ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, December 25, 1995 TAG: 9512260022
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY STAFF WRITER
The families of Linda Wells and Charlie Rozier talk as if they're keeping vigil in the same hospital room, but they're several states apart.
Both families, though, are focused on the same thing: getting out the word on the importance of organ donation. A morbid topic, they know. But as far as they're concerned, organ donorship epitomizes the spirit of the Christmas season.
"It's something bad that has to happen to somebody. But it's also a miracle," said Bobby Wells of Elliston. His wife, Linda, 50, who has battled emphysema for more than a decade, received a new lung Dec. 17 at a hospital in St. Louis. The lung came from a 22-year-old Wisconsin man. She is out of intensive care and doing "great," Wells said.
Charlie Rozier, a 51-year-old Roanoke County man, hasn't found his angel. He is in his fifth month of waiting for a new heart at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.
Rozier is at the top of the transplant list; if there is a donor heart that can be used by a person with Type O-negative blood, it could go to him.
"If you could just get across the point of how important organ donations are," said Rozier's wife, Ann, who has been staying with him.
"People can take what is a tragedy and give another family's loved ones a second chance at life," she said.
As of Dec. 13, more than 43,000 people were on the nine transplant waiting lists kept by the National Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. The network is operated by the United Network for Organ Sharing, based in Richmond.
Even though there are some duplications on the lists - a person can be registered in more than one of the 11 donor regions - each day about seven people on the lists die before getting a transplant.
Only about a third of the families of potential donors consent to organ donation, statistics indicate.
Before her surgery, Wells was one of 1,924 people waiting for a lung. Rozier is among 3,416 who need a new heart to survive.
In 1994, only 720 lung transplants and 2,340 heart transplants were performed.
Wells was on the lung list for 17 months. Rozier was added to the heart list in September.
Waiting for the moment
You don't just sign up for a transplant. It's often a long, tedious, lonely journey from admission to where Wells is today -learning to use a new and healthy organ.
Although a person can be dying from the failure of an organ, he must be in good health otherwise to get on a transplant list.
The first suggestion of a transplant for Wells came from Dr. Bruce Stewart, a Salem pulmonologist.
Wells' condition was such that the transplant could be considered a life-saving procedure, Stewart said. Generally, a transplant is not recommended unless a patient has a life expectancy of less than two years, he said.
Wells, a smoker, had suffered from emphysema for a decade. Two years ago, she had respiratory failure and was put on a ventilator in the hospital for a few weeks.
Lately, a trip from the bed to the bathroom had become an almost impossible walk. Wells had to use a wheelchair to go any distance, and she depended on oxygen.
Wells' insurance company approved the pursuit of a transplant, but with a condition. Wells could go to Barnes Hospital in St. Louis for a transplant evaluation if her heart was pronounced healthy.
Wells had a heart catheterization at Lewis-Gale Hospital; when the test results were good, she and her husband took a plane to St. Louis for her to undergo a week of intensive testing at Barnes Hospital.
It was the insurance company's idea that she go to Barnes. Its lung transplant program is directed by Dr. Joel Cooper, who did the first successful single-lung transplant in 1983.
Wells was added to the transplant list in July 1994. A few months ago, her name moved closer to the top, and she was summoned to St. Louis.
There are 278 transplant centers in the United States, some specializing in only one type of transplant. Roanoke Memorial Hospital, for example, does kidney transplants only. There are 30 people now on a kidney transplant list that Roanoke Memorial shares with the University of Virginia.
Transplant hopefuls sometimes live for months in a strange city, waiting for the moment when someone dies who is just the right match to help them live.
Linda Wells and her daughter and son-in-law, Lynn and Clinton Edwards, moved into a townhouse near Barnes Hospital on Sept. 6. Until they got the call one Sunday afternoon that there was a lung for Wells, their routine was physical therapy for Wells and an occasional shopping trip or dinner out, Edwards said.
