The lives of Jake Petty and Bobby Hunter converged in Austin when death came after them and, amazingly, was turned back. While trying to forget the terrifying way they came to be next-door neighbors, Petty and Hunter embrace the routine rhythms of their lives and revel in their new-found friendship. Their daily workout is a marriage of the mundane and the surreal. It goes like this:
Petty, clad in gray sweat pants and a brown and blue plaid shirt, hears Hunter beeping outside his door. Petty ambles outside, a surgical mask covering his nose and mouth. He greets Hunter, who also is masked and standing in blue plaid pajamas. Their faces wrinkle with pleasure.
"You ready, Bobby?" Petty asks.
"Yeah."
"How far did you go yesterday?"
"Thirty-seven minutes," Hunter replies, proud of his endurance.
It doesn't take Petty long to start the teasing, first accusing Hunter of swiping a piece of his exercise equipment, then threatening to press the buttons on Hunter's treadmill.
"Want me to speed you up, Bobby?"
Hunter, who moves more slowly than his pal, shakes his head and laughs. "I don't want my legs to give out on me."
Just two workout buddies in their 40s, yucking it up. Except for this: Both men are patients at Seton Medical Center, trying to cling to normalcy when their lives have tipped topsy-turvy. Each is tethered to a 400-pound machine that clicks around the clock and beeps when it's on battery, all the while pumping blood for their ruined hearts. You can see the blood as it swirls through the pumps, attached to tubes that go inside the men's hearts and extend from slits in their chests.
The two men know they would have died had it not been for these machines, ventricular assist devices, that serve as a bridge to their next ordeal: a heart transplant.
To gain strength, they work out together daily on hospital treadmills. They also wait in painful uncertainty for a scarce heart to come their way. Because they have different blood types, they are not competing for the same donated organ.
Two other patients at Seton, Austin's only heart transplant center, are on the same kind of device. Having four at once is unusual, said Dr. William Kessler, director of the Seton mechanical circulatory assist device program. It highlights the severe organ shortage that has doctors and patients fretting nationally and locally.
At least 30 people in the 56-county region served by the Texas Organ Sharing Alliance are waiting for hearts. So far this year, about 105 people in the region have received organs, including livers, hearts and kidneys. But more than 10 times that number crowd waiting lists. Their survival is linked to the tragedies of others.
"One of the things Jake and I first talked about when I met him was, how do you pray for a heart?" said one of Petty's nurses, Silva Callaway. "What we decided was instead of praying for a heart, we were going to pray for patience, just to wait until the time comes."
Five to 10 years ago, Petty and Hunter would not have survived the heart attacks that caused them to be rushed, near death, to Seton, Kessler said. Petty, 49, was flown in by helicopter from Waco on Oct. 2; Hunter, 46, came by ambulance two weeks later from his Bastrop home. Petty has two pumps dangling from his chest that do the work for both sides of his heart. Only the left side of Hunter's heart is on the mechanical pump.
The device can keep people alive for long periods, and most will survive long enough to get a transplant. Of those, 93 percent on the single left-side pump, like Hunter's, will live. Eighty percent survive when both sides of the heart are being pumped, according to Thoratec Laboratories, the company that makes the device.
The all-time record on the machine is 515 days, said Erich Brehm , clinical sales specialist at Thoratec. The company is awaiting federal government approval of an 18-pound version of the machine so patients like Petty and Hunter can go home and wait.
Petty, who loves spending time with Hunter and making him laugh, is not the most patient of patients, Kessler said.
"He needs to adopt Bobby's attitude," said Kessler, one of five surgeons in the Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgeons group who does assist device implants and heart transplants. "Bobby said, 'I'm better than I've been in a long time. I'm not going anywhere. I'm just going to sit here and be patient and wait for my heart.'"
Petty, who had moved to Waco recently from South Texas, copes with the agony of waiting by playing tricks on Hunter and the nurses. He once had his nurse and Hunter convinced he was going to escape that night.
He joked recently that if he doesn't get a heart soon, he's going to "take out a classified ad."
"Bobby's the shy one. Jake's the troublemaker," said Petty's wife, Linda, who is at the hospital night and day. She is staying at Seton's League House, which is near the hospital and is used by out- of-town families.
The two men, while different in temperament, share blue-collar backgrounds and similar philosophies. They have simple tastes and pleasures and draw strength from their faith, their families and each other. Both men ate junk food and smoked until about three years ago.
Now, they are in adjacent rooms at the hospital, waiting and hoping.
"The main thing is, he has life right now," said Shirley Hunter of Bastrop, Bobby's sister and a regular visitor. "It's a great gift."
Hunter, who is single, worked in maintenance for the Bastrop schools until his heart condition worsened several years ago. He's on Medicare, the federal program that provides health coverage to disabled and elderly people.
Petty, the father of three grown children, worked on a ranch near Waco before the owner learned of his heart trouble and said she couldn't use him anymore.
The Pettys are depending on Seton's charity care but hope a federal program for people with disabilities might help pay for the transplant. The average heart transplant in Austin costs about $96,000, Kessler said. That doesn't include a lot of the current hospital costs that Petty and Hunter are accumulating.
Hunter looks forward to singing again with his Bastrop Gospel group, Heavenly Praises. Petty said his second chance at life has brought him closer to God. He will be going to church "and respecting the Lord more" when he gets out, he said.
For now, he is grateful for Hunter, someone who intimately understands what he is going through. Hunter feels the same way.
Asked what he likes about Petty, Hunter doesn't hesitate. "Everything," he said. "He keeps me laughing all the time."
Much of what they hope and fear, however, goes unsaid, even when they're alone together.
"Me, I just block it out of of my head," Petty said. "I went through such a bad experience."
"Me, too," echoes Hunter.
"You don't realize what you have until it's almost gone," Petty said. "You don't realize how great life is until you're caged up . . . in this room."
Both heap praise on the medical staff and express amazement at the technology. Aside from the vibration of the pumping action, they are not in pain.
"We just consider ourselves very, very lucky," Petty said. "We're here to be joking with each other. We take it one day at a time."
"Yeah," Hunter said. With Petty around, "I can wait."
