Friday, May 07, 1999
A SURVIVOR'S STORY
Heart transplant, cancer - next, a marathon
BY SCOTT MacGREGOR
The Cincinnati Enquirer
In the months before a heart transplant rescued him from certain death, Greg Osterman became incapable of walking the 30 feet down his driveway to get the mail.
Sunday, he'll run more than 138,000 times that far — 26.2 miles, to be exact — and do it with comparative ease.
“I can't believe what I'm doing now,” says a beaming Osterman, a Loveland resident who plans to run Sunday's inaugural Flying Pig Marathon. “I don't think I would have done this even in high school, but here I am. What I'm doing is more than I ever would have expected.”
In his precious second life, Osterman — who has a 44-year-old body but a 25-year-old heart — has been reincarnated as the only heart transplant recipient nationally attempting his second marathon. At least eight other transplant patients have completed marathons, but none has gone for an encore.
In January 1998, Osterman ran the Bermuda Marathon, less than six years after his heart transplant and less than five years since he beat cancer.
Oh yeah, there's the cancer, too. Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, diagnosed four months after his transplant. This guy is an expert at slapping the odds in the face.
He runs with someone else's heart and practically no innards, having had his gallbladder and portions of both his small and large intestines removed to wipe out the cancer.
In the five months preceding his transplant — necessitated by a disease called cardiomyopathy, which slowly shrunk the life from his heart as it swelled to as much as three times its normal size — he became so incapacitated from a lack of blood to the brain he could not comprehend even major events in his life, including his father's death. Osterman spent the final weeks confined to bed, which at the time loomed increasingly more as a death bed.
By the morning of the operation, when his original heart was pumping at less than 12 percent of its capacity — doctors had told his wife, Carole, he had less than 24 hours to live — he was so far gone that any fear of dying had long since passed; he was incapable of understanding what was going on.
The cancer came just as he was getting his breath back, just as life seemed to no longer be so edgy and fragile.
And yet Osterman has not only survived, but thrived in the face of a swell so devastating he says, “I gave up on myself.
“When somebody tells you they're going to take your heart out and put another one in, you kind of say, "Well, wait a minute, this might not work,'” he says, laughing now. “You stay with it and stay with it so long, but unfortunately, the longer it goes, the sicker you get. You almost have to be dead to have a heart transplant.
“You just kind of lose faith in everything, but there were a lot of people who didn't lose faith in me, and it turned out real well.”
Well enough that Osterman, who was never a runner before his illness, plans to complete the Pig in about 41/2 hours, perhaps slower than a runner with a normal heart but amazing considering his story.
At 5-foot-8, a slim and muscular 148 pounds and tanned as if he just stepped off a Caribbean beach, Osterman doesn't have the bulbous look of some transplant patients, and the only evidence is the scar on his chest. When he runs Sunday, nobody will know the difference.
“It's remarkable,” says Dr. Lynne Wagoner, medical director of UC's cardiac transplantation program. “Most patients rarely even achieve the level they were able to do before the transplant. It's much more astonishing than someone who has just had a heart attack, just because of the physiological differences.”
A new start
Life began for Osterman at 37, on Oct. 26, 1992. That was the day doctors at University Hospital removed his heart and replaced it with one taken from an 18-year-old Dayton girl who had died in a car wreck that morning. The odds, for the only time in Osterman's ordeal, were with him that day; it was a weekend, and doctors had told Carole that was the best chance for a donor because of the higher incidence of road fatalities.
Osterman awoke four days later when he was taken off the ventilator that had kept him breathing after the operation. For the first time in months, he was alive.
“It was instant,” he says. “I just sensed something different. The first thing I did was notice that my heart was pumping. I could breathe, I could see, I was aware of things. It was just a sense of well-being after being so sick, and I was ready to get up and do something.”
First, however, his body had to accept the new heart, which required medication. He began his rehab slowly, starting with those short walks down the driveway he had been incapable of doing just a few weeks earlier. But he quickly set his sights on running the Cincinnati Heart Mini-Marathon in March 1993 — five months after the transplant — just to prove to himself that all the work his family and doctors had gone through was worth it.
“A lot of patients who have had heart disease consider themselves disabled,” Wagoner says. “Greg just has a totally different personality. He never wanted to be sick, and he's given this fight and taken it to the extreme.”
But in February 1993, Osterman began to feel sick again, and was soon diagnosed with cancer, which emerged when the anti-rejection medicines weakened his immune system. This time, however, he was better equipped to beat a life-or-death situation, drawing strength from his heart experience.
“My first thought wasn't "Why is this happening to me again?'” Osterman says. “It was, "Well, maybe I can get through this one, too.'”
He did, and by March 1994, he was finally running the nine-mile Heart Mini-Marathon. “After that,” he says, “I realized the quality of life can be pretty good.”
So much so that in 1997, he proclaimed to his family and friends he was going to run a marathon.
Some people he told looked at him as if he were nuts, but the ones who had stuck by him in the seven years since his heart problems began — chiefly his doctors, Carole and their two sons, now 18-year-old Jason and 15-year-old Danny — told him to go for it.
“I wasn't sure he'd be able to,” Wagoner says. “With a transplanted heart, the nerves are cut, and it doesn't respond normally. But I knew because of endurance and perseverance, if anybody could do it, it would be Greg. He's very type-A, and when he makes up his mind to do something, he pushes himself until he's able to do that.”
“You're always worried about, "Oh my God, are you going to break something?'” says Carole, who married Greg 20 years ago. “But he just got stronger every time he ran.
“It's a good focus for him. It changed his whole life. It's really helped the healing process mentally for him. And for us too.”
Running with purpose
A second chance comes at a price. Osterman, keenly aware of this, has made it his motivation.
“The first couple, three months was really tough,” he says, speaking not of the physical pain after the transplant but the emotional baggage of knowing someone had to die for him to live.
“I'd say it probably took me a good three months to finally get the words together to write a letter to the folks that did this for me,” he says. “It was hard to accept the fact that someone had to die. Why did this happen to me?
“I still think of that. That's why I'm doing this.”
Osterman never runs just for himself. He runs for his family, for a little girl in Dayton stricken with Leukemia, for other cardiac patients in need of transplants, and this time, for his sister, whose Montgomery home was destroyed by last month's tornado.
Mostly, he says, he runs “to prove that what the doctors had done, what my family had done, all the help I'd received, was for a good reason.”
So now, Osterman uses his running to inspire, making frequent visits to talk with cardiac patients in the same dire straits in which he found himself seven years ago.
“When you have end-stage heart disease, you feel like there's no chance, that life's at an end,” Wagoner says. “To see someone like Greg shows how far you can take this. It gives people something to hope for. He's definitely our poster child.”
The second chance is still fragile. Osterman's heart could go into rejection at any time, though the odds are slimmer now that he has lived so long. Last year, while training for the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C., he developed a blood pressure problem and had to go on medication, ending his hopes to run that one.
“He's been lucky not to have too many post-transplant problems after the cancer,” Wagoner says, “but he truly deserves it.”
No day is taken for granted.
“Every day I realize I could wake up, go into rejection and be gone,” he says. “I've been blessed to live this long. I'm not in a rush anymore. I just enjoy life more than before.”
Now, the purpose is his passion.
“I'm making the best of this,” he says. “I'm making the best of it for myself, for my family and for everybody that helped me.”
Flying Pig Marathon Guide
