The Match: Complete Strangers, a Miracle Face Transplant, Two Lives Transformed - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Susan Whitman Helfgot is the widow of Joseph Helfgot, a Hollywood movie marketer who died from complications during heart transplant in April of 2009. She was cast into the national spotlight when a Boston Globe reporter uncovered that her husband had been the donor in a historic transplant operation. In the late 1990s, the former insurance company executive decided to return to her first love, science, returning to college to study astronomy and biology. She co-founded a charter middle school in Los Angeles while pursuing her studies. Her knowledge of biology coupled with a decade as her husband’s caregiver outside and within hospital walls has given her a unique and valuable perspective and Susan has become an outspoken advocate for organ donation. She has presented to national medical conferences and testified before the Commonwealth of Massachusetts legislature, and has appeared on television programs including Good Morning America and Dr. Oz. Susan established the Joseph H. Helfgot Foundation with funds from the sale of The Match: Complete Strangers, a Miracle Transplant, Two Lives Transformed. Projects include Team Heart Rwanda and an ongoing research study about public perceptions concerning face transplantation. The foundation also provides funding support for face transplant medical research. For more information visit Joseph H. Helfgot Foundation. An avid runner and stargazer, Susan lives with her children and cocker spaniel in a suburb of Boston.

William Novak, who was born in 1948, has written or coauthored some two dozen books, including the bestselling memoirs of Lee Iacocca, Tip O’Neill, Nancy Reagan, the Mayflower Madam, Oliver North, Magic Johnson, and Tim Russert.  He is also the coeditor with Moshe Waldoks of The Big Book of Jewish Humor.  He and his wife, Linda, live in the Boston area and have three grown sons, all of whom are writers. 

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chapter one

For a dying man, it is not a difficult decision because he knows he is at the end. If a lion chases you to the bank of a river filled with crocodiles, you will leap into the water, convinced you have a chance to swim to the other side.

–Dr. Christaan Barnard

Monday, April 6, 2009, late morning.
Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston.

a calculated quiet has fallen over the normally frenetic and noisy cardiac intensive care unit. Nurses stand in groups of two or three, speaking quietly. Others attend to their patients’ life-or-death concerns in slow and measured movements out of respect for what has just happened.

Death has come to the floor. Not just any death, although all deaths are tragic in the cardiac surgical ICU, but the death of a patient who has become a fixture here, and for many of the staff, a friend. Joseph Helfgot had battled heart disease for more than a decade, and for the past two years he was cared for by the people who now stand around in stunned silence.

He came so damn close, inching up on the list of patients waiting for a new heart. Only a third of them ever get there, and he was one of the lucky ones. Just two nights ago the New England Organ Bank finally matched the heart from a man who had just died. Word spread quickly. Helfgot was watching late-night TV while his wife slept. The phone woke her up. “Mrs. Helfgot, it’s Dr. Lewis. I think we found a heart. Don’t rush, take your time, but start putting things together.”

“Joseph, we have a heart!”

Ignoring the doctor’s advice, they rushed to the hospital, barely taking time to say goodbye to their two boys, who were camped out in the family room, half asleep, ready for bed.

“Bye, Dad. We’ll see you after the operation.”

At the hospital e-mails flew around the floor. Off-duty staff were copied: Joe’s getting a heart! That was Saturday night. Two days later elation has turned to grief.

Earlier that morning.

Dr. Jim Rawn, the surgeon who has orchestrated Helfgot’s day-to-day care during his frequent stays in the ICU, steps into the surgical unit. It is barely 6 a.m., but the place is jumping. Two new hearts came in over the weekend, Helfgot’s and another one.

Dr. Rawn likes Helfgot, a market research executive who works in the movie business. He knows he has broken a cardinal rule: Don’t get too close. But sometimes a heart patient pierces through the cloak of aloofness that intensive care physicians wear like armor. Hollywood Joe, as the nurses call him, is one of them. Rawn has learned the hard way that he shouldn’t become too attached. Although the Brigham’s cardiac unit is one of the finest in the country, not every transplant patient who comes in here will walk out the door. Better to check your emotions before you come to work, because it hurts too much when you get close.

