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. Butthey 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.
At that time, heart transplants were no longer novel, but they still weren't common. There had been 1787 performed in the US between 1968 and 1985. Today, about 2000 are performed a year.
Nearly every December 28, Baisey receives at least two phone calls. One from Carolan. The other from Lefrak. She is their miracle as much as they are hers. Lefrak is now retired. Carolan teaches nursing. Baisey is a nurse.
Living 30 years with a new heart is extremely rare. Lefrak has tried to track down the exact statistics, and most experts have told him that there are probably no more than six people in the US who have lived as long as Baisey after such a transplant. He pats Baisey on the back, "She's pretty special. Eva's going to set the record."
