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20 t m c ยป p u l s e | m ay 2 0 1 9 O n July 7, 1990, Randy Creech got a second chance at life when he received a new heart. But the transplant came with an expiration date. "I was sitting at home and I got a call from St. Luke's Hospital," Creech said. "They said, 'A 19-year-old man has died in Amarillo, Texas, and we have a heart for you.' All of the waiting had come to an end. The first thing that came to my mind was that I was about to head down a path that I couldn't reverse." Months earlier, the otherwise healthy 40-year- old learned during a routine physical that he had an irregular heartbeat caused by a viral infection. Creech's heart was failing and he was placed on a waiting list to receive a new heart on, of all days, Valentine's Day. "They told me if everything goes well, you'll probably get about five years out of it," Creech said, referring to his donated heart. "Five years sounded really good when they had just told me I had less than a year to live without a new heart." That was nearly 29 years ago. Creech is still living with the same donated heart. At the time of Creech's surgery, transplant sur- geons were reinvigorated with hope for successful transplants because breakthrough anti-rejection How Long Do Transplanted Organs Last? drugs had been released into the market. "In 1970, Dr. DeBakey stopped doing heart transplants because he believed the problem of rejection was so severe that it wasn't the right time to do them," said Ahmed Osama Gaber, M.D., director of Houston Methodist J.C. Walter Jr. Transplant Center. After 12 unsuccessful transplant surgeries in two years, Michael E. DeBakey, M.D., halted trans- plant surgeries at Houston Methodist and turned his attention to the artificial heart. Fourteen years later, DeBakey resumed the program when he believed the cost and effort of organ transplanta- tion was worthwhile for patient success. In a 1984 New York Times article, DeBakey said: "With the advent of cyclo- sporine, the results of transplantation, heart transplantation, lung transplantation, as well as kidneys, have all improved significantly, and we should expect a five-year survival rate of better than 50 percent, dealing with patients at the terminal stage of heart disease." Cyclosporine, the first drug successfully used to prevent organ rejection, works by weakening a patient's immune system to help the body accept a new organ. After cyclosporine was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1983, Gaber said, survival rates after transplant surger- ies jumped from 55 to 60 percent after one year to 80 to 85 percent after one year. Creech, who has lived six times longer than projected, is something of a walking miracle. "[Doctors] are always looking backwards to get their num- bers and, at that point, they didn't have very far to look back so their numbers were very conserva- tive," Creech said, in reference to his own pro- jected survival with a donated Caption It all depends on the organ and the recipient Ahmed Osama Gaber, M.D., is director of Houston Methodist J.C. Walter Jr. Transplant Center. B y B r i t n i R . M c A s h a n