FIT CITY

Heart transplant keeps weights clanging for gym staffer

Staying fit is a mission for 39 year old with new heart

By Pamela LeBlanc
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, October 06, 2008

Lemuel Bradshaw clangs the weights at the no-frills Hyde Park Gym.

The exercise keeps him looking buff, but what matters even more is what it does for his heart. Bradshaw's heart was a gift, transplanted into his chest nine years ago when he nearly died of congestive heart failure.

The 8-inch scar down the center of his chest reminds him every day. So do the handfuls of pills he swallows to keep his body from rejecting the heart.

Now he wants people to see him as an example. To remind them of the importance of organ donation. To show them that a transplant recipient can pump iron and play basketball and juggle a part-time job at the gym with a full-time job as a college student.

Bradshaw, 39, grew up the biggest, strongest kid in his class in Hainesville, La. He played football and basketball, then turned his attention to discus and shot put. By the time he moved to Austin in 1990, he still played sports recreationally. He'd never really been sick.

In 1998, though, he joined his girlfriend, Odessa, now his wife, for a trip to Washington, D.C. "I got so sick and tired I couldn't walk 50 feet without stopping to rest," Bradshaw says.

Back in Austin, a doctor diagnosed him with bronchitis and prescribed antibiotics. He seemed to improve, at least temporarily. "But I didn't know what damage had been done," he says. "Any infection can get into the bloodstream and do damage to any organ — in this case, it was my heart."

The following summer, he suffered from nearly continuous headaches and upset stomach. He made several visits to the hospital emergency room, where his symptoms were treated, but the problem — congestive heart failure — went undiagnosed. Doctors thought he was stressed and prescribed anti-anxiety medications.

That October, worried a brain tumor might be causing the persistent headaches, Bradshaw scheduled an appointment with a neurologist, who noticed his irregular heart beat, elevated heart rate and high blood pressure. The doctor ordered a portable heart monitor to track what Bradshaw's heart was doing. Before he even picked it up, he landed in the emergency room again. There, technicians discovered his heart had swollen to three times its normal size and was pumping at less than 10 percent of its normal capacity.

A doctor sat at the foot of bed and told the 6-foot, 3-inch athlete, "You need a heart transplant or you will die."

He didn't have time for this. He was planning a December wedding. His fiancée had three teen-age daughters at home. Surely the doctor had the wrong medical chart.

But he didn't.

"I imagined wheelchairs and oxygen tanks for the rest of my life," Bradshaw says. "I told them, 'Give me some pills and I'll get better.' They said, 'There is no pill.' "

Doctors put in a pacemaker and an internal defibrillator, gave him some medication to steady his heart while he awaited a transplant and, at Bradshaw's insistence, let him leave the hospital. For the next half a year, he felt he was getting better.

"I seemed to have proven the doctors wrong, as I figured I would," he says. "The younger you are and the more male you are, the more bulletproof you feel."

But the next spring, his health deteriorated as rapidly as it had improved. By June 1999, he had to lie down on the driveway and rest after rolling the trash can to the curb. One night, as he lay in bed, he heard a beep. Seconds later, what felt like a mule kicked inside his chest.

The defibrillator. His heart had faltered.

Eventually, Bradshaw landed in the emergency room at Seton Hospital. "I didn't know it, but this was the end," he says.

He compares the scene to the television show "ER." "Everybody around me is trying to keep me alive," he says. "I'm holding the nurse's hand." When the doctor came in, Bradshaw looked at her and said, "Doctor, just make it stop."

He was told he had just 48 hours to live. His parents flew in from Louisiana; his best friends arrived to say goodbye.

Then the call came. A heart was available for transplant from a 51-year-old man in West Texas who had been killed in a car accident. Bradshaw's father was pacing outside the hospital several hours later when a doctor stepped out of a Suburban carrying an Igloo ice chest. His father "said to my friend, 'That's my son's heart right there,' " Bradshaw says.

On Oct. 23, 1999, surgeons removed Bradshaw's 29-year-old diseased heart, which was so swollen it took two hands to hold it. The muscle was so stretched out that the surgeon pushed his thumb right through it without even trying. The new heart fit in one hand, and it took doctors less than four hours to put it in.

"When you wake up with a new heart and tubes in you, you feel immediately better," Bradshaw says. "It's like taking a bad engine out of a car and putting a new engine in. You have energy you didn't have before. It seems like your vision and hearing are better; you're more conscious. You're more alive."

His fingertips were pink instead of gray, his face bright instead of ashen. Six days after the operation, which was covered by insurance, he went home.

For most transplant recipients, the first year is the hardest, as doctors work to get the cocktail of medicines that prevents rejection just right. Sometimes, patients get moon-faced and swollen. That didn't happen to Bradshaw. Still, the medicines made him emotional and tense. He leaned on his wife, who scheduled doctor's visits and doled out medicine.

"My problems were things I could internalize," he says.

By Jan. 1, he was back at his banking job. "I am not typical," he says.

Life has changed.

Bradshaw always wears a green plastic wristband that reads "Donate life." He swallows 60 pills a day — purple, yellow, green, white and gray — and will take them the rest of his life.

Something else inside has changed.

He wants the family of the man whose heart beats inside him to know how much he values his second chance. He speaks with them regularly.

"This is truly a gift, a gift of life," says wife Odessa Bradshaw, associate executive director of the Texas Board of Legal Specialization. "We love our donor family, and he takes great pride in taking care of his body. That's what leads him on. He wants to be the longest-living heart transplant patient out there."

Four years ago, Lemuel Bradshaw started lifting weights at Hyde Park Gym. He liked the gym so much that when he decided to return to school to study public relations at the University of Texas, he started working there part time.

Brook Jones, owner of the gym, says Bradshaw is a trusted member of the staff. "He's animated and boisterous — everybody likes him," Jones says. "He's very youthful and full of energy and positivity. It's not typically what I think of when I envision a heart transplant."

Besides working at the gym, Bradshaw lifts weights there three times a week. He also swims several times a week. He's lost weight, too, dropping from 307 pounds to 205 pounds. He changed to a low-fat, high-protein diet and eats meat in moderation.

He plans to graduate from UT in December 2009. Then he wants to work for a nonprofit organization that promotes organ transplants.

"I want to be a poster boy for organ donors," he says.

He already is.

pleblanc@statesman.com; 445-3994

Organ donations

About 100,000 people are awaiting an organ transplant in the United States, according to the Texas Organ Sharing Alliance. Eighteen die each day because not enough organs are available. Texans who want to make their organ donation wishes known can register at www.donatelifetexas.org.