A Borrowed Heart Fails After Six Vigorous Years

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Until his unexpected death late last month, Louis B. Russell Jr. had the distinction of being the world’s longest-lived heart transplant recipient. Less than 48 hours before he died, he talked with reporter Tom Whitford. Characteristically, Russell was on the go, oblivious to pressure, rushing to give an address to a Heart Association meeting.

I’ve lived a pretty rough life,” Russell said, as he drove toward Newport News, Va. It was clear by his tone of voice that he had thoroughly enjoyed it. During the six years, three months and three days he had survived with another person’s heart, Russell lived much as he always had, eating heartily, working long hours, smoking, drinking, making love.

If anything, Russell lived more vigorously with his borrowed heart. When he died at age 49, the Indianapolis industrial arts teacher was on his way to a speaking engagement. He traveled a half-million miles giving speeches after the operation that made him a medical celebrity.

“If I felt any better, I couldn’t stand it,” Russell was fond of saying. “If my car gets stuck in a snowbank and there’s a chance to push it out, it wouldn’t cross my mind that I shouldn’t—that it might be bad for my heart.” Russell always insisted that it was because of his enthusiastic approach to posttransplant life—and not in spite of it—that he lived so long and so happily. (Since Dr. Christiaan Barnard’s first successful human heart transplant in 1967, only 54 of the 255 people to undergo the operation have lived for as long as a year.)

Russell had already survived a fitful childhood in Terre Haute, Ind. where his father was a Baptist minister. “I started smoking, drinking and using dope as a kid,” Russell liked to recall. “I’ve been in street fights where I said to myself, ‘Old Buddy, you are going to be lucky if you get out of this one.’ But there was no fear.”

Russell went to work in a foundry when he was 16 but later returned to school and finally graduated from Indiana State Teachers College in 1954. By the time of his first heart attack in 1961, Russell had become a respectable father of four children.

After that seizure Russell’s heart deteriorated rapidly and by 1968 it was too damaged to repair surgically. He seemed doomed. Thus he had little to lose when a compatible donor became available—a 17-year-old Virginia youth who had died of a gunshot wound in the head. Russell was the 34th person to undergo the operation. He struggled through his first posttransplant year, fighting off four near-fatal spells of rejection of the new heart. But after that he behaved like anything but a sick man. Indeed, some of his exploits must have given his doctors palpitations of their own.

On his speaking tours he visited hospitals to cheer up heart patients. He became a lay chaplain in the Indianapolis police department, taking his duties so seriously that he smashed up his car while chasing a speeder in 1971. That same year, he ran, unsuccessfully, for the Indianapolis City Council, and he helped judge the Miss Nude America contest at Naked City, Ind.

Even when he developed fluctuations in his heart rhythm in October, he passed it off as “my electrical system going haywire, giving off bad vibes.” After a pacemaker was implanted he reported “everything is cool.” But further irregularities forced him to remain at the Medical College of Virginia where the original operation was performed, though he was allowed to leave for brief periods, such as for the Newport News speech. Instead of fretting over his own condition, he busied himself counseling two other heart patients. “I’m not afraid of death,” he said, only a few hours before he died of continued heart irregularity. “I’ve lived yesterday, I’m living today and I’m making plans for tomorrow. How can I be afraid?”