Peak Experience Warms Her New Heart

Three years after she received a donor heart, Kelly Perkins stood on the summit of Mt. Fuji. Next to her was her husband, Craig.

All the way up the mountain, he had feared his wife would push herself too hard if she knew about the makeshift memorial they were about to perform--all to fulfill a wish from the donor’s daughter.

With the wind gusting on the rim of Japan’s highest peak, Craig unveiled a leather satchel and gave Kelly a photograph of the woman whose death had given her life.

Inside the satchel, Craig told her, were the woman’s ashes. Her daughter had asked that they be scattered once the couple had reached the top.

“To have someone else’s heart inside you and be holding their ashes, it’s bigger than I can find words for,” Kelly said later.

Since her transplant operation, the Perkinses have reached many summits, both medical and metaphysical. Yosemite’s Half Dome, California’s Mt. Whitney, each conquered, then the accomplishment celebrated with a tradition of wishes made for the future as a cascade of soap bubbles was blown. Here’s to good health. Here’s to helping others. Here’s a wish on behalf of our friends.

But nothing quite compared to the ceremony earlier this month, after they had trudged upward into the canopy of clouds enveloping Mt. Fuji.

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The Perkinses--both in their mid-30s--were once avid hikers and ran five miles a day, 10 on weekends, they said in an interview Friday in their Laguna Niguel home.

A few years ago, Kelly’s heart started racing. Kelly, a real estate appraiser, visited her doctor, who declared her healthy and said she was probably suffering from stress. Five doctors’ visits later, before a summer backpacking trip, her resting heart rate was found to be about four times faster than normal.

Rushed to the hospital, she was diagnosed with an enlarged left ventricle caused by a viral infection. She remained hospitalized for three months while her heart was stabilized with drugs. But the organ deteriorated and she developed congestive heart failure. She was dying of viral cardiomyopathy, a transplant considered her only hope.

Soon afterward, a woman somewhere in Southern California was thrown from a horse and died; her family chose to donate her organs.

Ten months after Kelly’s transplant--and having had six months of heavy drugs to keep her body from rejecting her new heart--she was climbing Half Dome. She also was earning the first of several replicas of famous peaks to add to a charm bracelet given to her by Craig, who works in sales.

After the couple walked up Mt. Whitney last September--a trek covered by the media--Craig received a call. It was from the heart donor’s daughter. She had learned who the recipient was and wanted the Perkinses to know she was happy for them and glad that her mother’s heart had been accepted.

Looking back, Kelly was relieved that she had not answered the phone, because her emotions would have been too intense. Now she finds letters are better. Craig is the only one who speaks to the daughter.

Recently, Kelly set her sights on Mt. Fuji, in large part to raise consciousness about the benefits of transplants in Japan, where organ donation is controversial and most patients who need them must go abroad.

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The ascension to Fuji’s peak took two days.

On the first, the Perkinses said, they--along with a guide and a writer and photographer from the Associated Press--hiked nearly five hours to a midway summit.

They planned to sleep a little, rise at midnight and hike the five hours to the top to be there just in time to take in the majesty of the sunrise.

On July 10, they reached the 12,388-foot summit--right on schedule. Kelly’s new heart thumped with exhilaration. Craig was trying to gauge her condition. She was fatigued. Could she take the news about the secret he carried? Could she make it back down the mountain after hearing the last request of the donor’s daughter?

Finally, Craig brought out the leather pouch, and they shared thoughts about the donor.

Tears and rain streamed down Kelly’s face as the traditional bubbles were blown. The donor’s daughter had mailed a red plastic double wand for the ceremony--in honor of her mother.

Craig then pulled out a letter from the daughter, whose name they fiercely guard. Craig had been sent a faintly reproduced photo of the donor, who was about 40 when she died. He had reduced its size and clarity, and superimposed over it a poem that had been read at the woman’s funeral. Her daughter had asked if it could be read as the sun rose on Mt. Fuji and her mother’s remains were scattered.

As the wind caught the gray ashes, they took flight. The Perkinses and their companions broke down. And then, as the sun inched upward, a fog bank that had shrouded the mountain suddenly broke.

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They arrived home on Thursday.

Grateful for the chance to give something back to the family who chose to donate an organ, Kelly said the experience nevertheless has drained her.

“I think it contributed to my feeling really wiped out on the way back,” she said, adding that her own bubble-blowing wish atop Mt. Fuji became somewhat narrowly focused on herself. She giggled a bit before divulging that it was “to get back down to the bottom safely.”

When you’ve been given another person’s organ, it is difficult to decide how much to know about the donor, her family and the life that was left behind, Kelly said.

“Even a picture is so real,” she said. “That’s why Craig lightened hers some. It looks more like an angel than a person. And I view her as sort of my guardian angel.”

Some of her loved ones worry that Kelly, who is 36, attempts too much. But she disagrees. “I have the feeling that I’ve had a second chance. Why now am I gonna hang out and wait? If I have any window of feeling good, why not do things?”

“It’s not like I’m climbing [Mt.] Everest,” she added, grinning ever so widely.