But sometimes you can’t resist, and Joseph Helfgot can shatter the toughest of façades. When he’s not knocking on death’s door, it’s hard to believe he’s a patient at all. In the ICU his bed is usually littered with half a dozen movie scripts. Piles of yellow legal pads filled with notes cover the top of his hospital tray, and a second tray on the other side of his bed holds his laptop and his BlackBerry. He has set up shop here. The nurses call it his bedquarters, a term his employees have been using for years. Even before he got sick Helfgot loved to work from bed.

In the hospital he regales anyone who cares to listen, as well as a few who don’t, with behind-the-scenes stories about the “real” Hollywood. It isn’t uncommon to find a heart specialist with a gaggle of medical students crowding around Helfgot, who is propped up in bed with a movie booming loudly on his laptop. “So I’m watching Public Enemy. You know, Jimmy Cagney plays a gangster? They’re doing a kind of remake, with Johnny Depp as John Dillinger. So which do you like better? The scene over here, where Cagney shoots the guy?” The students lean in. “Or this one, where he kisses the girl?” He fast-forwards the movie as they stare blankly at the screen. “Christ, how old are you guys anyway? Do you even know who James Cagneyis? How about Jean Harlow? You know, the blonde? Crap, never mind.”

Some of the nurses adore him–mostly those he hasn’t driven half-crazy with his perpetual list of demands. With a few of them he has the kind of relationship they have with their hairdresser. He can also be exasperating.

“I’m sorry, Judy, but I need this ice-cold, please.”

“Mr. Helfgot, we’re talking about liquid potassium. It’s medicine, not a cocktail. We don’t serve it on the rocks.”

“Just bring me some ice, please,” he says, flashing a petulant smile.

Judy shakes her head. The first time she met him, he asked if she was married.

“No,” she said, busily attending to an occluded IV. “Put your arm out and try to hold still, will you?”

“Why not?” he asked, inches from her face as she checked his line, looking for the chink in the tubing.

She stared back at him blankly, thinking, Boy, that’s personal. But then she heard herself saying, “Good question. Why the hell am I not married?”

“You’ll find somebody,” he told her. “You’re pretty.”

Helfgot’s wife was there, and he turned to her and said, “Susan, do we know anyone for her?” To the nurse’s embarrassment, which conveniently masked how much she was enjoying this conversation, Joseph and Susan began ticking off names of the single men they knew, and why this one or that one would be suitable or not. A year and a few dates later, some with Helfgot’s bachelor friends, Judy was still single.

“I’ll get your ice, but you have to drink it all at once, and not over the course of the next two weeks. Your K is so low you’re going to crash.”

“Okay. I promise.”

Dr. Rawn steps quietly into Helfgot’s room. This morning, right after the transplant, there aren’t any scripts on the bed. Just Helfgot. He hasn’t woken up, but it was a long surgery.

“He’s not waking up,” the nurse says. The nurse is worried, but he’s trying not to show it.

Rawn stands over the bed and does his own quick check. He lifts Helfgot’s eyelids and examines his pupils, which are dilated. He takes the flashlight from the wall and shines it right into Helfgot’s eyes. Nothing happens, no contraction at all.Shit. He calls for a CT scan and the nurse picks up the phone.

An hour later, after the scan, Rawn hovers around the computer screen at the physician’s desk outside Helfgot’s room, anxiously waiting for the results to upload. He nods at Susan, who has just arrived.

“Not awake yet?” she asks the nurse.

“You know how long it takes for Mr. Helfgot to wake up from surgery.”

She does indeed. This is his fourth surgery in a year and a half. Although this is the big one, the one they have long hoped was coming, she is numb from the constant fear of his death. She hasn’t had any real sleep in more than a year. This whole medical adventure has been a prolonged road trip through hell.

“Wake up, Joseph!” she shouts in his ear. Sometimes hearing a familiar voice does the trick. She lifts his eyelids and then shakes him a few times. An angry vitals monitor picks up the disturbance and sends out an...