Heart transplant gives young hockey player new lease on life
“I’m sure the experience was even more shocking for him, a young athlete almost dying of heart failure.” registered nurse Selvi Sinnaburai
Six weeks ago, Shane Lehman nervously stepped up on a treadmill, and for the first time in three years, began to run.
A slow jog wouldn’t normally worry an athletic 24-yearold, but Lehman was coming off open-heart surgery. In the 34 months leading up to July, when the St. Albert man received a heart transplant, physiotherapists had forbidden him from running lest he disturb the artificial valve wired from his heart to an external, brick-sized controller and two holstered battery packs.
As he began to hoof it, Lehman wasn’t sure how he was supposed to feel.
“You get tired pretty quickly, I’m not going to lie,” Lehman said. “But it was exciting, because I know that I’m finally moving on from all this nonsense and I can live a normalish life.”
Sunday morning will be far less nerve-racking, when Lehman tackles a five-kilometre stretch around Louise McKinney Park for the Heartbeat Run, a fundraiser for the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute organized by the University of Alberta Hospital Foundation.
“I won’t be fast, I’ll tell you that much,” Lehman said. “I won’t be able to run 5K, not a chance, but I can run and walk it, and all my friends are coming out too, so it’s not that big of a deal.”
Not long ago, Lehman was a star left-winger for the Spruce Grove Saints. He twice led the Junior A hockey squad in scoring and had dreams of going pro. He had accepted an offer to play for the University of Maine Black Bears.
But then he began feeling tired. In his third and final year, in 2008-09, Lehman grew so weak he couldn’t even get up.
At first, he figured it was the flu. Then he blamed poor conditioning and a long season. He pushed himself harder during workouts, which only made things worse. He tried tweaking his asthma medication. Nothing worked.
On his 21st birthday, Lehman and his girlfriend took a trip to Las Vegas. He choked down just two or three meals and just half a beer that week, and by the trip home, was too weak to pull his suitcase.
One night in July 2009, Lehman drove himself to Sturgeon Community Hospital, partly from boredom since his parents were out of town. It likely saved his life. A battery of tests at the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute that week led to a diagnosis: idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy. He wouldn’t leave hospital for 10 weeks.
“My heart was too big to pump blood to the rest of my body, so its functioning was absolutely terrible,” Lehman said. “I’d been in Stage IV heart failure for a little while. I shouldn’t have been functioning, let alone playing hockey.”
The New York Heart Association Functional Classification rates symptoms under four categories, with Stage IV being the most severe.
“Severe limitations while at rest, all signs and symptoms of heart failure,” Lehman said, listing off the symptoms. “Can’t sleep on back, no appetite, trouble breathing, tachycardia, then multi-system organ failure and so on.”
Doctors believe a viral infection had decimated Lehman’s left ventricle. His heart swelled to five times its normal size and functioned at just sevenper-cent efficiency. Within a month, low blood flow caused liver and kidney failure. Doctors had to open his blood vessels by placing a balloon pump into his heart.
As Lehman puts it, he was “circling the drain.”
A month before he should have been heading east to begin his NCAA hockey career, Lehman was bedridden, anxious and too weak to brush his teeth. He had surgery to install a Heartmate II ventricular assist device (VAD), a batterypowered artificial pump.
Over the next six months, his heart healed, but not enough to eliminate the need for a transplant. Lehman made friends with his fellow patients at the heart institute, most of them triple his age, and just focused on getting better.
Since heart patients often get mired in depression, Lehman’s bounce-back was “quite inspirational,” said Selvi Sinnaburai, a registered nurse and the hospital’s VAD coordinator. Although he often wonders what he could have accomplished on the ice had his heart not failed him, he began to reinvent himself.
“I’m sure the experience was even more shocking for him, a young athlete almost dying of heart failure,” Sinnaburai said. “But he’s so positive and motivated and actually lived his life.”
Lehman enrolled at the U of A, and having seen the job up close, decided to go into nursing. Six months after the VAD was installed, with mixed feelings from his doctors, he was back playing recreational hockey.
This past July, Lehman’s phone rang at 3:30 a.m., half an hour after he finished cramming for an exam he “was not prepared for.” Four hours later, he was in the operating room. He didn’t have to write the exam. “It worked out perfectly,” he said.
Lehman still feels tired. Recovery takes time and it will be months before he starts feeling normal again. But he’s already bought a gym membership at a north Edmonton health club, and men’s league hockey begins next week.
Finally, at long last, he can run again.
“It’s going to take a little time to get back to where I was,” Lehman said. “But sooner or later, I’ll get there.”