TYLER, Texas — February is American Heart Month and in this week's Hooked On East Texas, we introduce you to an East Texas man who underwent a heart transplant and credits fishing as part of his recovery.
You might say this is the story of how fishing can mend a broken heart.
“That’s a good way to put it. It’s done it many times”, John Mark Stuart says he can tell this story better than most because he had a broken heart.
Stuart needed a heart transplant and says the quiet time fishing before and after the surgery has really helped him deal with the emotional and physical sides of heart transplant.
Stuart's story starts when he was 45 years old. “And so at 45", Stuart said, "I knew I was just getting sicker and sicker, and my legs were starting to swell went into the ER, and they took 30 pounds of fluid off of me in 24 hours and said you're in heart failure”.
Doctors implanted a pacemaker and defibrillator but Stuart’s health kept failing. The pacemaker and defibrillator saved his life more than once.
“I had two or three events over that period of time where my heart stopped, and I fell to the floor and the pacemaker, the defibrillator kicked on and shocked me and brought me back," Stuart recalled.
Stuart has lived with the devices for 12 years. But he knew time was running out and his only option was a heart transplant.
“And so it's a fine line for transplant, you have to be sick enough to get it but not too sick to receive it. So it's really a narrow window. And so I finally got to that point that they knew that was the only option for me. So I was running out of days for sure," Stuart said.
That’s where fishing and his boat house become part of the story.
“And so when I was struggling for so long before this transplant took place, that would be my getaway”, Stuart told us as we fished at the boathouse.
Word of a donor came in January 2020 so Stuart went to visit the Baylor Medical Center in Dallas. But Stuart knows for him to live someone else had to lose their life.
“And that's the emotional side of it. You know, it's a, it's the physical journey to accomplish. All of that is unbelievable. But I realized after the fact that the emotional side of it is, is just as big,” Stuart says.
Stuart learned his donor was a young man who died in an accident in the Houston area. In March, he will have an emotional meeting with the young man’s parents.
“I can't imagine, you know, this was a young person. And a family has to live without them for the rest of their life. And, and the other side of that is I get to live on, and help be a part of my grandkid’s lives,” Stuart said.
Statistics show that in the past decade there have been more than 31-thousand successful heart transplants in the U.S. Stuart hopes his story will inspire more people to sign up as organ donors.