Seminary student’s transplant is a gift from God

Edmund Luciano recieved a new heart

By: Paul Koepp
   In March, late in his second year at St. Mary’s Seminary in Maryland, Edmund Luciano III began to feel ill.
   Walking up the stairs to his third-floor room, he had to stop at the second floor to catch his breath. At night, he had to sit up to feel comfortable enough to sleep.
   "I thought I had the flu," he recalled in a recent interview.
   Instead, at the age of 23, the Catholic priest-to-be from Kendall Park soon found that he was suffering from congestive heart failure, with his condition deteriorating rapidly. A deep believer in the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Mr. Luciano received a blessed heart of his own on May 4 at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.
   The transplant was performed just in time and also came amazingly quickly, just two days after Mr. Luciano made the decision to go on the waiting list for a new heart. The doctors attending him, including Mark Zucker, Luis Arroyo and David Baran, said they had never seen a match found so soon. Mr. Luciano’s friends, some of them doctors and nurses, could hardly believe the speed of the turnaround.
   "Everyone thought they had heard the story wrong," he said.
   During the transplant, the surgeon, Margarita Camacho, had to use both hands to lift Mr. Luciano’s swollen, thin-walled heart from his chest. The damaged organ’s "ejection fraction," or rate of producing fresh blood, was only about 5 percent, compared to 60 percent for a healthy heart. In the days before the surgery, Mr. Luciano’s organs had begun to fail, leading to "horrible" pain from his liver.
   After a full day of sedation following the transplant, he woke up on the afternoon of May 6 and despite the discomfort of surgery, could instantly tell that he now had a heart able to sustain his body.
   "I felt right away the difference," he said.
   Mr. Luciano will have to take drugs to suppress his own immune system for the rest of his life to keep his body from rejecting the heart. For now, apart from two daily walks, he has to stay in his house, which is constantly cleaned to keep germs away. He said the possibility of rejection is "scarier to everyone else than to me and the doctors" because it does not happen suddenly and can be easily avoided with the right treatment.
   The Lucianos said they want their story to make people more aware of the life-saving potential of becoming an organ donor, which is easy to do when renewing a driver’s license.
   "It’s not experimental and it’s not science fiction," said Mr. Luciano’s father, former Councilman Ed Luciano, Jr.
   In theory, just one donor of organs, bone marrow, and other tissue can save more than 50 lives, according to the state organ donation network’s Web site. However, an estimated 6,000 people die each year while waiting for an organ because only one-fourth of 1 percent of all deaths in the country lead to organ donation, according to the site.
   A graduate of Seton Hall University, Mr. Luciano decided while driving back from an interview for a high school teaching job that he had to try going to seminary first, and now he is more sure of his path than ever.
   "If anyone had to go through this, I’m glad it was me and I’m glad it was now, because it will allow me to be of greater help and witness," he said.
   Mr. Luciano will come back to Central Jersey to be a priest after two more years of study, and he hopes to volunteer at transplantation centers in the area. He is also participating in a study by Dr. Baran on one of the drugs commonly taken by organ recipients.
   "Anything I can add to organ donation research and awareness, I feel morally obligated to do," he said.
   "Generosity doesn’t even begin to describe" the gift of receiving a new heart, he said. Being an organ recipient has changed his outlook on life.
   "There are very few things left that can cause me anxiety and stress after being so close to death and having my life given back to me," he said. "I see the world through very different eyes after standing a very real chance of not being in it."
   He and his family, and other members of St. Augustine of Canterbury Church in Kendall Park, are certain that their faith has played a role in his recovery.
   "Being a person of faith, I completely attribute it to the hand of God," Mr. Luciano said. "There were so many people praying for me."
   His father added that they want to "give praise to the Lord and say thank you very much for answering our prayers."
   Mr. Luciano sees another sign of a greater power’s influence in the timing of his ordeal. For Catholics, the first Friday of each month, including the day of his surgery, is dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. And the last of his six weekly checkups at Beth Israel will fall on the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on June 15.