A change of heart isn’t easy

It is a warm, spring morning and we are sitting outside on the deck of Greg Baber’s Ohauiti home when he lays his heart on the table.

It’s white and rubbery and sealed in a plastic vacuum-packed bag.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but this is not it.

To put it bluntly, it looks like a slab of colourless meat.

Half of it, he explains, will be buried with his mother and the other half with his father.
It got him through 39 years of his life but now, at the age of 40, another heart beats in his chest; the heat of a man he never knew.

He then lays his heart on the table in a figurative sense.

“I’m grateful and I think about his family a lot.  The first week was pretty hard.  While I was recuperating they were burying him.  That was hard to get my head around that,” he says of the heart transplant he had 11 months ago.

“I never thought of myself as a man who would get too emotional about much but I came out of there a different person to what I went in.  Now I’m a bit more sensitive to things around me."

The birds, for instance.  They seem louder somehow.

As does his conscience.

Before he went into the operating theatre in January this year, he took his three children, Ana-Rose, 15, Wiremu, 14 and Paris, 13, aside and gave them a heartfelt apology.

“When the kids were young, their mother and I broke up.

“It caused difficulty to them, hardships…it made a definite impact on their future.  If I was this guy I am now 15 years ago, their lives would be different,” he explains.

“I never had a good relationship with my parents.  They were both alcoholics and my father was violent.

“I wanted to speak to them properly and apologies for the past. If I didn’t make it, I wanted to make sure I did it with a clear conscience.  I’m grateful now I got a chance to make amends.”

But Baber is not completely at ease with his new sensitive side.

He is a blokey bloke and there is a hint of embarrassment when he pulls out a small, purple, spiral-bound notebook.

In it is jotted the innermost thoughts of his first few days post-surgery.

I tell him it’s beautifully written and that he should be proud.

He shrugs it off with a smile.

A rugby-playing welder who liked to spend his spare time hunting and fishing, he had little time for sentimentality in his former life.

But when, at 31, Baber unexpectedly collapsed on the rugby field he was forced to re-evaluate his life.

“I played on the wing and I was running down a guy.

“I caught him and he got up to play on but I didn’t.

“I was lying on the ground gasping for breath,” he recalls.

His father was an asthmatic and, while Baber had never suffered an asthma attack, he thought that’s what was happening.

Carried off the field by the ambulance officers, he was given oxygen and sent home.
On the Monday, he went to work, but still didn’t feel right.

“I went to have a medical check, because I was still running out of breath,” he says.

When his pulse was taken it revealed a heart rate of more than 240 beats a minute.

Living in Auckland at the time, he was rushed to Greenlane Hospital by ambulance, where he was told he needed a valve replacement.

“I had sprung a leak in a valve…it didn’t seem that big a deal,” says Baber.

But during the two week wait to have the operation, his health deteriorated and, following further tests, he was told the shattering news that things were much more serious than originally thought and he would need a heart transplant.  Scar tissue on his heart suggested that he may have had rheumatic fever as a child and he was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, or a weakening of the heart muscle.

“It was enlarged and the right side not working very well,” he explains in layman’s terms.

“I was playing rugby, working hard at my job, fit.  I was in the prime of my life.

“I went into massive denial.  I was told to stop drinking and slow down.

“I just didn’t.  And I was a smoker at the time,” he recalls.

Baber did give up his job as a welder, but was so bored that after six weeks he started working in a bar.

On the active waiting list for a new heart, after a year he was downgraded to the inactive list because he was no longer deemed an urgent case.

When he later moved to Tauranga with his wife Jade, he decided to return to welding and took up a job with Page Macrae Engineering.

But three years ago he became so ill he had to leave.

Having given up cigarettes and alcohol, he went back on the active list, with a promise from his boss that he could come back when he was fixed up.

Eighteen months later, and three days after getting custody of Wiremu, he got the call.

“It was 8.30am.  I was told it wasn’t a sure thing and to stay by the phone for the next hour and they would call me back.

“Helen Gibbs, the heart and lung co-ordinator, rung back an hour later and said they still weren’t sure but to come up anyway.

“A friend of my wife’s drove me up, because my wife was at the Bay of Islands…I rang my wife and she had to drop everything and meet me there.

“I sat around until 5pm that night and they came in and said ‘yes’…and then they wheeled me in,” he recalls.

The operation was successfully completed in a record five hours.

Two days later, he was walking about and after seven days he left the hospital for a rehabilitation facility.

But his recovery was complicated by a whitetail spider bite on his leg that became infected and he was re-admitted to hospital, where he stayed for another five months.

“They were struggling to save the leg and they were worried the infection would get into the blood and bone,” says Baber rolling up the leg of his jeans to reveal multiple scars from the skin grafts.

As far as scars go, they are way more impressive than the faint line down the centre of his chest.

By the time he left hospital his weight had plummeted to 70kg, his ideal weight being 92kg.

“I was thinking: what is going on? I’ve paid my dues now for whatever I’ve done. That’s it.”

On Monday this week he was back up in Auckland having a routine biopsy, with just one more scheduled for February, after which he will require only annual check-up’s.

And in the New Year he hopes to be back in his old job.

Having not touched a cigarette or an alcoholic drink since he gave up, he hopes he will get a good innings out of his new heart.

“For us, we all look at it the same way, how we live our lives now and how we treat our new organs,” says Baber, speaking for all organ recipients.

“We don’t want to disrespect the donor system or the donor families by not doing the right things.

“We have a responsibility to live our lives healthily. We have been given a second chance and it would be wrong not to.”

While the family of the donor receive regular updates on Baber’s progress, he does not know who the donor was, except that it was a man in his 50s.

After a year, he is able to have a letter forwarded on to the family; something that he is keen to do, although finding the right words will be difficult.

“What do you say? I don’t know what to say because thank you seems so lame.”

An extract from Greg Baber’s notebook:
Tonight I will be five nights reborn. It has been an emotional night for me.  I have been experiencing so many feelings of joy and sorrow.  It is particularly hard thinking of the donor family. They would have farewelled their loved one this week.  All those years of nurture and memories, of shared love and laughs and tears, a father’s guiding hand and a mother’s eternal love, tragically taken with a special part given to me.  The comprehension and enormity of this gift is something that can’t be written down, but I can acknowledge this gift and or/guide in my new life by being a better person – a better husband, brother, father, and son.  I do not understand or pretend to know why I have been spared or singled out for this roller coaster ride, but I feel there is a destiny here and if that is just to be around to better the lives of others, then I would do that gladly.

By Julia Proverbs, Bay of Plenty Times, December 3 2011