Eva Baisey, first heart transplant recipient in the Washington area, dies at 55 [View all]

[mahatmakanejeeves]

I don't care for Gene Weingarten's style, but he did a good job with this obituary. He should try his hand at writing obituaries more often.

Obituaries

Eva Baisey, first heart transplant recipient in the Washington area, dies at 55

By Gene Weingarten
September 14, 2021 at 2:18 p.m. EDT

Eva Baisey, a nurse from Washington who became one of the longest-living heart transplant patients in history, died Sept. 12 at 55 — 34 years and 257 days after her surgery. ... She died at a hospital in Lanham, Md., of complications from covid-19, said her son, Antonio Baisey. ... There are no reliable databases on longevity after heart transplants, but in the medical community, 20 years is considered remarkable. Over 30 is almost unheard of. Ms. Baisey’s life puts her in a rarefied echelon.

Her extraordinarily successful transplant was the first in the Washington area. It was performed at Fairfax Hospital (now Inova Fairfax) in the early morning hours of Dec. 28, 1986, by a team of doctors and nurses who had never attempted one before. {snip} At the time, Fairfax Hospital was trying to enter a local heart-transplant industry then limited to Richmond and Baltimore, placing a burden on prospective Washington-area patients.

Fairfax needed a few public triumphs to establish a reputation. They had decided to offer the first few surgeries free to people who could not afford competitor hospitals with track records — but those initial surgeries, particularly the first, had to be successful. ... In Ms. Baisey, they found the perfect Patient One. ... But they still had no suitable donor, and Ms. Baisey’s time was rapidly running out. In the end, it took an unimaginable tragedy for her to survive.

Karen Ermert, a 19-year-old woman from suburban Virginia, had just broken up with her boyfriend, a brooding, jealous, lovesick paranoiac named Mark Willey. He shot her to death on Dec. 27, then turned the gun on himself. It was not Ermert’s heart that became available — that organ died instantly, with her. But Willey’s heart kept beating long enough to be saved, and it saved Ms. Baisey.

{snip}

At the time of her surgery, Ms. Baisey was a nursing student. She had always said she wanted “to help old people and babies.” But after the surgery, she was told that career was no longer possible because of the risk of infection. It came as a huge disappointment.

She tried other occupations, which did not satisfy her; eventually, because of her remarkable recovery, the medical community relented. She became a nurse, working at the World Bank, at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, and most recently at a private doctor’s office in Reston, Va.

{snip}

Heart transplant recipients sometimes are incurious about the details of the lives of their donors. It is not ingratitude, it is self-preservation. Their ordeal is already difficult, and it does not help to incorporate the tragedy of another. ... Ms. Baisey was not told the full story about the source of her heart until this writer revealed it to her in 2013 for a book about the events of a so-called “ordinary” day chosen at random. Coincidentally, the day happened to be the day of her surgery.

“How do you feel about having the heart of a murderer?” she was asked. It was a rude, impertinent question, but she took no offense. What she did take was time, nearly two minutes to consider her answer. ... “Okay, it could have been a car accident,” she said. “Someone dying for no reason at all. Something meaningless.”

But “someone loved someone so hard they couldn’t bear to live without them,” she continued. “Yes, it is selfish. I don’t want anyone to love me to death. But it all comes out of a need to be wanted, to passionately connect with another person. That is not meaningless. That comes out of something good. And something good came out of that.”



Ms. Baisey in 2019. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

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By Gene Weingarten
Gene Weingarten is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and writes "Below the Beltway," a weekly humor column that is nationally syndicated. Twitter https://twitter.com/geneweingarten