A matter of heart ... and an extended life

     Tom Harrington celebrated his 70th birthday with his family and friends on January 23, and he will tell you that was his first birthdate.
     His second birthdate -- August 31, 2018 -- is the story here.
     That day, in Nashville, Tennessee, he received his new heart, and his new life.
     Yes, a heart transplant for our old friend.
     It has been five-plus months of recovery and adjustment, of trials and scares, of joy and gratitude ... and of a second chance.

At Woodlawn in the mid-1960s

... and Tom Harrington in 2018

     The kid and young man we knew as Tommy back in the old neighborhood (Sunset Acres, Shreveport, La.) and at the schools some of us went through (Sunset Acres Elementary, Oak Terrace Junior High, Woodlawn High) is ready to hit the road again.
     He is preparing for his first road trip -- from his home in Gallatin, Tenn., 29 miles northeast of Nashville -- to Shreveport and then to Rockwall, Texas, on the east end of Dallas.
     He will be reunited with family and, well, he will put his heart into it.
     That's the way we have always known him, putting his heart into whatever he did -- football player (a good one -- from junior high to an NFL bit), discus thrower, student, son, brother, husband, father, grandfather, race-car driver for a quarter century, waste management executive. 
     (And, yikes, even a short time as a newspaper sports writer. How do you like that?)
     But the heart that carried him for so long gave out. He needed a new one.
     A blessing -- even at age 69, beyond the pale of normal transplants, he was physically sound enough to qualify. And so far ... so good.
     He can say, "It's easy, you just lie there until they wake you up." You can guess it really is not that easy. It has been quite an ordeal.
---
    It began with the flu.
    In 2007, flu-bugged Tommy "never could shake it, from January to June." And that flu virus, he said, attacked his pericadium.
     (An Internet description: "The pericardial sac is a double walled layer of tissue which surrounds the heart and the large blood vessels which supply it. It acts essentially like a protective envelope for the heart.")
     "It affects about 200,000 people a year," Tommy said, "and I was one of those lucky 200,000. I was too smart to take a flu shot."
     The result: "About two-thirds of my heart muscle was dead," he recalled, "and the doctor said, 'We'll see how long you can last before it [the heart] stops pumping." 
     The estimate: nine years, at the most.
     Tommy beat that by two years. But he could feel the weakness last year and his doctor -- cardiologist -- had a new estimate: "Three or four months left to go."
     Tommy's question: "What are my options." 
     Answer: heart transplant.
     Tommy: "Let's do it."
     Then, several items of good fortune:
     • Saint Thomas West Hospital in Nashville had just restarted its heart transplant program.
     • To qualify for a transplant -- and the cutoff age usually is 65 -- he was put through extensive testing ("there was no organ they did not check," he said), and he was told that his physically biological age was 58.
     • Put on a 24/7 intravenous feeding drip, faced with only two or three months remaining, he went into the hospital and was told that he "would come out with a new heart or in a box,  [casket]." After only five days, the donor heart became available.
     And so, "6:32 a.m., August 31," the operation began. 
     "I remember some dude shaving my chest," he recalled, "and I woke up six hours later [with a new heart]. Next day I was up walking."
     He does not know who the heart donor was, and says, "I will be working through an agency that connects the donor and the recipient if both parties agree to do this."
      He also points out that only 2,200 heart transplants are done annually in the U.S., although some 35,000 are needed. Not enough donor hearts are available.
     For Tommy, the great challenge, the chance of rejection and the long recovery are still in progress.
---
     He was a football player growing up -- a running back and placekicker in junior high, high school and in college football (at Louisiana College, then Delta State).
     At Oak Terrace, he was the (then) rare junior high placekicker -- likely the first the school had in what was its  fifth year (fall 1963).
     At Woodlawn -- winningest top-class (AAA) program in Louisiana in the 1960s -- he was a halfback and the placekicker on the school's first undefeated regular-season team, ranked No. 2 in the state. He was part of a backfield that was as good (and deep) as any the Knights have ever had.

