OSU hospital performs 500th heart transplant
The first heart transplant at Ohio State was on July 26, 1986.
The glowing green flat line stretched across the operating-room monitor, which displayed a large, bold zero. Lou Bennett had no pulse. Then a beep. And another, and another. And a few more.
The line jumped into peaks and valleys. Zero became 111, then 112, 114, 115.
An hour after being placed in the hole in his chest, Bennett’s new heart had come to life.
Early on the morning of June 18, Bennett was one step closer to the moments he had hoped to live for: splashing in the pool with his grandchildren, standing behind the plate at high school softball and baseball games, cruising in his new retro-style camper through state parks with his wife.
The 61-year-old West Portsmouth man was on the receiving end of the 494th heart transplant at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center’s Ross Heart Hospital. He allowed The Dispatch to document his life-changing surgery.
Just over two months later, on Aug. 31, the hospital performed its 500th heart transplant — 32 years after its first.
“It’ll be nice to have life back,” that tearful recipient, Margaret Paugh, said Thursday in her hospital recovery room, where a box of tissues was close at hand.
Paugh, 52, was diagnosed with heart disease about two decades ago, a side effect of the chemotherapy she underwent as a 10-yearold girl with bone cancer. Doctors treated her heart with medication and, about four years ago, a pacemaker. In December, her health nose-dived. In March, Wexner surgeons installed a mechanical heart pump to keep her alive.
The Cincinnati-area woman was on the transplant list for eight days.
The first heart transplant at Ohio State was on July 26, 1986. In the decades since, surgeons have transplanted as many as 31 hearts or as few as six in a year.
As of Friday, the hospital’s total had climbed to 502, including 16 this year.
Bennett’s was the eighth of the year.
He was in a tournament at Shawnee State Park Golf Course on the morning of June 16 when the call came. It was time. Bennett spent the next day, Father’s Day, at the hospital with wife, Kim, and their daughters, Kristi and Keri.
The women sat in a waiting room as Dr. Bassam Shukrallah cut open Bennett’s chest around 2 a.m. the next day to begin a twohour process to detach the mangled and enlarged heart that had served Bennett for six decades.
They waited as Dr. Bryan Whitson removed the donor heart at an undisclosed location around 3 a.m. and accompanied it, in an ice-filled Tupperware container placed inside a rolling Igloo cooler, to the Wexner operating room about a half-hour later.
They waited as Bennett’s heart, still beating, was pulled from his chest and the pink donor heart placed in the gap.
And they waited as the transplanted heart was shocked back to life with a defibrillator about 5:15 a.m.
Whitson, a cardiothoracic surgeon who also retrieved Paugh’s new heart, called the transplant process humbling and bittersweet.
“We’re giving a new lease on life to a person and their family, but it also comes as a great tragedy to somebody else,” said Whitson, who directs Wexner’s heart and lung transplant program. “It’s a pretty awesome thing to do. But it can be a pretty emotionally taxing thing also.”
The 500-transplant mark comes from countless health care professionals working hard and caring deeply, said Dr. Nahush Mokadam, Wexner’s director of cardiac surgery.
“This is a team accomplishment for the benefit of not just the 500th patient, but the 499 previous patients,” said Mokadam, who assisted in Paugh’s transplant. “It takes a village to make this happen. We all share in this, and we look forward to reaching the thousand-heart milestone.”
On Thursday, the hospital staff celebrated No. 500 in a room near the lobby. Employees received commemorative pins and heartshaped cookies and wrote messages on heart-shaped cards that would be delivered to Paugh.
Heart disease is the top killer of men and women in the U.S., each year claiming about 610,000 lives, roughly 25 percent of all deaths, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Based on its total number of transplants, Wexner ranks second among seven Ohio centers that perform heart transplants, according to Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network data from 1988 through July 2018. Cleveland Clinic Foundation, at more than 1,800, leads the state and is third in the nation.
Wexner is 50th among 211 U.S. centers, where more than 3,200 patients received hearts in 2017.
An estimated 93 percent of Wexner heart-transplant recipients meet the benchmark of surviving at least one year after surgery, compared with 91 percent nationwide, according to the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients. That’s based on an evaluation of 62 Wexner transplants over 2½ years through December 2016.
Among those 62 recipients, 89 percent were white and 11 percent black; 71 percent were men and 29 percent women. The largest age group, making up 43 percent, was 50- to 64-year-olds.
Today, nearly 4,000 Americans, including more than 150 in Ohio, await heart transplants, said Andrew Mullins, director of partner services at Lifeline of Ohio, an agency that works with Wexner and other medical centers to allocate donated organs.
Wexner’s 500 mark gives hope to those who are waiting, Mullins said.