On that fateful day in August of 2005, Tom Arcara knew there was a problem with his pump. That is, the one in his basement.
“I had some leakage in my Liberty pump that pumps the sewage out to the road,” says Tom, a 51-year-old resident of Spencerport, NY. “I called a couple of my friends to help me with it. They wanted to open it up, so I tried to pull the thing out. That was a mistake.”
Right away Tom felt that something wasn't right. He walked back up the basement stairs, but was already feeling strange. He sat down on the steps. He was having chest pain and getting chills.
He stood up to finish the trip back into the house. In the kitchen, he started to pass out. His friend, Nick White, caught him just before he crashed through the patio door.
“Nick got me into a chair and I started throwing up,” Tom recalls. Another friend, Kenny Brongo, arrived soon after. Kenny recognized the signs of a heart attack, and called 911.
The ambulance got to the house in minutes. Tom was loaded into the back. Kenny—now on his cell phone with Tom’s wife, Chris—crawled into the back of the ambulance after him.
Chris, sensing that the situation was critical, told Kenny, “Take him to Strong!”
Tom says. “They took me to Strong. If they hadn’t, I would’ve died.”
Dr. Chris Cove was in the cardiac catheterization lab when Tom arrived. Dr. Cove would later tell Tom that at that point, Tom was “swirling the drain”—he was close to death. Dr. Cove wasn’t sure Tom would live long enough to have the procedure that could save him. Considering the situation, Dr. Cove more than doubled the dose of stimulant he would normally administer. This gave Tom’s heart the boost it needed to hang on a little bit longer. |
|
He was rushed into surgery where it was discovered that Tom's heart was so damaged, there was no hope of saving it. So in the operating room he was put on an external heart pump, a machine that assisted his heart in pumping. The Strong Heart & Vascular Center is the only facility in the region that can provide them. Later, he was put on a Thoratec ventricular assist device, another similar, but smaller, unit. “It was about the size of a hockey puck, two of them, right on the outside of my body,” Tom says. “You could actually watch the blood pumping through them.”
But these devices were only temporary. Their purpose was to keep Tom alive while he waited for a heart transplant. He spent his time waiting at Strong. Only once was he allowed to go home. Despite the extreme reliability of the artificial heart pump, Tom and his wife were trained by the hospital staff for the unlikely event of a battery failure. “They taught my wife how to pump it manually. They actually disconnected the battery so she could try it. She pumped, and for a few minutes, she was actually keeping me alive.”
On September 27—a little more than a month after Tom's heart attack—he got the good news. “The doctors came into my room at 2:30 in the morning and said, ‘You're getting a new heart today.”
|
Tom's transplant was performed by Dr. Todd Massey and Dr. Leway Chen—veterans of over 100 heart transplants. Less than a month later, in mid-October of 2005, Tom was back home. Early in 2006, he had returned to his job as a kitchen designer for Ridge Lumber. And he was hard at work on another project, too.
“We're having a fund-raiser for the hospital, sponsored by my wife and I, and by the Friends of Strong,” says Tom. “We want to a place for people to stay while their spouses are waiting for transplants at Strong. “ It's not a typical fund-raiser . “This isn't one of those $200 events,” explains Tom. We want this to be something for the nurses and all the staff to attend. “ |
Tom's surgeons, Todd Massey and Leeway Chen will do a presentation. And a very special band will provide the music.
“I'm a drummer, and I'm back to playing music again,” says Tom. “I was playing two weeks after I came home from the hospital! My band, Second Chance, will be playing at the event.”
Tom plans to have the event each year. “I just keep asking myself, ‘What can I do to help the next group of people?' Because everyone at Strong helped me so much. I should be dead right now, but I'm not. So I'm going to do whatever I can.”
* Chris Arcara is an employee of the University of Rochester Eye Institute.
|
|
