8/2/98

Three transplant patients celebrate new chances at life

By Genna McLaughlin

TRIBUNE-REVIEW

People look at Martha Patton differently since her close call with death 10 years ago, and she doesn't deny her life has changed.

Back then, she didn't know much about organ donation. She didn't worry about hepatitis. And she hated onions and cottage cheese.

She didn't volunteer at Family House in Pittsburgh, knew nothing about the Kidney Foundation's Transplant Games and didn't, she says, enjoy life as fully as she does now.

In 1988, she never had to wonder what the face of the person who saved her life looked like.

Now it follows her, the thought of what would have happened if that stranger hadn't signed a donor card, if the family of that stranger hadn't agreed to let the organs be donated, if the liver hadn't come in time.

She thinks about it at her granddaughter's dance recital.

Walking the track with her neighbors in Brownsville.

Talking to her daughter on the phone.

Enjoying a glass of beer.

She just thought of it again and the emotions caused her to stop her story. "I'll be all right in a minute." She put her hands over her face and cried.

- "Why put 85 percent on the line when I still have my life?" Bernie Zimetbaum of Youngwood asked himself when doctors told him a much-needed liver transplant had an 85 percent chance of success. He couldn't find an answer so he decided to wait.

"This is life we're talking about," he said, not a prediction of rain.

When he was too weak to get off the sofa more than twice a day, he decided to "put it on the line." In less than a week, he had a new liver.

Sure, he was "sore as heck" for a little while after surgery but he considers himself one of the lucky ones. "There are a lot of people who don't get an organ and die."

Ten people die every day while waiting for organ transplants in the United States, according to the Center for Organ Recovery & Education.

When he needed a kidney transplant in April, he didn't worry about percentages.

"The marvels of medicine," said the 51-year-old, who has had a new liver for nine years and one new kidney for four months.

He stopped suddenly and looked down at the floor of his porch, his eyes welling up with tears behind wire-rimmed glasses.

"It's amazing."

- David Wyatt had 19 months to worry about his heart and double-lung transplant. But when the telephone call came with a match while he was working under his car, it was his wife who had cold feet that July morning. She was seven months pregnant.

"Let's wait till the baby is born," said Patsy Wyatt.

"We've waited too long," answered Wyatt.

He continued to be the brave one when he was wheeled away from his crying wife and parents into the operating room and when the nurse asked him if he had written his will. But after the surgery, the nurse found him in his hospital bed with tears streaming down his still swollen face.

"I'm happy, I'm sad and I'm scared," he told her. "I'm happy that I'm alive, sad that someone had to die for me to live and scared of what the future holds."

DONORS

"Someone died. That's why I'm alive," said Martha Patton, who still has cards from her 64th birthday in July sitting among pictures of her two grandchildren on her television.

Ask her about the person whose liver has been with her for 10 years and she can't answer.

Male or female?

Young or old?

Where the person lived?

How the person died?

She wonders about all of it but has never gotten answers. She wrote a letter to the donor's family years ago and sent it through the Center for Organ Recovery & Education, which keeps all records closed unless both the donor family and the recipient agree to correspond directly.

She never received an answer.

"I respect their wishes if they don't want to correspond," she said. After all, in her mind, they, as much as the person who died, are responsible for giving her life.

But for 10 healthy years, she has theorized.

"I like things I never liked before," she said. "I eat onions now. I never ate onions. Never liked cottage cheese. I really enjoy a glass of beer now."

She has no way of knowing if those were things her donor liked and no medical proof to back up her thoughts. But other recipients have talked about sudden changes in tastes after a transplant.

She is contemplating writing to the donor's family again in October, the anniversary of her lifesaving surgery. "Things could have changed in 10 years," she said.

In the meantime, she follows what she calls the unwritten recipient law - go out and get others to sign donor cards. If people see her, hear her story, maybe they won't pretend it doesn't affect them.

Before she got the hepatitis that ruined her liver in five weeks, organ transplantation was a "taboo subject" and she didn't have a donor card. She's found that others are just as unwilling to talk about things they like to think won't happen to them - die or be placed on an organ waiting list.

"We set up our (information) table in a grocery store once and do you know that people went all the way around another aisle to avoid having to face us?" she said. "It might be you. I didn't know it was going to be me."

- "We need to put it in people's faces - get the message out there. We just need the organs," said Bernie Zimetbaum, who wears a green pin shaped like a ribbon on his cotton hat. The green ribbon stands for support of organ donations. "(My wife and I) aren't going to run ads for my wife's personal care home now. We're going to put ads in for organ donations."

In the Yellow Pages listing for the Mt. Airy Retirement Home in New Stanton, below the slogan "We care where you live" it says, "Organ donation saves lives!"

Donors saved Zimetbaum's twice in nine years.

A 34-year-old woman from Texas.

A 29-year-old man from Pittsburgh.

"The belief (in organ donation) was always there," said Zimetbaum. He's sure he had the designation on his license years before he went in for a routine checkup and learned he had abnormal liver functions. But, organ donation cards weren't around back then. At least he never noticed them.

"I don't know if there's a clear-cut answer for organ donation. It needs to be more universally accepted. People need to start thinking ... if it was their family.

