Chuck Newman took good care of his transplanted heart, but after 31 years, it wore out. He turned to a familiar surgeon -- and his son -- to save him.
MILWAUKEE – Last March, an aging cowboy in a Stetson rolled into Froedtert Hospital in a wheelchair. Chuck Newman had come to Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, to see the doctor who’d performed his life-saving heart transplant decades earlier.
No human heart lasts forever. Chuck’s donor heart had survived almost 31 years, believed to be the fourth-longest in the history of organ transplantation. In the last five years, the pair had performed about 100 heart and lung surgeries together. They made a good team; one the right hand, Lyle said, the other the left.
In the last half-century as heart transplantation has become more common and more successful, some of the marvel and peril of it have waned. The one-year survival rate is now approaching 90%, enough to mask just how difficult it is to live with another person’s heart.A medical rarity: Two patients get back-to-back, triple-organ transplants
Another scientific field was rising in the public’s imagination, though, and in this area, the farm boy was well prepared. The field was open-heart surgery, and the early work would have to be done in animals before it could be tried in humans. On Dec. 2, less than three months after he had watched the surgeons sew an artificial heart into a cow, Barney became the first human to undergo the procedure. The university and its famous patient became the center of a media circus that lasted 112 days, until the dentist died.
Lyle flew to Omaha to procure the heart. When he returned, he and a fellow surgeon sewed the donor organ into the cowboy's chest.Something changed, though, on the day Chuck was to return. When the doctor stopped in to say goodbye, his patient looked dejected.“Well the finance people came in to talk to me,” the cowboy said. He would need to sell virtually all of his assets to pay his medical bills.
Lyle sometimes daydreamed about working in the operating room with David. Still, he never wanted to push David. He and his wife, Tina, often told their son, “You’ve got to find your own way.”Then he went to Harvard Medical School, graduating in 2001 and moving on to Johns Hopkins School of Medicine for his residency in general surgery.
But the Joyces had always been close — hobby farming, riding horses. David knew his father was not the drill sergeant type. Chuck said the last thing he remembers Lyle telling him before the surgery was that they would do the best they could.
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Home for Christmas: In 1988, a surgeon sewed a new heart into a cowboy. Nearly 31 years later, he did it again.Chuck Newman took good care of his transplanted heart, but after 31 years, it wore out. He turned to a familiar surgeon -- and his son -- to save him.
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