After three long years on the organ donor waitlist, Delungra shearer Nigel Downey has finally received his life-saving heart transplant and a new lease on life to go with it.
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The father of five suffered a massive heart attack while shearing in 2017, putting life in a health holding pattern while he awaited surgery.
After a couple of 'false starts', he finally made it to the operating theatre in November.
Nigel, now 46, is keen to enjoy everything life has to offer, including a few more grey hairs.
"Life begins now," Nigel proclaimed.
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"Most people complain they don't want to get old, but all I want to do is get old."
Nigel was at his neighbour's watching State of Origin when he got the life-changing transplant call from St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney.
"The hospital rang up and said they had a heart for me," Nigel remembered. "Five hours later I met a jet at the airport and within 36 minutes I was in Sydney."
It's every transplant recipient's dream to get the life-saving call, but Nigel didn't get his hopes up.
"By the time I got this call, I'd already had two practice runs that turned into false starts!" Nigel remembers.
"The first time, in January 2019, I was half way to Tamworth and the surgery got called off.
"The second call was in April 2020, but at the time I was taking steroids to treat my overactive thyroid so I wasn't able to have the surgery," Nigel remembers. "It was a fair kick in the guts."
This time, third time lucky, Nigel wasn't going to miss the opportunity. After arriving at St Vincent's in the dark, early hours of the morning, he attracted amused interest from the hospital staff with his meticulous surgery preparation, arriving showered, shaved and fully prepped to hop on the operating table.
"They said I was the most prepared patient they had ever met," Nigel laughed.
I'll be doing everything I can to keep this heart going for as long as I can - all I want to do is grow old.
- Nigel Downey
Surgery didn't go as smoothly as anticipated. The mammoth procedure to remove his heart was further prolonged as surgeons worked to remove his Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD) - a portable heart pump sewn into his chest to keep his heart ticking over.
"I had the pump so long my internal organs had grown in and around the connections in my chest. It took 10 hours to untangle the pump, removed my heart and replaced it with the donated one," Nigel said. "The doctors believe I'm one of the longest living patients sustained by an LVAD machine. Most people with a heart pump receive a heart transplant in 12 months, not 3.5 years like me."
For three years, night and day, prior to his heart transplant, Nigel was required to carry the machine's bulky portable controller in a shoulder bag, which he wryly called his 'heart in a manbag'. While it served an important purpose, Nigel was pleased to finally say goodbye to the hardware that had literally been weighing him down.
For the past few months, he's been looking on the bright side and has stuck with his plan to live life to the fullest, promptly hitting the books to earn a set of motorbike 'L' plates.
He's looking forward to riding into Inverell for cardiac rehabilitation a few times a month - a pleasant change after years clocking up more than 150,000km travelling to Sydney for medical appointments.
He's also drafting a letter to the transplant donor's family, to be passed on anonymously by the Sacred Heart Foundation, thanking them for their loved one's life-saving gift.
"I'm so thankful for a second chance at life," Nigel said. "I'll be doing everything I can to keep this heart going for as long as I can - all I want to do is grow old."
Nigel's happy he's lived to tell the tale, and believes his own heart attack story serves as a warning to blokes who usually soldier on through ill health.
Nigel, then 43, was shearing sheep near his home town of Delungra, outside Inverell in north west NSW, when he began to feel sick.
"I'd been working along pretty good until we pulled up for smoko," he recounts. "We got back to into it and I started to get what I thought was indigestion. I pushed through but after 10 minutes I couldn't handle it anymore - just massive chest pain and burning in my throat and gums."
Not wanting to appear like he was a "sook" or slacking off on the job, Nigel left the shed, washed his face and found a quiet spot to rest for an hour. When the crew knocked off at 12pm he convinced his boss not to bother calling an ambulance and got a lift home instead.
He spent a few miserable days at home in bed, thinking he might have chronic indigestion, or even Q Fever, before he eventually became so weak and short of breath he saw a GP who prescribed medication for his reflux symptoms.
Nigel resumed his working week, even helping his son break in a horse, but a couple of nights later it was clear something still wasn't right.
"I knew something was really wrong," Nigel recalls. "I knew if I didn't get this hospital I was going to die. I couldn't breathe - I was basically drowning because of all the fluid in my system from heart failure."
At the nearby Warialda Multi Purpose Service, staff used Telehealth - a secure video link - to speak to emergency doctors at Tamworth Hospital who requested he be brought to Tamworth via Westpac Rescue Helicopter. After a barrage of tests and bed rest, Nigel was transported to St Vincents Hospital in Sydney where he was promptly placed on the heart transplant list and fitted with the life-saving LVAD machine.
He says hindsight's a wonderful thing and that if he'd known the signs of heart attack the last few years might have been different.
"That probably wasn't the first heart attack," Nigel remembered. "A couple of years before I was shearing when I suddenly felt the same sort of burning. I went outside to spew and lay down for an hour - that was probably a heart attack. Only a month before this recent one there was a day when I felt off and kept having to stop and rest and wash my face. The indigestion I felt was probably all the water bubbling up in my throat from the heart failure."
Photo: Nigel Downey wears his Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD), he wryly referred to as his 'heart in a man bag' prior to his heart transplant. Inset: An interior diagram of an LVAD connected to the heart.
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