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Mark Maeder talks about receiving a new heart. He is joined by his wife, Deb. |
“I never realized how gray he looked until after the surgery,” Deb Maeder said.
Sitting next to her husband before a roomful of reporters and television cameras, the Maeders beamed with excitement and relief.
Less than one week before the Oct. 13 news conference, Mark Maeder was struggling to stay alive.
The Papillion resident suffered from cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle, and his heart function was down to 10 percent at the time of the transplant.
He was listed for a heart transplant on Aug. 31 and was surprised to find himself less than one month later in surgery. The heart transplant, which began late Sept. 29 and ended the next morning, was the first one at The Nebraska Medical Center since 1999.
“How are you feeling?” a reporter asks Maeder.
“Unbelievable,” he replies. “There is no pain, no fatigue, it’s fantastic.”
Maeder said he felt fine for the first six months of this year then around June 1 he began to have upper respiratory problems. “I thought it was allergy symptoms,” Maeder said. “As the month of June progressed and on into July, I started having this knotty tension in my stomach.”
At one point Maeder said his doctors thought that he might be having trouble with his gallbladder.
But further tests revealed that his heart was enlarged.
The burden of going through a heart transplant was eased for Maeder and his family, he said, because he was able to receive care and treatment so close to home.
“My wife was able to go home at night and sleep in her own bed,” Maeder said. “My two children were able to continue with their activities and I will see the same doctors who performed my surgery for follow-up care. That’s phenomenal.”