A life for a life
the 30 years Kay Burnett never expected to live
When Kay Burnett needed new lungs three decades ago, she gave her heart away to another. She tells Nikki Macdonald about her globally ground-breaking domino-donor transplant, and the 30 years she never expected to live.
As the ambulance pulled away from her Marton home, doubt crept into Kay Burnett’s mind: ‘‘I thought, God, I wonder if I’ll see this house again.’’ Her two daughters had already left: 9-year-old Melissa to stay with her uncle down south; 13-year-old Cherie to stay with friends. Her husband, Ian, flew with her to England, where she hoped to be among the first Kiwis to survive a heart-lung transplant.
The odds were barely better than even, but she soon banished the doubt and reckons it’s the only negative thought she’s allowed herself in the three decades since: ‘‘I thought to myself – don’t be bloody silly, of course you will.’’
Burnett not only became one of the first Kiwi heart-lung transplant survivors, but she is believed to be the world’s first successful domino-donor transplant patient.
‘‘My heart went to a Dutchman,’’ Burnett declares. She’s not talking about a covert love affair. She needed only replacement lungs, but at the time – 1987 – it was considered less risky to transplant the heart and lungs together. When British surgeons found her own heart remained in good condition, they re-plumbed it inside a 50-year-old Dutchman suffering from heart disease, making Burnett probably the first person to live while her heart beat in another body.
There was no time to ask her permission, but when she found out, she never felt weird about it. All that about your heart shaping your identity – ‘‘That’s a bloody lot of rubbish’’.
‘‘I was given life, and if I could give life to another person, so be it, I would.’’
Thirty years on from her May 9 transplant, Burnett is celebrating with champagne at Shed 5 restaurant on Wellington’s waterfront, surrounded by 26 of the people who have helped her reach this extraordinary milestone – friends, family, doctors, trust fundraisers.
To understand how she got here, and why it matters, there are things you need to know about Kay Burnett, and about 1987. The first is that 67-year-old Burnett’s wispy frame is deceptive – she’s as stubborn and bossy as they come.
Her current kidney specialist, Philip Matheson, sums it up: ‘‘Really, it’s a spectator sport – looking after Kay.’’
Burnett was 37 when she received her donor heart and lungs, from a 12-year-old girl killed in a road accident. She’d smoked
briefly as a teenager but had long since stopped, but emphysema was steadily squeezing out her life breath.
In barely a year, she’d gone from active mother to barely mobile. She was five stone (32 kg) when she had the transplant – ‘‘just skin and bone’’. She couldn’t bathe herself – when hot water hit her head, her lungs would seize. Melissa would wash in the hollows around her neck where the skin had sunk into her chest; Cherie would gently wash her hair.
She had a wheelchair, but refused to be seen out in it: ‘‘I’ve got queer beliefs, but if you give in to that sort of thing, you’ve had it.’’
So when the ward doctor suggested she’d be permanently wheelchair-bound, she was having none of it.
‘‘He said, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’. I said, ‘I’ll take my chances with the knife’. That was the exact words I used.’’
That was 1986, a year before New Zealand’s first heart transplant, at Green Lane in December 1987. Newspaper clippings are filled with Kiwis raising money to travel to Sydney
‘‘Health is number one. I think – how long have I been on borrowed time? I would never have thought I’d have seen 67. It makes you really stop and think about life and what it is all about.’’
or London to wait and hope.
Ann Crawford was New Zealand’s first heart-lung recipient – transplanted at Britain’s Harefield Hospital in July 1985. She died four years later, aged just 27. A tally of Kiwi patients who travelled overseas for heart or heart-lung transplants in 1986 found half died either before or after.
Still, Burnett figured it was worth a shot. Her respiratory specialist, Peter Martin, had worked with renowned Harefield surgeon Magdi Yacoub. ‘‘You realise you can’t just have lungs,’’ Martin told her.
‘‘I said, ‘Yeah, but I’m not going in a wheelchair’. I said, ‘What’s the point? There’s no life in that’.’’
Martin stayed up late arranging for Yacoub to see Burnett. ‘‘It seemed the only chance,’’ Martin recalls.
Then there was the question of getting there. Former Social Credit leader Bruce Beetham fronted a trust to rally the people of Marton, Whanganui and Palmerston North to raise $120,000. Dubbed ‘‘A Christmas Present for Kay’’, the fund opened on November 25, 1986 and closed on Christmas Day.
And soon Burnett was farewelling her daughters for nine months and jetting to England to await her fate. Cherie never feared her mother would not return.
‘‘You don’t comprehend the magnitude of it,’’ Melissa says. ‘‘I think it is not until you literally grow up and become a mother yourself that you understand. For her, receiving a child’s heart and lungs when she had children that age at home; never knowing if you were ever going to see your children again.’’
Burnett’s biggest worry was