Small Pleasures Become Large For Heart-Switch Recipients

Don Kaminski goes fishing, dancing and muses over several marriage proposals. Gerald Rector is savoring the day he can r i d e a norse again. An inactive Philip T. Barnum observes, "Life is still going on and I'm more than happy to be here with it." Their small pleasures were magnified in importanee after each was saved from death by heart transplant operations at the University of Michigan Medical Center within the last 10 months. Barnum, the world's 51st heart transplant patiënt; Kaminski, the 99th, and Rector, the 121st, are among 37 such patients still alive throughout the world. Every heart transplant operation at Michigan Medical Center so far has been a success. A divorced father of four who 1 i v e s in .Alpena, Kaminski is the only one who has returned to a near normal life. The other two complain of tiredness. "There's only one thing better than fishing," said Kaminski, "and that's women. But right now, fishing gets most of my time." On the other hand, Kaminski attribütes his recovery to the fact he has no wife at home- like Barnum and Rector - and therefore has to take care of himself. Kaminski, a onetime boat salesman, says the other two are not doing enough things for themselves. "If they would drink, fish and raise heil, they would be a lot better off." Medical records indícate other reasons for differences in recovery. At 39, Kaminski was the youngest patient and his operation last Dec. 22, which lasted 4 hours, was the shortest andl smoothest. He also got the heart from_the youngest donor, year-old Robert J. Pushman of Fenton, a college student who died from a brain injury suffered in a car accident. Rector, 43, at the time, had his volley-ball sized heart removed March 18 to receive the heart of Roland J. Hoag, 24, of Westland, a technician at Ford Motor Co., who died from a ruptured blood vessel in his brain. Rector's chest was kept open for seven hours, longer than expected, to make ceratin his circulatory system would respond to the new, fist-sized heart. Barnum, who has had a heart condition since he was 19, underwent a five-hour, 28-minute operation last Sept. 19 in which he received the heart of Herman Openhoff, 37, an inmate of Southern Michigan Prison at Jackson who died from a brain tumor. At the time, Barnum was ex-hausted from the lengthy illness, cardi-myopathy, which is a degenerative disease of the heart. In the operation, there was a brief cardiac arrest and a pacemaker was inserted to start Bar- num's new organ. Kaminski, a grandfather, re:alls with almost a boyish zeal hat on Feb. 9, two days after lis release from the hospital, he :hopped a hole through 30 inches if ice to fish in Canada's Mitch11 Bay. He's kept on the go since then, mainly fishing in the northern Lower Michigan lakes. He staysl at his mother's home in Alpena or with his two married daughers at times, and is looking for fulltime employment. Kaminski said he has received more than 20 marriage proposals 'since an interview with him was published early this year. He is not taking any of them seriously. Despite his comments of living the good Ufe, he said his religión has strengthened since the operation and he attends Roman Catholic mass regularly. Rector, married and father of a teen-age daughter, complains of "sore legs and weak legs where I got the shots" for the operation. Rector does only a little work, mainly driving a small tractor to cut the grass on a 40-acre área around his home at Yankee Springs near Kalamazoo. So íar, he's not been able to take care of the horses and the Doberman pinschers they raise. Rector has been looking with anticipation to the time he will be able to ride again. He hopes in six months to return to his profession as an operating engineer. In the hospital, he said he decided to convert to Judaism. "I had no religión before." The same tiredness has kept Barnum f rom working at either of his two businesses in Kalamazoo, a vehicle license . office and an accounting office, which he started when illness prevented him from eontinuing in his profession as a pipefitter. . One of his four children operates the license office. He has hired a person to run the other. "My memory isn't back at what it used to be. It's a little exasperating at times," he said. Barnum uses a cañe to walk, noting "with an incisión on my side and being in bed as long as I was, my legs didn't have much strength in them" when he left the hospital. The incisión was made after the operation, to drain an infection in his right ribs. The infection set in after the final suture was removed from the original heart transplant operation. "It's just a matter of time to I build up the strength," said Barnum. "Within limits, I will live a completely normal life."