After six months of waiting, Newfoundland fisherman receives heart transplant
A Newfoundland fisherman being kept alive since February by a heart-assist device underwent a successful organ transplant over the weekend.
The family of Jimmy Sullivan, 61, say he’s recovering well after the eight-hour operation Sunday.
“He’s doing wonderful,” said his wife, Michelle, 61, noting he was already sitting up in a chair Monday afternoon and breathing on his own.
The couple had been living on the grounds of the Civic campus of The Ottawa Hospital while he was a patient at the Ottawa Heart Institute. For the past six months, he has been surviving with the help of a left ventricle assist device, or LVAD, a mechanical pumping system that greatly bolstered his damaged heart.
They were profiled by the Citi- zen earlier this summer and spoke warmly of the community of transplanted Newfoundlanders and health-care providers that had supported them so far from their home village of Calvert, about 70 kilometres south of St. John’s.
Saturday, around 9:20 p.m., the couple received the call they’d been waiting for: A suitable heart had been found. “We were in the hospital in 15 minutes,” Michelle said. “Everything with the surgery went really well.”
Sullivan is one of 17 children and has four grown children of his own, all of whom were on their way to Ottawa.
Once the LVAD was installed — it sits in a pouch that rests outside the body around the waist — Sullivan could not be more than two hours from the heart institute in case a suitable organ became available.
He had a parade of visitors as he and Michelle occupied a 12th-floor apartment off Parkdale Avenue.
The Heart Institute does roughly 35 transplants per year, and at any given time 10 to 20 patients are using an LVAD, a $150,000 device that does much of the heart’s pumping by providing a continuous flow of blood through a mechanical rotor.
It is worn 24 hours a day. About one-third to half of transplant recipients have used an LVAD, with the mean length of use roughly 300 days.
Sullivan officially went on the transplant list in June and was told he might be waiting as long as a year.
Michelle said she expects he will be released from hospital in a couple of weeks.