HIS (HEART) N.J. man’s ‘miracle’ transplant after a lifetime of

Steve Weitzen celebrated his 61st birthday this March with his fiancée, Dede, a decadent chocolate cake, and something most people take for granted— a healthy, beating heart.

Born with a congenital defect that blocked electrical signals from traveling around the essential organ, Weitzen spent his whole life defying the odds.

“[Doctors] told my parents that I would likely never walk,” he said.

Despite those dire predictions, Weitzen learned to walk, run and play like any other child, only slightly aware of his limitations. He remembers how his mother would worry: She would yell down from the upper-floor window of the family’s apartment in the Boulevard Houses in East New York, Brooklyn, telling Weitzen to take a rest from playing outside with his friends.

“I would say, ‘What do I need a break for?’ She was just worried that I was running around too much,” he said.

“My parents were frankly scared out of their minds.”

“No doctor would ever allow me to play on a team, because they were afraid I was going to die on the field or the court. So my childhood was spent being held back from doing some things,” he recalled.

In a theme that would define his life, Weitzen, who now lives in Randolph, N.J., found a work-around, playing sports like Ping-Pong and tennis that didn’t require doctor’s notes.

But when he was 30, doctors found that Weitzen’s heartbeat was so slow he could have died anytime in his sleep. They fitted him with a pacemaker.

“It worked beautifully. I never had a problem,” he said. He was able to continue his career as a corporate lawyer in Manhattan, and keep up his active lifestyle.

Real trouble came again in 2018. “I came home from work one day, and I thought let me take the next day off, I didn’t feel very well,” Weitzen recalled. “It turned out I had a staph infection in my blood. I’m told by my doctor I had a 50-50 chance of living.”

Weitzen spent the next several months in and out of the operating room, getting his pacemaker removed then reimplanted, and dealing with a slew of complications. After he had two separate strokes — caused by worsening blood clots — doctors decided to take a drastic step.

“They said we’re going to take out your heart. I said, ‘How are you going to do that? Don’t you need a heart to live?’ ” he said.

Dr. Sean Pinney, the director of heart failure and transplantation for the Mount Sinai