Treasury of Joy & Inspiration (13 page)

Meanwhile, Jeanne and Chet had flown from Knoxville and arrived at the hospital just after midnight. They were alone in Chet's room as they awaited Dr. Altshuler. “We just have to keep remembering one thing,” Chet said to Jeanne. “This is what Patti would want.”

“There's something else,” Jeanne said, thinking about their 37 years of marriage and the fact that this might be their last moment together on earth. “I know we've always loved each other, but I'm sorry we haven't said it more often.” Chet put his arms around her.

Dr. Altshuler, a friendly, easy-going man in his 40s with a shock of black hair, strode into the room. This would be the last chance he and Chet would have to talk before surgery, and Altshuler wanted to be sure his patient understood the risks and was at peace with the unusual emotional stress facing him.

He explained the whole procedure: he would fly to Knoxville, remove Patti's heart and bring it back to this hospital. Dr. Altshuler was ultimately convinced that Chet could handle the special trauma—a conclusion he based on his nearly four years of working with him as a patient. “I knew that Mr. Szuber thinks things through, and I felt comfortable that once he reached his decision in this case, it was the right one.”

As Altshuler was leaving, Chet called to him. He was thinking of Patti, and with his voice breaking, he made one final request.

“Please,” he said. “Be gentle.”

“Lifeguard flight,” Max Freeman announced to the tower as the sleek white Cessna Citation sped toward the runway at 1:20 that Monday morning. To air-traffic controllers the “Lifeguard” designation is the same as flashing lights and a siren are to highway traffic—giving that flight top priority for takeoff and landing over almost everything else. It also qualifies for the best routes to Knoxville.

Instantly cleared, the little jet rose sharply into the night air, streaking over Detroit and heading on a southerly course for eastern Tennessee. Soon it was cruising at 400 miles per hour at an altitude of 37,000 feet.

In the cabin Dr. Altshuler and three members of his team sat quietly. Lynn Flores, the team perfusionist, had been on other transplant trips with Dr. Altshuler, but never one like this. “It's always both sad and thrilling, but this was different. I found myself thinking about myself and my own children.”

Flores's job was to administer the chemicals that bring the beating heart to a complete stop. Only then can it be removed and packed in ice. From the instant she stops the heart, the clock begins ticking until the organ is restarted in the recipient's chest. Four hours is the optimum limit for a heart to be at rest. On the floor behind Flores lay her bag of chemicals and instruments—as well as a small red and white Igloo ice chest.

The plane touched down in Knoxville at 2:50 a.m. and taxied to a small corporate hangar. The team got into an ambulance, leaving Max Freeman and his co-pilot ready and waiting at the plane.

At the hospital Patti's chest was already open when the team arrived, the beating heart displayed. Even though brain dead, the donor patient is treated at every step as if she were actually alive. Indeed on some levels it appears that she is—with the ventilator and heart monitor flashing and beeping as they track functioning organs.

Dr. Altshuler spent a few minutes examining Patti's heart, checking to see if it had any bruises from the accident that might cause complications. When he was convinced the heart was sound, Lynn Flores released the chemicals into the aorta, flooding the heart with potassium cardioplegia.

Patti's heart beat for the last time at 3:56 a.m. The lines on the monitors became straight; the small beeps ceased. A calm settled over the room.

“We keep our emotions to ourselves,” says Lynn Flores. “But at that moment I always say a prayer, and that night I said one for Patti.”

At that point Dr. Altshuler removed Patti's heart. After a final inspection he packed it in the cooler. He then went to a telephone and called his partner in Michigan to get Chester Szuber ready. His daughter's heart was on the way.

At the
Knoxville airfield in the dead of night, pilot Max Freeman was deep in thought as he awaited the return of the Altshuler team. He saw another small jet, a Lifeguard flight, quickly ease into place at the corporate hangar and let off another transplant team. Sometimes Freeman has seen as many as four jets converge and then rush skyward into the night in different directions, bearing a person's most precious gifts.

In Patti's case her organs left Knoxville that night and took with them the hope of vision to two people, kidneys to two others, a liver to a 15-year-old girl—and her heart to her father.

“It's during that wait that you have time to think,” Freeman says. “All the technology at work in a mission like this is humbling: the surgeons, the skilled technicians, the equipment to keep the donor's organs going. It really is the ultimate coming together of human skills. And then you have an airplane whose speed makes the difference in whether or not it all works.”

By 4:25 a.m. Dr. Altshuler and his team were back on board. Freeman accelerated down the runway, and the Cessna soared into the hot Tennessee night—speeding toward Detroit where surgeons were already opening Chester Szuber's chest. The team was tense because of the close timing. The Igloo ice chest was on the floor beside Lynn Flores. Fighting strong head winds all the way, Freeman knew every minute counted.

Morning had broken when the jet touched down at 6:10 at Detroit Metro Airport. Waiting beside the corporate hangar was a green and white Bell LongRanger helicopter, ready to relay the team and the heart to Beaumont Hospital. The team quickly boarded, and 15 minutes later the LongRanger settled onto Beaumont's helipad.

