Implants of heart, kidney go well for Las Vegas man

Thursday evening Chuck Besen told his fiancée that the six months he had spent in the hospital waiting for a heart and kidney transplant was causing him to go "stir crazy."

"He said he wasn't sure how well he could handle it any more," Jennifer Hokanson said Friday in a telephone interview from the Tucson, Ariz. hospital where the 45-year-old Besen had lived with an artificial heart since October.

He didn't have to handle it even one more day.

By 9 a.m. Friday, he had a new heart. By 7 p.m. Friday, he had a new kidney.

"When you least expect something to happen, it does," Hokanson said. "It's just incredible the way everything has happened."

Alerted that a donor heart and kidney had become available in Southern California, a four-member medical team jetted there from Tucson shortly after midnight Friday.

Dr. Jack Copeland, the physician who kept Besen alive with the CardioWest temporary Total Artificial Heart, implanted the new human heart in about four hours.

"I didn't take out the artificial heart and put him on the heart-lung machine until I got a call around 5:15 (a.m.) that the team landed back in Tucson," Copeland said. "It was as smooth a transplant as you could get."

An hour after the transplant, Copeland, 67, said he was stunned to see Besen sitting up in bed writing notes to Hokanson.

"I've never seen anything like that before," he said. "He was doing great."

Medical authorities will not release information about the donor.

Friday's Review Journal detailed how Besen almost died about six months ago after an aortic valve replacement procedure at Desert Springs Hospital in Las Vegas.

Flown by air ambulance to Tucson, the Las Vegas bartender had his heart removed by Copeland and replaced with a modernized version of the Jarvik 7 artificial heart.

Connected by tubes to a 400-pound power source on wheels, the artificial heart system did allow Besen to move around the hospital grounds, but no further.

Copeland, considered in medical circles as one of the world's top heart surgeons, said what has made Besen's case particularly challenging was his failed kidneys. Only one is used in a transplant.

"I've never handled a case like this before, because we've thought it too high risk," Copeland said. "But he's just doing beautifully."

At 4 p.m. Friday, a team went to work on the kidney transplant.

Hokanson said doctors have told her that Besen will have about a month's recovery at the University Medical Center affiliated with the University of Arizona.

That will be followed, she said, by about a year's stay in Tucson as transplant teams monitor his new organs.

Today, benefits for Besen and his family will be held at Martini's, 1205 S. Fort Apache Road, from 2-6 p.m. and at the Outside Inn, 9941 W. Charleston Blvd, from 7-11 p.m.

Hokanson seems sure that the greatest benefit has already been realized.

"Dylan will grow up with a father," she said, referring to their 13-month-old son.

Contact reporter Paul Harasim at pharasim@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2908.