TAMPA, Fla. — Doctors at Tampa General Hospital saved 50 lives with heart transplants last year, ranking the hospital 22nd for most heart transplants in the country.
While the technology for preserving and transporting hearts has grown by leaps and bounds in even just the last year, there are still more than 3,300 people across the country waiting for hearts, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN).
Dennis Alvarez, 78, spent his 25-year career as a Hillsborough County judge giving many others a second chance at life, serving as Chief for 12. A few years after he retired, he received his own second chance at life with a new heart.
“I had just been elected county judge at 34,” Alvarez explained how old he was when his doctor first discovered something was wrong with his heart. “They did the catheterization, and they found three of four major arteries 95% occluded.”
Dr. Benjamin Mackie, a Transplant Cardiologist at TGH, told us that they see anywhere from a couple dozen to hundreds of patients with advanced heart failure every month.
Alvarez said doctors monitored him for decades, but when he was 64-years-old, things went south so fast he can hardly remember.
“They tried to take me by ambulance at night, but I kept on coding,” he recalled. “So then they put me in the helicopter and flew me over.”
It was the night of August 12, 2010. Alvarez said the doctors told him they were moving him to the top of the list for a heart.
“We have a problem in this country where we don't have enough donors to match the number of people who actually need hearts,” Mackie explained why it can take so long for someone to receive a transplant, and if one never becomes available that is a perfect match — it may never happen.
“I was being released at midnight, and they came in about 7:30 that evening and told me, ‘Hey, we found you a heart.’” Alvarez recalled. “The next day, the 13th of August on a Friday, I went into surgery and got my new heart.”
Alvarez gives credit to his faith, his family, and TGH.
He said there was one thing he wanted to live for, and that was to see his grandchildren graduate high school.
“Right now, one's junior in college, and the other one's a freshman in college,” he exclaimed.
“There must be a reason why I was a fortunate one to be able to extend my life… not that I'm counting days, but it's been 12 years, six months and 11 days,” Alvarez joked with humility.
TGH has come a long way since its first heart transplant in 1983. Last year, they did their 1500th heart transplant, which is the eighth most transplants for any hospital in the United States, according to Mackie.
His job is diagnosing, treating, and monitoring heart transplant patients before and after the procedure — a job that isn’t just a year or two but instead becomes a life-long relationship.
“They're like family to us,” Mackie said. “We say that when you get a heart transplant in this program, it's very similar to that we all just got married.”
In 2022, TGH was able to reduce heart transplant waitlist times and increase its donor pool by 30% using new technologies such as the SherpaPak cooler and the Organ Care System.
The hospital transported a fifth of their hearts with the Organ Care System.
Mackie explained, “We actually take the heart out of the donor, and we put it on a machine called the Organ Care System, and the heart never stops beating. It actually is perfused, meaning that we supply blood flow and nutrients to the heart during transport.”
He adds that they have also expanded some of the donor pools by accepting donors that have circulatory death instead of brain death.
But even with these innovations and changes to the donor pools, there are still people waiting for hearts.
“None of it really works if we don't have hearts to take from healthy people who unfortunately are not going to live and put them into people who aren't going to live if they don't receive one,” Mackie stressed.
According to national data collected by OPTN, 3,366 people across the country are waiting for hearts, and 219 are in Florida.
As Alvarez continues to mediate cases a few days a week, he said he will always advocate for others to become donors.
“If you call my phone, listen to the message. It tells you to become a donor,” he exclaimed.
But even at 78 years old, he still wonders how he got so lucky.
“Every time you think, and you know you get teary-eyed… it took someone to die so that I could live, and you always sit back and say what is the purpose,” he said.
Here’s how you can become an organ donor:
1. Sign up online at the Florida Organ Donor Registry
2. Elect to be a donor when you get or renew your driver's license
3. Include Organ Donation in your estate planning documents or will for your after-death plans
It’s also important to share with loved ones that you want to be a donor, so they know your wishes if the time should come.
We also found that most people in the U.S. are waiting for kidney transplants, according to OPTN. In fact, of the 1114,171 people waiting for organs in the U.S., 96,004 are waiting for a kidney. Of the 5,334 Floridians waiting for an organ, 4,493 are kidneys.
To learn more about becoming an organ donor, click here.