     Ross "The Hoss" Oglesby was the fast, strong All-State fullback who signed with Louisiana Tech; Doug Bland, the team's only two-way starter (halfback, cornerback) played at LSU; explosive runner Tom "The Bomb" Hagin (hurt -- knee -- much of the season) signed with Arkansas; Harrington, good blocker and running/receiving threat, was the least heralded.
     The quarterback was a thin, talented, promising sophomore -- Joe Ferguson. The next two years he was a high school superstar and most of this blog's readers know about his brilliant football career.
     There was a place for Harrington in college football, too, at smaller Louisiana College, a Baptist school in Pineville. For Tommy, it was a church connection.
     His pastor, Rev. Charles Harvey of Sunset Acres Baptist Church -- Brother Harvey, as we all knew him because it was the largest church in our neighborhood -- who recommended Tommy to the LC coaches. 
     An even more important connection: Rev. Paul Green, a  move-in from Lufkin, Texas, in the mid-1960s as the new minister of education at Sunset Acres Baptist and Brother Harvey's associate preacher, had a daughter. Connie Green  in time would become Mrs. Thomas Harrington. They have been married 48 years as of January 30.

Delta State running back, 1970

    At LC, Tommy (at 6 feet, 200 pounds) played regularly as a freshman and sophomore ... and then the program folded. The last game, in 1968, was against Delta State; the next day, the Delta State coach called Harrington and invited him to transfer to the school in Cleveland, Miss.
     That's where he played his final two college seasons, again as a starter. But he was not done with football.
      He moved to Monroe and, in 1971-72, finished his education at then-Northeast Louisiana University, with a B.A. degree in business. And -- pay attention -- for a time he was a sportswriter with the Monroe Morning World. 
     He wised up, and decided there was not a lot of money in sportswriting. And football still beckoned.
      Bulked up to 225 pounds and switched to tight end, he found a spot with the semipro San Antonio Toros. He didn't click with the coaches, but they suggested he had the ability to give the NFL a try.

From a Shreveport Times sports column
by a young writer, Aug. 12, 1972

      So, as Tommy recalled, he and Connie drove to New Orleans, he walked into the Saints' offices and the director of player personnel knew of him, asked if he had workout gear with him and, on the practice field, he got a tryout and soon was part of an off-season six-day receivers camp. 
     That led to an official NFL contract for the 1972 season. But he hurt his back (slipped disc) in preseason, surgery was required, and he was placed on injured reserve, out for the season. So that fall he was a Saint (off the field), with pay.
      So long football. Hello, real life.
      A connection with Saints' vice-president Dick Gordon -- former astronaut, command module pilot of Apollo 12 which went to the moon (Gordon's two spacemates walked there) -- led to Gordon's recommendation to Tommy that he visit a personnel agency in Houston (where Gordon had lived). 
      That led to jobs in the solid waste and recycling industries, 26 years with BFI and a decade more with Waste Management, and moves to Sugarland, Texas (near Houston), Atlanta, Memphis, San Juan, P.R., Cincinnati, Nashville, Pittsburgh and finally the Nashville area again (first Franklin, then Gallatin). He wound up as a regional vice-president, overseeing a seven-state area.
     A nomadic journey, three houses owned at one time, banks owed money ... but a living, and a family.
---
     And all along, there was auto racing -- a hobby, and a parttime vocation. For 25 years, he raced cars, seriously.
     It began with his father, Wilson H. "Dub" Harrington, an automobile salesman who, says Tommy, "messed around with cars at the [Louisiana state] Fairgrounds [track]."
     But Mom (Hattie) was the even bigger race-car fan, for decades.
     "My mother loved racing," Tommy remembers. "She would let me skip school to listen to the Indy 500 on the radio before the TV broadcasts started."
     When NASCAR superstar Dale Earnhardt Sr. was killed on the final lap of the Daytona 500 in February 2001, Miss Hattie (who died in 2014) was quoted about her hero in a Shreveport Times story. 
     She also was featured a couple of months later in a Times story about Tommy's racing career, which included three years on NASCAR's "second" series -- then the Busch Series -- and mostly the American Speed Association (ASA) series. In all, he said he raced on 69 tracks all across the U.S. and Canada.
     That Times story included a 1984 photo of Tommy with Dale Senior, an occasional racing competitor. So

