Leaning back comfortably in a swivel chair and dressed in a snazzy multicolored warmup suit and tennis shoes, Dick Woods is smiling. It seems like he’s always smiling.
There’s a good reason.
“By all rights I should be dead now,” Woods softly intones, nodding his cherubic, pleasant face before sharing his decade-long odyssey through pain, waiting and the miracle of modern medicine. Along the way he also became a volunteer ambassador for the American Heart Association, sharing his story with scores of others.
“Dick has such a positive outlook on life that it motivates the people in our office,” says Darla Kloepffer, manager of the American Heart Association office in Libertyville.
Here is how he got to that point: multiple heart attacks and angioplasty procedures, lying “dead” on an operating table after a coronary seizure, subsequent emergency quadruple bypass surgery and a 10-day coma. After all that, plus the haunting feeling over the last three years that he could die at any time, Dick Woods was ready for a new heart.
It all started when Woods suffered a heart attack in 1985. He obediently changed his lifestyle and had five healthy, active years. Then in 1991, things went downhill. He got tired more often, started having chest pains again and began angioplasty treatments to clear his clogged arteries.
In late summer 1991, Woods, of Ingleside, had another one of his all-too-familiar angioplasty procedures at St. Mary’s Hospital in Milwaukee. Then something went wrong.
He died.
Woods had a coronary seizure and “flatlined” on the operating table, was oxygen-deprived for several minutes and underwent emergency quadruple bypass surgery. His heart stopped beating five times in the next 48 hours, with doctors restarting it each time. He was comatose for 10 days.
The doctors told his wife, Emilie, who practically lived at the hospital while life-support machines made her husband’s lungs fill with oxygen, that Woods wouldn’t make it. And even if he did, he might have brain damage.
“It was quite frightening,” Emilie says. “But all I could say was that if anyone would come through it, he will.” And Woods did make it.
“I remember, vividly, waking up in my room and looking at the calendar and saying, `These people really need to keep better track of time,’ ” says Woods, now 57.
In September 1991, he had another bypass. “I never fully recovered,” he says. “I was well enough to sustain life but not active. I was in limbo, between my former life and dying.”
Woods, who had been a successful insurance sales director, was no longer able to work because of his poor health. His heart, deprived of more and more blood because of the consistently recurring plaque buildup in his arteries, was dying. He was regularly “popping nitros,” or nitroglycerin pills, to stave off his unbearable angina. His wife and daughter (also named Emilie, 17) suffered along with him, constantly checking to see if he was having chest pain.
The ordeal continued for two years, until his doctor, Jay Alexander of Lake Forest, concluded that Woods was close to another heart attack and ill enough to be hospitalized.
“Simple tasks like getting the mail were a real act of labor,” Alexander says today of Woods’ grave condition. “But I knew he had the attitude that he wanted to live.”
“He told me, `You need a new heart’ ” Woods says. Then another waiting game began.
“To be eligible for a heart transplant,” Woods says, “you have to show that you’re sick enough to need it and healthy enough to live through the surgery.” Woods passed that test but many others were ahead of him on the Illinois heart transplant waiting list.
“I waited from August of 1993 to October of 1994,” Woods says. “It was a long, long year.” On Oct. 12, unable to bear his angina and irregular heart rhythms any longer, Woods called his transplant team at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago and, to his delight, was quickly moved higher on the waiting list.
But there were more problems.
“They had 10 hearts for me, and I wasn’t a match for any of them,” Woods says, shaking his head and chuckling. When Woods had had bypass surgery, numerous blood transfusions caused an antibody buildup in his system that prevented donor organs from matching. When the hearts were screened with his blood makeup, tests indicated rejection. “It would have to be an absolutely perfect match,” Woods explains.
At this point, Woods was willing to try anything. He had his blood cleaned, a five-week procedure in which antibodies were filtered out by machine.
Then at 8 p.m. on Nov. 30, 1994, the call came through.
” `We’ve got another heart for you, Dick,’ ” Woods remembers the doctors saying.
“It was a long ride up to the operating room, lying on that gurney. I was looking at the ceiling tiles, and I thought to myself, `Am I gonna see these in four hours, or is this the last trip I’m gonna take?’ “
Four hours later, after having his chest sliced open from top to bottom again, Woods opened his eyes. “I thought, `God, I’m awake!’ ” he recalls excitedly. ” `I made it.’ ” His new heart was beating, and he was alive.
And what a heart. It came from the body of a 13-year-old Denver boy who died of head injuries after slamming his bicycle into a parked van.
“We just knew it was going to work. You have to have that positive attitude going in,” says Emilie, also 57. “And we could never thank the family of that boy enough.”
For the first 48 hours, Woods recovered in the intensive care unit, then was moved to isolation to safeguard him from infection. Woods was doing well and expected to go home on Dec. 12. Then there was yet another roadblock.
A bleeding ulcer from which Woods recovered 30 years previously began bleeding again. “It was the prednisone steroid I was on,” Woods says. “It attacks the weakest part of the body, which was my old ulcer.” Woods took 7 pints of blood while a crack surgical team put him back together again.
Then, finally, Woods went home–on New Year’s Eve, no less.
“It was snowing that night,” Woods recalls. “And my wife and daughter and I turned out the lights and just watched the snow come down. It was one of the most beautiful and memorable experiences in my life.”
While the ordeal appeared to be over, Woods has only begun the recovery work. He’s on a walking and fitness program, and his heart is constantly monitored. He takes 12 kinds of medication a day, including very strong anti-rejection drugs. And he gets heart biopsies twice a month, which so far have shown no signs that his body is rejecting the organ.
Now, in addition to public speaking for the Heart Association, he serves as a mentor for other heart transplant patients.
When asked how he has gotten through it all, his wife says, “Dick always stopped and smelled the roses, even before this.” He always had heart.
