The night before his 45th birthday, Derek Gould couldn’t sleep. Lying in the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP) heart and vascular intensive care unit, waiting for a donor heart to become available, he was preoccupied with his teenage daughter, Maddi, who hours earlier had been in a car accident. Though thankfully she wasn’t hurt, a family member would need to drive her to work and the car would need to be replaced. He couldn’t be of much help from his hospital bed.
His wife, Jennifer, and family friend Nicole Mancini, BSN, RN, a nurse on Rhoads 5 in the surgical critical care unit, had already filled his hospital room with balloons and birthday cards from family members and friends, but Gould had a lot on his mind.
Just past 2 a.m. on Aug. 26, 2021, he was drifting off to sleep when he saw his phone light up. It was the transplant coordinator.
“She told me they had a heart for me, and immediately, I was crying with joy,” Gould said. “I kind of forgot about everything going on with Maddi and the car, at that point I was just thrilled to get a heart. To get it on my birthday was even more special.”
For 11 years, Gould lived with inherited dilated cardiomyopathy, a disease in which the heart cannot pump blood effectively because the left ventricle, the main pumping chamber, is enlarged and weakened. Gould’s disease resulted from a genetic mutation and was causing frequent irregular heartbeats, or arrhythmias, that required him to have a defibrillator implanted in his chest.
Gould never knew when or where the defibrillator would shock him – which felt like getting kicked in the chest – and require an immediate trip to the emergency department to stop the arrhythmia with medication. A few months before his transplant, it went off at the end of a baseball game he was coaching for one of his sons.
“My life was full of fear and angst, and I did my very, very best for the sake of my own sanity to hide it,” Gould said. “There was the fear of getting shocked and having to go to the hospital, and the underlying fear that something bad was going to happen.”
Though he never stopped working for his family’s holiday décor import business and even continued coaching baseball, there were many days when Gould had little energy to do much else. One anti-arrhythmia medication, while effective in treating the heart rhythm disturbances, caused a litany of side effects including pneumonia that resulted in fluid backing up into his lungs. He knew his condition was getting worse.
The morning of Aug. 9, 2021, as his wife drove him to a doctor’s appointment at HUP, Gould passed out in the passenger seat and woke to her hitting him across the chest and screaming at him to wake up. He had suffered ventricular fibrillation, or V-fib, the most serious type of abnormal heartbeat, in which the electrical signals in the heart go haywire and cause the heart’s lower chambers to quiver instead of beating normally. That prevents the heart from pumping blood.
They made it to the emergency department, where he was stabilized, transferred to the heart and vascular intensive care unit, and put on an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine, a life-support treatment that replaces the function of the heart and lungs. Within days, he was bumped to the top of the heart transplant list, and on Aug. 26, Gould’s birthday, the call came.
“I always knew that a transplant was the endgame,” Gould said. “I just didn’t know it was going to be this soon.”
While excited, he was understandably nervous about what was to come.
A meeting with his heart surgeon, Marisa Cevasco, MD, MPH, assistant professor of Cardiac Surgery at the Perelman School of Medicine, instantly put him at ease with her calming presence. She told Gould how much she loved doing heart transplants – that it was her favorite operation to do – and that he was getting a really good heart.
“I love doing heart transplants because it gives another person a second chance at life,” Cevasco said. “There is nothing better than watching a new heart start to beat when we take the cross clamp off.”
When Cevasco left the room, Gould looked at his wife.
“I’m good,” he told her. “I’m ready to go now.”
He woke up the next day with a new heart. His second chance.
After a few weeks in recovery and rehabilitation, Gould returned to his home in Sewell, New Jersey, and was reunited with his family. Now Gould is planning to participate in a 5K road race – something he couldn’t do for more than a decade – and making plans for the future. While he never considered himself a man of faith, he believes it was a miracle that he made it to the hospital that day in August and was kept there long enough to receive a new heart. And he knows that someone had to die for him to receive the gift of life.
He doesn’t intend to waste it.
“I finally feel like I’m me again after 11 years. It’s hard to describe. It’s like you just flip the switch on your life,” Gould said. “I laugh more now, I smile a lot more, and I joke around a lot more. All that fear I had before, everything that was weighing on me, it’s totally gone. That’s probably the most wonderful aspect of this whole thing. I don’t have to live my life in fear of what’s going to happen anymore. I’m looking forward to all the good things.”