The 91 car took Tommy for a ride in one big-track race.

were A.J. Foyt, Darrell Waltrip, Jimmy Johnson and other top racing stars.
     It began seriously in Sugarland -- "I drove right past the track on my way to work," he said. And with moderate success came some accidents, fortunately no serious injuries ... and money spent.
     "Racing cars is expensive," Tommy offers. "It is a good way to spend your retirement."        
     The failing heart ended that second career. But he will tell you it was a fun endeavor.
---
     The aftermath of the heart transplant: complications, multiple hospitalizations, tests and more tests, strict monitoring ... and encouragement.
     On the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service web site, under the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute page on heart transplants: "... Recent survival rates are about 85 percent at one year after surgery, with survival rates decreasing by three or four percent each additional year after surgery because of serious complications."
     The regimen includes 31 pills and four shots a day -- "my wife does a great job keeping the meds straight," Tommy says -- and a biopsy every week "to check new heart tissue and make sure there is no rejection." 
     Because his "immune system is compromised," he explained, "I am wearing a surgical mask right now [as we spoke]."
     And the hospital trips, three in recent months.
     "My doctor said my old heart was one of the biggest diseased hearts he'd ever seen," Tommy said. "It took up so much room. The heart I got was from someone in his 40s, and the trouble was getting it to fit the area. So my chest cavity filled with fluid."
     He went into the hospital weighing 299 pounds. (When I suggested that was big enough to play in the NFL, he laughed and said, "Yeah, but I could not catch a pass.")
     The fluid was drained, and he went from 299 to 238 in four days.
     "None of my joints could bend," he said. "I could not walk; I was stiff as a board."
     On another trip, "the deadburn catheter would not come out; it got stuck in there," he said. "The cardiologist said, 'That could have killed you.' "
     So, "we are still working on the heart and the body synching with each other. There are still times when I have trouble getting my breath."
     Still, he is "up and around, and driving."
     He and Connie are taking the highway to Shreveport-Bossier to see older sister Harriett [Stinson] and older brother Wilson H. -- known to all as "Butch" -- both Woodlawn Class of '65 graduates.
     Although he dealt with cerebal palsy his whole life, Butch was always a mainstream student in school.
     He married, he drove his own customized van for years and years, he liked the casinos in Bossier City (where he lives) and they liked him. 
      He long ago showed us that heart runs deep in the Harrington family.

     "Butch decided he wanted to go to public school, so he did," Harriett said. "Just so happened we wound up in the same class. He's always been such a go-getter. ... He's always been my hero. I'd give anything to have his courage."

     True, too, for her younger brother.
     "This all happened so fast," Harriett says of Tommy's transplant, "and the progress he made afterward just blew us all away. An absolute miracle, but that's what prayer gives you."
     Tommy's friends who knew about the transplant gave him a boost.
     "I was blessed to get a lot of e-mails and messages from old friends I went to school with ... [for example] I told Connie, 'I went to school with this person at Sunset Acres Elementary,' " he said. "It really makes you feel good when you are in a hospital bed."
     After Shreveport, Tommy and Connie will visit with daughter Katie, grandson Teagen (age 12) and granddaughter Addie (2) in Rockwall. There are also daughter Jane, an attorney in Sacramento, and twins Ana (in San Francisco, with granddaughter Hypatia, 2, and Tommy II (in Nashville).
     "We love our grandchildren and take every opportunity available to spend with them," Tommy says. "Hoping for more."
    Indeed. The old football player and race-car driver, Tommy Harrington is still speeding along in life.