A Story With Heart

This great story comes to us thanks to the San Jose Mercury News:

Transplant patient's heartfelt thanks

By Scott Herhold
Mercury News
Article Launched: 11/24/2007 01:35:28 AM PST

Mary DiMaggio of San Jose and the Larrañaga family of Mondragon, Spain, will not understand each others' words when they meet next month in Spain's Basque country. DiMaggio speaks no Spanish and no Basque. The Larrañagas know little English.

It won't matter. The American and her Basque hosts share the alphabet of tragedy and the syntax of hope. They will talk in the language of the heart.

DiMaggio, 63, a woman with the sallow complexion of a long-time patient but the sturdy frame of a swimmer, is pushing herself to endure the long air flight for one overriding reason: gratitude.

Since a Stanford University Hospital transplant in August 2003, she has been kept alive by the heart of the Larrañagas' only son, Gaizka, who was killed in a traffic accident in Reno at the age of 32.

DiMaggio is telling her story publicly to remind people of the need to donate organs. "To be able to thank these wonderful people is just unbelievable," said the San Jose woman, whose husband, Horace, is a second cousin to Joe DiMaggio, the famous Yankee slugger. "Believe me, I wouldn't get on a plane just to go to Spain."

Delayed by language barriers, the meeting almost never happened. That the donating family and recipient will be able to look one another in the eye owes to two decisive moments.

Reno tragedy

The tragedy struck first. At 5:40 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2003, Gaizka Larrañaga, a newly arrived teaching assistant at University of Nevada-Reno, was riding his bicycle in the gutter of Reno's Kings Row when he was struck by an SUV. The driver said the sun got in her eyes.

Dragged more than 100 feet under the vehicle, the sturdy athlete had no hope for survival. When his father, Jose Maria Larrañaga, arrived from Spain, he was given the bad news. He did a noble thing. He willed his son's organs for donation. He allowed Gaizka's body to be kept alive by machine until recipients could be found.

Mary DiMaggio, who spent 23 years working in customer service at Fairchild and National Semiconductor, was high on the list of those who needed a heart. The experimental drugs she took to fight cancer in the early 1980s had damaged her heart, which was working at only 10 percent capacity by 2003. She had little time left.

"They gave me about six hours' notice," she said, describing how she checked into the hospital. "You're lying in bed, hearing the helicopter, and you're thinking, 'Is that the heart? Is that the heart?' "

It was the heart - though the process of rebooting DiMaggio's body with Gaizka's heart nearly betrayed her hopes. In the three years after the transplant, she suffered three major rejections and saw her leg cut open to control a hematoma.

Though her immune system is still delicate and she can't return to work, she's suffered no big setback this year. And that realization led to the second decisive moment.

Beginning a year after she received Gaizka's heart, DiMaggio has been searching to connect with the Larrañaga family. Through the hospital, she sent them a letter. They sent one back in Spanish. Language difficulties defeated her when she called and her e-mail went into the ether. It wasn't until a friend, Consuelo Vargas, volunteered to call in Spanish that DiMaggio made contact. The Larrañagas invited her to Spain.

Status of health

This was no small order. On an airplane, DiMaggio needs to move around so her legs do not fill with fluid. And there was always the nagging doubt: Was she really healthy enough for the trip?

Four months ago, her doctor made the choice easier after she read him a letter from Spain. As long as she wasn't suffering setbacks, she could go. In fact, she needed to go.

So at 7:15 a.m. on Dec. 4, DiMaggio will leave on an American Airlines flight from San Francisco to Miami with her two good friends, Olga Andrade and Joan Perkins, along with Consuelo Vargas and her husband, Hugo. After a two-hour layover, they'll fly on to Madrid, where they'll spend a few days. Then they'll take the train to Vitoria, where the Larrañagas will meet them.

DiMaggio is encouraged by the e-mails she's received from Jose Maria, who had four daughters as well as one son. "We have a beloved heart in the body of a good and grateful American," read the translation of one of his e-mails.

One detail adds the final piece. When he was a child, Gaizka loved to play cowboys, shooting a toy gun at imaginary foes. The Larrañagas asked DiMaggio: Would she object if they gave her one of Gaizka's cowboy hats? For a woman who pretended as a girl that she was a wild horse, it seemed exactly right.

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