"You look at a lot of things different.

"Just little things.

"Things you see at Denny's.

"You put a $20 bill in there because you see someone has a transplant fund."

He paused, choking back tears.

"You may fall behind on your bills, but you'll always have a $20 bill for someone like that."

- The waiting game, David Wyatt calls it.

That period when he lived with a beeper, waiting for it to go off and for someone to tell him it was time to replace his heart and lungs.

During that 19 months, he was afraid to go beyond the beeper's range, afraid he would miss the small window of opportunity that exists for organs, afraid he would die before his call came.

The three false calls were worse than a silent beeper.

"You stand by the phone.

"You're on a high.

"I've got my bags packed and I'm ready to go.

"Then they call back and say it wasn't a match.

"And you just drop."

An exasperated sigh.

"I just wish more people would become donors."

Wyatt knows he can't have back those 19 months when he couldn't lift a thing, couldn't help his father, Richard Wyatt, build cupboards.

"I couldn't walk from here to there without gasping for breath," said the 38-year-old, pointing to the table next to him in McDonald's. "My wife had to dress me and bathe me."

He didn't have a donor card before he started having recurring bouts of bronchitis. But a 29-year-old girl who died in a car accident in West Virginia in July 1997 had one.

He has taken some ribbing from his friends about the female organs. But they were the same friends who didn't believe in organ donation. "Now, most of them have their donor cards."

CELEBRATION OF LIFE

"Someone asked me once if I was bitter," said Martha Patton.

"How could I possibly be bitter?

"I've gone places I would have never gone.

"Met people I would have never met."

After 10 years she's had only one minor rejection. For the past five years, her tests every six weeks at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have been normal.

She keeps busy doing things she never did before the transplant.

She volunteers for the Center for Organ Recovery & Education, speaking to groups around the region, sharing her story.

She works at Family House, volunteer-run apartments on a floor at Montefiore University Hospital, Oakland, for people who come from a distance to stay in Pittsburgh for long-term treatments. Some of the patients are organ recipients.

She helps take care of her grandchildren, Blake Chunko, 12, and Betsy Chunko, 15, while her daughter, Raine Chunko, works.

She travels with her daughter and grandchildren and with friends she's met at the U.S. Transplant Games and at monthly transplant support meetings at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

"I live twice as hard, for me and my donor."

At the transplant games this week in Columbus, Ohio, she'll run the 100-yard dash, walk the 5K road walk and join the volleyball team if she's needed.

She's been practicing every morning, trying to improve her 100-yard dash time.

"I can't get below 30 seconds, no matter how hard I try," said Patton. "But I'll be happy if I'm still breathing in the end."

She's not worried about winning a medal. She figures she already won the gold when she won life back in 1988.

She attends the games to see friends she met at the last games in 1996.

To meet new recipients that she knows she'll bond with immediately.

To hug the donor families who will attend because one of them might be her donor's family.

"We're there to show the world that we're well-functioning people. Transplants work," said Patton.

"I'm a miracle. Any transplant is."

- "I had a nightmare about the games the other night," said Bernie Zimetbaum.

"I was in there (the racquetball court) and I was doing terrible.

"The ball was flying at me.

"And I was looking at my wife and my kids like `Get me outta here.'

"It was so embarrassing," he said.

"I used to play tennis. I was playing doubles six weeks before the liver transplant.

"But the dialysis took a lot out of me," he said, referring to the treatments before his kidney transplant four months ago.

"That really threw a wrench in my training.

"I just went today to the (YMCA) for the first time.

"I worked out for 30 minutes.

"I was slayed."

A laugh comes before he turns serious again.

"I just want to be there (at the transplant games).

"Just to participate in something like that.

"I don't know why I never got involved in the transplant games before.

"This year it's just easier to go.

"I think it's going to be real exciting ... emotional.

"I mean it's a real family ... a brotherhood.

"To look at someone who went through what you went through."

A pause. More tears.

"I'm real happy to be alive."

- David Wyatt will be looking to break the world record at the games.

He'll have to find the record first because he's not really sure what it is.

But he's determined to live longer than anyone with a heart and double-lung transplant has before.

"I would like to meet someone with a heart and double-lung transplant. Try to learn more to stay healthy down the road," said Wyatt.

At monthly support meetings at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the closest he could get to his own experience was talking to two women with new hearts.

He's sure with 1,500 transplant recipients at the games, he'll find someone with whom he can compare notes in between competing in a basketball event and the 1-mile run.

So far, his notes look pretty good.

When he went in for the transplant with 28 pounds of fluid around his heart, the doctors told him there was a 50-50 chance he would survive.

On his one-year anniversary in July, he was feeling "healthy" at 158 pounds, 32 pounds less than when he came out of surgery. He works out for an hour each day, swimming or lifting weights.

He still gets nervous every time he goes for three-month checkups. "I'm scared they're going to find something wrong."

Before surgery, Wyatt had to quit his job at the Indiana Recycling Center because of the lifting involved.

He's a stay-at-home dad with a 2-year-old daughter, Shawna Vera Wyatt.

"If I go back to work and something happens, think of all the time I will have missed with my daughter, watching her grow up."

S.C. Spangler and Philip G. Pavely page A1 photos