TWO SURGEONS, ONE HEART — NO SWEAT

No one gave up hope. Dr. Laskow’s family clung to his side. The staff monitored him day and night, and administrators, including the hospital president, visited at all hours. Everybody pitched in to take care of him .

By Kristin Boyd Staff Writer
    Dr. David Laskow was getting ready for a trip to Atlantic City when he felt a twinge in his chest. As he sat in his bedroom, the pain worsened, and he broke into a sweat.
    He called his wife, Mary, who had already left for work. When she didn’t answer her phone, he called a neighbor and said, “I think I’m having a heart attack.”
    Dr. Laskow was passed out on the floor, his head bloodied, when his neighbor and an ambulance arrived at his Montgomery home. He awoke briefly to a blur of commotion.
    “There was no bright light, no flashes of life, no great epiphany,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this is all there is, that’s it, just the EMS crews.”
    No one at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, where Dr. Laskow is chief of kidney and pancreas transplant, thought he would become the patient sprawled across the operating table. All these years, he had been the one who saved lives. Now, on Dec. 10, 2005, he needed someone to save his.
    At age 50, Dr. Laskow, a former high-school jock, was the picture of health.
    He ate healthy and never smoked or drank alcohol. He exercised regularly and even refused to take elevators. Instead, he would park on the hospital’s highest garage deck and jog down the stairs.
    “People had trouble keeping up with me,” he says.
    Yet, here he was, on the verge of death, his body in shock, his heart fighting for a second chance.
    In the ensuing days, he would undergo two major surgeries, both performed by his longtime colleague and close friend, Dr. Mark Anderson, a heart transplant surgeon at Robert Wood Johnson.
    “In terms of people I’ve operated on or cared for, he was probably the person who I have known the best,” says Dr. Anderson, a Princeton resident. “I’ve never operated on a family member — that’s what this surgery felt like.”
    Being trusted to fix his friend’s failing heart was bittersweet for Dr. Anderson. Walking to the operating room on Dec. 10 and later on Dec. 20, he says, the same thought replayed in the back of his mind.
    “This is Dr. Laskow. This could be bad if this doesn’t go well.”
    On the morning of Dec. 10, a cardiologist at Somerset Medical Center called Dr. Anderson, who was on his way to a Christmas party at Princeton University with his 5-year-old daughter.
      “There’s a problem with Dr. Laskow,” the cardiologist said. “We’re going to see what we can do.”
    Dr. Anderson followed up every two hours, learning through phone calls that the cardiologist had performed an angioplasty but that Dr. Laskow was still unstable.
    Dr. Laskow was supposed to be moved to Robert Wood Johnson for further treatment, but in his fragile condition, a transport was deemed too risky. Hearing this, Dr. Anderson drove from Princeton to the Somerset Medical Center.
    “I figured I’d go up and see. It wouldn’t be that bad. It wouldn’t be that big of deal and he’d be OK,” he says. “But when I got there, I found, in fact, he was as sick as advertised.”
    Dr. Anderson insisted Dr. Laskow be taken to Robert Wood. “The way he was headed, he needed surgical intervention. He needed some sort of support device to help him through it.”
    RWJ’s medical team was ready when Dr. Laskow arrived at 10 p.m. After several medications failed to stabilize him, he was taken to the operating room around 2 a.m.
    Before the surgery, he flashed his wife and daughters, Sarah and Bari, the I-love-you sign, though, he says, “I don’t remember any of that.”
    Dr. Anderson inserted a left ventricular assist device to sustain adequate blood pressure and flow, both of which had failed as a result of the heart attack. The device, he explains, essentially does the ventricle’s work, allowing the heart to rest.
    The next week was tense, touch-and-go. Prayers were said. Consolations, paired with warm embraces, were offered.
    No one gave up hope. Dr. Laskow’s family clung to his side. The staff monitored him day and night, and administrators, including the hospital president, visited at all hours. Everybody pitched in to take care of him.
    “It became clear that the heart attack he had was too severe,” Dr. Anderson says. “He wasn’t going to have enough recovered native heart function to do OK without the device.”
    Given two days to live, Dr. Laskow needed a heart transplant.
    Stat — that’s medical lingo for “immediately — at once — right now.”
