this afternoon this was the best news he could have possibly gotten.”

Members of the transplant team said the unidentified donor was a 28-year-old man who died in a Bronx hospital after suffering massive brain injuries.

Frank Torre, the 64-year-old former player for the Milwaukee Braves and Philadelphia Phillies, had suffered three heart attacks and depended on intravenous medications to stabilize his badly damaged heart while he waited at Columbia-Presbyterian for almost three months for his operation.

“In layman’s language, he was extremely sick,” Rose told reporters. “He is a happy person by nature, but on some days [while waiting for a transplant] he was clearly depressed.”

Throughout it all, Torre watched the Yankees on TV. After the games in New York, his brother would come to his bedside to relate the events on the field.

About four hours after Andy Pettitte’s pitching brought the Yankees a 1-0 victory in Game 5 in Atlanta on Thursday night, doctors received word that a donor heart was available.

A patient at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx had died because of extremely high pressure in his brain. Physicians on the transplant team said they did not know the reason the man’s brain had herniated.

But his death set off a chain of events that led to Torre’s being wheeled into the operating room. Members of the New York regional transplant program traveled to Montefiore.

Lists of patients awaiting transplants at other hospitals were analyzed. The donor had the same blood type as Torre and it seemed that his heart would be a good fit.

“About 3 o’clock in the morning, we deemed Mr. Torre was the appropriate recipient,” a member of the transplant team said. “He was appropriately pleased this was happening and quite calm about the whole thing.

“Minimal exertion resulted in symptoms for him,” the physician added. “Absent being here, he would have been short of breath at least, if not dead.”

There was one very delicate moment during the surgery.

“It is a nerve-racking one,” said another surgeon who operated on Torre. “You sew the heart in and everything goes well, but you are really never sure until the heart starts to beat that it is going to beat.”

Torre’s new heart beat just fine.

Doctors said the prospects for his long-term health were good. About 90% of heart recipients live a year, and about 50% survive 10 years.

Torre’s doctors said that without Friday’s operation, he probably would have died within a year.

The former major leaguer was at the top of the waiting list at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, one of the nation’s top transplant centers, where the average waiting time for a new heart is 60 days. Doctors noted that he had waited longer than most patients who get transplants at the hospital.

“There clearly was no preferential treatment offered to him,” one of his surgeons said.

“The timing is serendipitous,” Rose said. Another member of the transplant team, Dr. Mehmet Oz, noted there was no World Series game on Friday.

“We wanted to do it on an off day,” he joked.