The experience has been marked by great generosity, but also great loneliness. A "mixture of happiness and sadness" is how Lynn Edwards put it in a letter she wrote about the four months she has spent with her mother in St. Louis.
"We need to ask for a favor ... for cards and letters," she wrote. "We're here, and we're together, but we feel isolated. We miss the Roanoke Valley so bad!''
Bobby Wells joined his wife after she received the transplant - taking her some of her favorite oranges and a Virginia apple - but until her surgery, he stayed home and worked as a superintendent for Aaron J. Conner General Contractor.
Bobby Wells plans to stay with his wife until she gets out of the hospital in about three weeks. She has to remain near the hospital for three months after surgery, however. The Edwardses will stay with her.
Wells has made excellent progress, the family said.
"It just makes tears come into your eyes to see her now," her husband said.
He's now worrying about the future of the 25 other people waiting at Barnes for lungs.
And they want to hear from the Roanoke Valley, Edwards said:
"Any time we hear from home is like getting a piece of home."
Ann Rozier, who waits with her husband at Duke, said the more than 200 cards and two Christmas tree wall designs that have been sent to Charlie by friends and co-workers have been "very comforting and humbling."
Rozier, a land surveyor with the U.S. Forest Service, had his first heart problem the day after Christmas in 1985 while visiting family in North Carolina. He was treated at Duke, where doctors found an unusual condition, a septal aneurysm - a balloon area in the partition that separates the left and right halves of the heart.
Doctors also found lots of scar tissue that indicated he had been having heart problems for some time, Ann Rozier said.
His heart can pump out only slightly more than 10 percent of the blood it takes in; a normal heart pumps at 60 percent.
"His body just adjusted somehow, and Charlie has managed to function fairly normally with an unbelievably bad heart," she said.
In July 1994, Charlie Rozier began showing signs of heart failure. Doctors said his condition indicated he'd had a massive heart attack. Still, he went back to work part time.
He also played an occasional game of golf.
The couple decided to return to Duke for an evaluation of his condition. They drove to Durham Aug. 28.
Doctors there told Rozier that he was too sick to return home and that he had no choice but to try for a transplant. He was put on the transplant list in early September.
"They told me I may look healthy and feel healthy, but it was an illusion," Charlie said from his hospital room last week.
Ann took an apartment near the hospital and spends most of her time with her husband, talking and reading and taking short walks with him. He must stay constantly linked to the tube that feeds him heparin, a blood thinner, and milrinone, a drug the transplant staff refers to as "rocket fuel," because it keeps sufficient blood moving to his vital organs while he waits.
Ann Rozier, an agent with Owens & Co. Realtors, is depending on co-workers to keep her business alive.
A week ago, Charlie Rozier moved into a new heart transplant unit. His neighbors-in-waiting, a retired military officer, a professional bowler, a real estate developer and a 16-year-old basketball star, have become their family, Ann Rozier said.
They also see patients who have already gotten heart transplants and are returning for biweekly biopsies.
"The most common discussion is how they feel," she said. "Some of them say it's like having a freight train inside because they haven't felt a strong heartbeat for so long." A lot of them are back to an "almost normal life," she said.
When a patient who'd gotten a transplant died recently, though, the entire group took it hard, she said, and she worried that Charlie would get depressed. But when she asked him about it, he told her that he couldn't control the fact that his heart was no good and he couldn't control whether he would get a donor, but he could control how he faced each day.
"I'm going to make each day the best I can," Charlie Rozier said in a telephone interview. "If you stop and rationalize the whole thing, we're in the best place we can possibly be."
Anyone who wants to write Linda Wells or her family should send the mail to them at 7B, 4400 Lindell Blvd., St. Louis, Mo. 63108. Send mail to the Roziers at Duke University Medical Center, Hospital North, Room 3323, Durham, N.C. 27710.
LENGTH: Long : 168 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Charts by staff. 1. Organ transplants. color. 2. Donorby CNBfacts.