BEAT GOES ON
Defying the odds – ‘I really thought I was going to die’
Health System, remembers Weitzen’s heart was so weak from so many years of stress that it simply couldn’t be saved.
“The perfect solution was to do a heart transplant, and to take the diseased heart out and replace it with a new beating heart,” he said.
Easier said than done: A heart transplant requires a healthy, beating heart to be donated from someone else, and conditions just right for the whole procedure to work. But Weitzen couldn’t go on living with his own heart while he waited for a donor to be found, so doctors hooked him up to a total artificial heart — essentially a pump that mimics the function of the real organ by pushing air in and blood out of two plastic ventricles.
“I was very very sick after they put it in,” said Weitzen, who was facing an indefinite hospital stay until he could get a new heart. Just a few weeks later, though, and mere days before his 60th birthday, he got the incredible news that doctors had found a donor.
“My fiancée and I looked at each other like this could possibly happen,” he said.
Still, Weitzen was far from out of the woods. “I was delirious, I really thought I was going to die. I thought a lot of times going into these surgeries that I wasn’t going to make it, but I really thought it was the end.”
The cutting-edge operation lasted between six and eight hours, requiring tremendous coordination from the Mount Sinai staff. “As we often say, it’s the ultimate team sport,” said Pinney. Only about 120 centers across the country can perform full heart transplants.
In the year since his new life began, Weitzen has not skipped a beat — getting back in shape, spending time with his family in New Jersey, and doling out advice to other transplant patients, which he says gives him a lot of satisfaction.
He’s also taken the time to write a fictionalized version of his life, appropriately titled “A Change of Heart.”
“It’s a miracle, to be so sick and to be restored to full health and vitality,” said Pinney, who has been a cardiologist for 26 years. “I’ve been fortunate to take care of hundreds and hundreds of transplant patients and I remember them all … but Steven’s [story] is really special.”
“One of the doctors couldn’t believe I existed,” Weitzen said, referring to his many brushes with death. Shortly after his transplant, he reached out to his donor’s family, telling them in a letter how grateful he is for their most precious gift.
“It’s going to give me the ability to see my children grow up and my grandchildren grow up,” he said. “I’m part of life. That’s the most remarkable thing about all of this.”