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By Charles L. Ehrenfeld
© 2002 - The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
Dave Harveson could be, or maybe even should be, dead.
That is usually the prognosis for someone who had only 10 percent of his heart functioning. At least that is what his family members were told by a physician in January.
Harveson, 33, was a pharmaceutical salesman for Johnson & Johnson, living in Lubbock and covering his sales region that stretched from Amarillo to Midland and from Clovis, N.M., to Snyder, when he had a sleepless night in October.
"That's when things basically went downhill," he recalled recently. "I couldn't breathe, I had some nausea and I was retaining a lot of fluid."
In February 2000, he had been diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition which causes the heart to become enlarged and function poorly. The muscle of the heart becomes weak, thin or floppy and is unable to pump blood efficiently around the body. This causes fluid to build up in the lungs.
"I was diagnosed pretty much by accident," said the 1987 Monterey High School graduate. "I had gone in to see my family physician about an upper respiratory infection, and she ordered a routine chest X-ray. The radiologist commented to my physician that my heart looked large, and she sent me to see a cardiologist.
"They thought it could be controlled with medicine. They started me on a diuretic and an ACE inhibitor."
He saw his cardiologist - Dr. James Grattan of Lubbock - every two weeks and changed medications, but he wasn't getting any better.
The day after Christmas he was admitted to the hospital after an appointment at the doctor's office. The next morning he had an angiogram that revealed the shocking news.
"The doctor came out to my family and told them that he was surprised I was still alive," Harveson said. "I was operating on about 10 percent of my heart function."
The doctor told Harveson he needed a heart transplant.
That same day, he was taken to St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital in Houston.
"Things got even worse just after I got here," Harveson said. "I went into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing. They revived me and decided I couldn't wait for a heart transplant."
He had reached a terminal stage of heart failure. Too ill for a transplant, his only option was the Thoratec HeartMate VE, an implanted pump that replaces the function of the left ventricle. He received the life-saving device Jan. 9.
"He certainly would have died without the pump," said Dr. O.H. Frazier, chief of cardiopulmonary transplantation and director of surgical research at Texas Heart Institute and chief of transplant service at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital.
Tecomet manufactures 80% of the HeartMate pump which is a critical component of the whole system.
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