Heart Health Heart Health Basics

Heart Transplant: Coping with Preoperative Stress

Summary & Participants

For many heart transplant recipients, the toughest part of the experience is the stressful waiting period. Join heart surgeon Mehmet Oz and Frank Torre, ex-baseball star, as they discuss preoperative stress and how it can affect your recovery period.

Medically Reviewed On: May 07, 2008

Webcast Transcript

MEHMET OZ, MD: Most patients come to the hospital with an ailment, and they see there's an obstacle they have to overcome in order to return back to normal existence. As crazy as it sounds, patients really have to see illness as an obstacle not to going back to normal life but to evolve, to mature. In fact, you have an opportunity to become a more evolved and mature and aware person by overcoming the ailment that you're suffering from. Someone like Frank was able to take an illness which should have ended his life, which two decades ago would have taken his life, and instead make that into a tool to make him more powerful. That's really the major lesson that caretakers of patients in the hospitals have learned. So our goal was to empower Frank and people like Frank to be able to do more, and the goal therefore becomes, what are those tools? How do you create a scenario, an environment, where patients feel comfortable taking charge in their own future? For that reason we offer all kinds of therapies, some of which are alternative in nature -- music and yoga and massage. Some of them are just plain psychological and supportive care -- educating patients, allowing them to play a bigger role in decision processes that affect them.

DAVID R. MARKS, MD: But there's a lot of time spent on the edge, waiting for that heart to come in. It must be very depressing day after day if they don't see their heart coming in.

MEHMET OZ, MD: It's terribly depressing, and in fact, one-third of all patients who have heart surgery of any type suffer from major depression, which is one of the biggest quality-of-life problems that we have for an operation which otherwise succeeds fairly well. The big dilemma, of course, David, is that you have a limited population of donor hearts -- only 2,200 a year -- yet we've got 40,000 or 50,000 patients like Frank who could theoretically benefit from heart transplants.

So we have many people who are actually not just dying to get a heart, but die while waiting for a heart, and that tragedy is impossible to hide, and causes problems like depression that Frank had to overcome.

DAVID R. MARKS, MD: Did you feel depressed?

FRANK TORRE: When I first got there, I felt very depressed. It was important for me to realize that without a new heart I was going to die. I wasn't afraid of dying, but you really want to live while you're alive, and when I saw those other transplant patients who were living a comfortable life, I started to relax and I started to get excited, and as far as me personally, I think that was the key of me being here.

DAVID R. MARKS, MD: Thank you for joining us. And thank you for joining our webcast. I'm Dr. David Marks. Goodbye.

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