After 30 years, it was time to let her doctor in on a little secret.
Heart patient Eva Baisey had been going stir crazy. She'd spent weeks in isolation, because of the risk of infection. Nurse Deirdre Carolan received permission to take her for a quick drive off campus. But they never told Edward Lefrak, Baisey's doctor, where they went that day.
Three decades later, the nurse, the surgeon and the patient were at the Inova Heart and Vascular Institute in Fairfax, Virginia. Carolan and Baisey laughed as they told Lefrak that weeks after he'd performed the first-ever heart transplant in the Washington area, his patient went to McDonald's for a cheeseburger and fries. All Lefrak could do was shake his head with mock disapproval. What could he say? Baisey had beaten all the odds.
In the predawn hours of December 28, 1986, Lefrak sliced the heart out of a 19-year-old man who had died that previous morning. The surgeon wheeled the healthy heart to the operating room next door, where Baisey, a 20-year-old mother of two, lay waiting. He removed her weak, engorged heart and stared into the gaping hole in her chest. He then sewed in the donor's heart and waited. The electrocardiogram monitor started to beep. Her new heart was beating.
Baisey had been diagnosed with idiopathic cardiomyopathy. Without a new heart, it was unlikely that Baisey would live more than a few months.
