“You can feel it,” Charles Okeke says. “It’s pounding. If I opened my mouth, it was very audible.”

Okeke is remembering the days when his blood was pumped by a massive 400-pound machine. It was one stage in a remarkable journey that has finally brought him where he is today — a healthy man with a healthy heart once again beating in his chest.

The heart Okeke was born with failed when he was just 30 years old, from a condition called cardiomyopathy. Okeke received a transplanted heart; but transplanted organs have a life span, and a decade later that heart failed as well.

Okeke was still a young man, but he could not have another transplant. His doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona said his immune system was too “revved up” and would destroy a second transplant.

“Charles was very sick when he showed up at our hospital,” remembers Eric Steidley, MD, a cardiologist at Mayo Clinic. “Charles was going to die unless we did something.”

What they did was remove his failing heart and implant an artificial heart. A human heart is a muscle that powers itself, but the artificial heart needed an outside driver. Okeke was continually tethered to a 400-pound rolling motor. Since the machine could not leave the hospital, neither could Okeke.

No one was sure how long it would take for Okeke’s immune system to calm down enough for him to receive a transplant. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months. “You have to have a strategy,” Okeke says. “It’s a long day.”

After two years, Okeke was still not ready for a new transplant, but technology had improved. He was able to trade in the 400-pound driver for a 13-pound version he could carry in a backpack. Okeke made national news when he left the hospital, the first person to go home with an entirely artificial heart.

The patience of Okeke and his doctors paid off. Seven months later, Okeke received a second transplanted heart, and his body did not reject it. “I feel like I’m the most blessed person on earth,” he says.

And Okeke says those years spent tethered to a machine were not wasted. “The great thing I have learned in all of this, how my life has changed, is that I think I know how to simplify my life,” he says. “Life to me is really simple. Life is about service. That’s it.”

Source: http://ecruzi.com/the-man-without-a-heart/

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He must be a Heartless Man

Corn99:
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Space Booker

He must have been dead several times..

walearoy:

Space Booker

space bookers spy

wow

pyyxxaro:
He must be a Heartless Man

Nice pun.

SonOfTheLion:
space bookers spy

they robbed me of FTC

Well this reminds us to be grateful for the little but crucial things like a beating heart!!

God kept him alive for a purpose

btw this land is not for sale

Beware of 419 mods


The C of O is on my sd card as proof

Cc: Obinoscopy

I will comment when I read

Mods pls move this thing to fp for the world to see.its a miracle...

Cc Freiburger,r231