Lincoln man overcomes adversity, gets new heart

BOSTON - If Joseph E. Elliott Jr. ever wrote an autobiography, he's fond of saying, people would think it was fiction.

The Lincoln resident, now 52, had not one, but three bouts of rheumatic fever as a child. A doctor once told him he'd spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, he remembers, but instead, Joe went on to hold such physically demanding jobs as shipfitter, steeplejack, carpenter and welder.

He has been resuscitated by his wife, Donna, after a cardiac arrest. At one point, doctors gave him a 1 percent chance of survival.

And a week ago, Joe added a new, and more remarkable yet, event to his life story: heart transplant surgery.

"The Elliott family motto is perseverance," Joe says matter-of-factly.

As he recovers at Tufts New England Medical Center, he and Donna are hoping fervently that the story's future chapters will read less like the gripping suspense novel Joe's medical history resembles.

In his half-century of life, Joe has had three open-heart surgeries, and a litany of multisyllabic heart conditions that challenge the tongue.

"Joe could be a textbook himself," says Dr. Daniel J. Levine, who has treated Elliott for five years and is director of Rhode Island Hospital's Heart Failure Program.

It began with the rheumatic fever. The sickness is a rare complication of a strep infection in which the body attacks its own tissue, causing degeneration of the heart valves.

But rather than hindering Joe, the damage the disease did to his body only strengthened his resolve.

"He was not allowed to take phys ed in high school, but he played in every backyard football game that existed," Donna remembers.

During his adult life, Joe purposely sought jobs that required strength and fitness, and lifted weights in his spare time.

"I knew it was going to come to this, but that didn't stop me from living my life," Joe says.

The couple had three healthy children, and it seemed like maybe Joe had beaten his earlier illnesses.

Then, in his 30s, he began having spurts of noticeable shortness of breath. Since then, his congestive heart failure has progressively worsened, and his heart's level of output lessened. He has had heart valves replaced, and an aortic aneurysm removed.

In September 2000, Joe and Donna were sitting on the loveseat at home one evening watching the Olympics, when Joe made "a strange noise," Donna remembers. She took it for a snore, thinking Joe had fallen asleep, but when she shook him, he didn't respond. There was no pulse, and he wasn't breathing. He had gone into cardiac arrest.

After calling 911, Donna frantically tried to recall the CPR training she'd gotten more than five years ago.

"I just kept praying, because he didn't seem to be responding," Donna recalled. "Those minutes seemed forever."

Donna later found out she'd gotten Joe's heart beating, though in an irregular rhythm, and blood pumping through his body until rescue workers arrived. He was considered a "sudden-death survivor," meaning that he survived a condition in which the heart's rhythm becomes very fast and chaotic, essentially stopping all output.

After Joe went into cardiac arrest a second time 24 hours later, doctors said he had less than 1 percent chance of survival, Donna recalls.

Though he did recover, his condition continued to worsen, and Joe was placed on the transplant recipient list in July.

He was admitted to the hospital on Sept. 26, the day after his and Donna's 31st wedding anniversary.

Just prior to the hospitalization, Donna remembers, he would get winded going from their car into their apartment at Lincoln's Washington Hill complex. The Elliotts have the parking spot nearest the door, and their apartment is the one nearest the elevator on their floor, but the journey still took his breath away.

A heart transplant is "a final therapy for someone who has no other choice," Levine says. He says the death rate for congestive heart failure patients is roughly 75 percent in two years, while the one-year survival rate for heart transplant recipients is 90 percent.

Less than six months after being placed on the recipient list, Joe has a new heart. Now, the audible ticking of the pacemaker doctors installed two years ago is gone.

"He keeps saying, 'It's so quiet, I can't hear it beating,' " Donna laughs.

One thing that's not gone is Joe's sense of humor. He'll have to wear a mask after he leaves the hospital, to protect his suppressed immune system from germs.

"I won't be able to go near a bank," he jokes.

Medical workers told Joe he was the first patient to ask the hospital to save his heart in a jar so he could see it.

"It's bothered me all my life," Joe says. "I want to see what it looks like."

Joe was released from intensive care on Sunday afternoon. A biopsy is scheduled for today to make sure his system is not rejecting the new heart.

As for Joe's prospects for the future, it's likely he'll be able to resume normal physical activity. Many transplant recipients work in demanding careers such as medicine and law, Levine says.

The last time Joe worked was March 1987. For a time, Donna, who is legally blind but has some sight, ran a day-care center out of their home to supplement Joe's disability check. They've been surviving without the day care's income since 1996, when the couple lost their house after Joe's aneurysm surgery.

Though Donna, who is 50, is pursuing a degree in social work and Joe may be able to return to work, they will likely have formidable medical bills and other related bills to contend with. But that's of no concern, Donna says.

"Things don't matter," she says. "It doesn't matter if we have a house. It doesn't matter if we have an old car that's going on 200,000 miles. None of that matters. All I want is him. That's all I care about. Some wonderful family has given me the chance to have that longer."