By the time Dr. Altshuler walked into the operating room, Chet's chest had been cut open, and a heart-lung machine was standing by to keep him alive. Ignoring his fatigue, Dr. Altshuler immediately removed the old heart and began to stitch Patti's heart into her father's chest.

Finally, his work done, Dr. Altshuler released the clamps and sent Chet's blood from the heart-lung machine into the new heart. It is only at that moment that anyone knows whether or not the new heart will work. And to add to the team's concern, Patti's heart had been at rest almost two hours over the four-hour mark.

Instantly at 9:47 a.m. Patti's heart sprang to life, pumping blood through her father's body with a power he had not felt for a quarter of a century. Unlike a repaired heart, which can take months to reach full potential, a healthy transplanted heart almost always reaches its potential immediately.

When Chet eased toward consciousness a little past noon that day, one of his first impressions was the clarity of his mind. After his earlier surgeries, grogginess and confusion and pain tormented him as he tried to gain control, to assess his condition.

But this time his sensations were completely different: “I knew my memory had deteriorated, but I didn't realize what a fog I had been in until I started to wake up that day. My mind was working like a kid's. I knew exactly what was going on and that things had gone well.” Even the lingering pain from his horrendous surgery was light.

When Jeanne went in to see her husband that afternoon, her emotions were as raw as an open wound. All she could think of was that Patti's body was in Tennessee, but her daughter's heart was beating right here in Chet's chest.

What Jeanne beheld was beyond anything she ever dreamed possible. “Chet's face was pink instead of the usual gray,” Jeanne says, still barely holding her emotions. “His lips weren't white anymore but pink. And his eyes were clear and bright—like Patti's.”

Within a few hours, Chet was sitting on the side of his bed. The next day he was on his feet, able to take a few steps. As the doctors predicted, Chet's emotions were on a roller-coaster ride—ranging from exhilaration to grief as he thought of his daughter.

A few days later the family gathered in Berkley at Our Lady of LaSalette Church for Patti's funeral. Chet rested in his hospital room, along with a few close friends. One of them was Paul Pelto, the Santa Claus to whom four-year-old Patti had offered her favorite doll. As Paul looked at the newly transformed Chet, he remembered Patti's instinct for giving—an instinct that, as it turned out, ran as deep as life itself.

For more
than two years now, Patti's heart has given her father a fresh life he could never have imagined. He has an energy that allows him to do things his illness had once made impossible, including hunting caribou in the freezing weather of the subarctic. Chet's tree farm is thriving as never before.

The principal person at the Szubers' farm is their son Bob. For him the defining moment of his sister's gift to their father came at the end of a long summer day in which he saw Chet doing more work than he had in years. “When I saw Dad driving home on a tractor, smiling, with a grandkid on each knee, that's when it all came together for me. Patti would be so thrilled.”

Chet thinks about Patti all the time—almost as if she's a constant companion. He is in regular touch with his physician at Beaumont Hospital and does what the doctor tells him to do. “I'm not only taking care of myself, I'm taking care of Patti too.”

When Chet's not working on the farm, he travels the country telling the story of his daughter's gifts of life and pleading with people to understand the importance of her example.

“Patti may be gone,” says Jeanne, “but she's not dead. She lives on in so many others. Any one of us can make the same gifts, and we should.”

“What's happened here,” adds Chet, “is the greatest miracle this side of heaven. Sometimes people's lifework doesn't begin until after they die.”

Occasionally Chet even feels that having Patti's heart gives him some of her feelings as well. When urged to bring a wrongful-death lawsuit against Todd Herbst, Chet refused. When Todd was charged with involuntary manslaughter under federal law—since the accident took place in a national park—Chet appealed to the judge for leniency, pleading that the young man had been punished enough by losing his best friend. (Todd was sentenced to one year in a prison work camp. He was released this past summer and is now on probation for another year.)

On the first day of last spring, with snow still swirling in the air, Chester and Jeanne Szuber visit the graveyard where Patti rests, the same one where Patti and Todd used to meet to talk at the old Gilbert marker. It is only a few blocks from the Szubers' house.

At Patti's marker Jeanne and Chet tidy up little sticks and leaves blown there by the March wind. Chet gestures toward the words engraved on the stone, his fingers almost touching the inscription: “The Happiest Angel in Heaven.”

“Do you think she really is?” he's asked.

Chet's strong face crumples a little and his jaw tightens. “I hope so,” he says quietly.

It is a hope well founded. In going through papers after Patti's death, Jeanne came across a bright card filled with hearts that Patti had given Chet on Father's Day, 1992. On it she had written a prayer and a promise:

“I'm very proud of your strength and courage. Things will work out, and you will be as good as new soon.

“With love, always, Patti.”

Quotable Quotes

If you're
lucky enough to do well, it's your responsibility to send the elevator back down.
Quoted by Kevin Spacey

• • •

Joy is
one of the only emotions you can't contrive.
Bono