    Dr. Laskow received a heart from a Delaware family on Dec. 20. Focused, Dr. Anderson prepped for the six-hour surgery. He’d performed it hundreds of times before, but this was different.
    “It’s something that we do every day. It’s the nature of the business. You get used to it (the pressure),” he says. “If it would’ve gone badly, that would’ve been hard.”
    Dr. Laksow’s surgery went smoothly; his recovery, however, was a tough road. He suffered from several infections and sepsis. He endured kidney and liver failure. He was put on a ventilator for a time, and then dialysis.
    He became undernourished and de-conditioned. And he had lost most of his muscle mass and strength, dropping from about 195 pounds to 135 pounds in the two months following his heart attack.
    Dr. Anderson remained by his bedside, pulling for his friend, even on Christmas Day. “Yes, I got to do his heart transplant, but there were thousands of nursing hours spent on him,” he says. “It was a team effort from start to finish, and without it, he wouldn’t have gotten through it.”
    For Dr. Laskow, the Great Heart Transplant Story of ‘05 is a mix of faint memories and hearsay.
    He became fully alert in late January 2006, about a month after the surgery. He was weak and could move his left arm only 5-6 inches; his right arm and legs felt like dead weight.
    “I began putting everything together,” he says. “I had an anxiety attack because I went through the statistics.”
    Cut off main left artery, 70 percent mortality. Renal failure, 15 percent. Liver failure, another 15 percent, he says, rattling off the numbers.
    “You get down to this like wee percentage that you should survive, and it makes you a little nervous,” he says. “Like that the next time you move, you could hurt something.”
    Despite the odds, Dr. Laskow was determined to get healthy.
    “He was so motivated,” Dr. Anderson says. “Once he was able to do anything — sitting up, getting out of bed — he started to do it.”
    Dr. Anderson swiped spare needle holders and scissors from the operating room so Dr. Laskow could practice surgical maneuvers in his hospital room.
    “As soon I was awake,” Dr. Laskow says, “my goal was to come back to work.”
    Dr. Laskow was discharged in February 2006, nearly 70 days after being admitted.
    “The hardest part was getting started,” he says. “But when I woke up (after surgery), and couldn’t really move, that was the scariest part.”
    He eventually created a personal rehab center/gym in his den. He developed a daily routine: Wake up, work out, eat, rest, repeat.
    He used bands to stretch and an aerobic stepper to gain strength in his legs. He learned Pilates and, to regain his eye-hand coordination, he often sewed.
       “I put myself to work for six or seven hours a day,” he says. “To climb up one step was a big deal for me. So I had my walker in front of me, and I would just go up and down that one step a gazillion times. It was a big challenge.”
    While recovering, Dr. Laskow also wrote to the Delaware family that had donated his new heart. He needed to say thank you.
    “I want them to realize that they’re not just helping me, but that I put it to good use,” he says. “They’re helping all the patients I’ve come to touch. This one act is going reach much further than just helping me.”
    In June 2006, six months after the heart attack, Dr. Laskow returned to work. He started off slowly, with small cases. And he had a partner scrub in with him during surgery until he felt comfortable handling it alone.
    “It’s like he re-appeared. He was 20 pounds heavier. He looked healthy, like he was back to his old self,” Dr. Anderson says. “It was kind of a big deal. That was very emotional.”
    To recognize their accomplishments and the successful heart transplant, Dr. Laskow and Dr. Anderson were honored during the hospital’s 48th annual gala last month.
    “The fact that he went through an illness is secondary,” Dr. Anderson says. “It’s more so about what David has done here at the hospital with the kidney transplant (program) that he started and built and has made into one of the busiest and most successful around. The number of people that he has helped, that’s the real award.”
    Dr. Laskow returned the compliment.
    “If it wasn’t for that heart, I wouldn’t be here,” he says. “Dr. Anderson really should be receiving the award. I just survived.”
    On a recent Friday afternoon, Dr. Laskow bolted into his office. He had just performed surgery, a complicated procedure that saved a woman’s life.
    The next day, nearly two years after his heart attack, he and his daughters planned to celebrate his birthday — in Atlantic City, with a nice dinner and comedy show. “Transplants really change someone’s life,” he says. “You hear about it, but until it really happens to you, you don’t understand how dramatic it is.”