Description

A visit with heart recipient John Cavaleri . John keeps a deep connection to his donor.

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Transcription

• Speaker #0

  this one stay night here with my friend john tyler how are you john good excellent and it's kind of interesting because i've known john for a few years since uh 43 as of yesterday right and You just had two years, September 6th. I just want that for them. How did that come about? Was it like the pre-existing condition? Was it disease?

• Speaker #1

  I was electrocuted on a scaffolding back in 2019. and that uh that caused heart failure six months after that i ended up in hospital heart failure and i remember i was in arizona so i was seeing some of that recovery that was i mean it

• Speaker #0

  was a big deal because i had to go through my own stuff like two years later yep what process and deal with that first

• Speaker #1

  Well, I mean, at first, you know, finding out at 38 years old that I was at heart failure was pretty shocking and surprising by itself. And then to know that I was possibly going to be on the transplant list at that time. And thankfully, I was able to get out of that. I was able to get enough fluid off of my heart at the time to get me out of the hospital to get me stable. And then I went on a heart failure journey for about three years after that.

• Speaker #0

  um question because it's kind of hard to bring it up because pretty happy the lucky guy up there a while you can do this do that but had that major surgery started

• Speaker #1

  going through some weird feelings you feel like you want to talk about that yeah i'll talk about that that's no problem at all um

• Speaker #0

  you missed me and like everything felt pretty cool too about what started to happen to you as far as your feelings how you felt about yourself your life i mean i feel i feel good i feel i feel great now you came to see me we did a process in which we found out who had that heart yeah my my daughter had that heart yeah Do you feel a closeness to that donor?

• Speaker #1

  I do feel a closeness with the donor, of course. I mean, there's definitely a connection between me and Shaq, 100%. It's weird. It's hard to exactly pinpoint the feeling, but I definitely do feel that he is present at times.

• Speaker #0

  How did he pass? so the fact that you're not answering affected a lot of things for you good yeah 100 um at least i bring that up the reason i knew i was getting that is that that answer is that it came up in the week session yep true they

• Speaker #1

  created some feelings of this name a little bit yeah i mean there's definitely there's a lot of different feelings with the transplant it's not just physical, it's emotional, it's mental. There's a, you know, some survivor's guilt, various feelings that you just, you know, are hard to grasp until, you know, you have a little bit of an awakening.

• Speaker #0

  I had a couple of books that said that they carry some memories on from that.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, there's definitely, I've also read them, but I also know that there is some, there is DNA that does get transferred. through. I mean, it is coming, the heart did come from my heart donor, so.

• Speaker #0

  And your heart donor kind of made himself known.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, he did, he did, he did make himself known.

• Speaker #0

  You don't have to get into detail, but he did make himself known.

• Speaker #1

  It's a wild experience.

• Speaker #0

  It was definitely a wild experience. What was that experience like for you?

• Speaker #1

  I'd say it was a sense of relief. Yeah, there was a lot of relief. I feel a lot better since that experience.

• Speaker #0

  Do you feel like, it almost felt like for me, and I know I was there with you, that he feels free now.

• Speaker #1

  I definitely feel like he feels free. I feel free, but we're still connected in a way. More or less, he's connected to me, but he might sit next to me now instead of.

• Speaker #0

  In me. In me. And that's the way it should be. I got always the sense, because I don't want to follow any lines here, he was closer to you than I even realized. Like, he kind of enjoyed that space with you.

• Speaker #1

  Well, there's a lot of synchronicities, too, with the way that this all worked out. Some of the things that are in common. His name is Jack, and my son's name is Jack. oh that's right um he was born on memorial day and my son was born on memorial day um he was also passed away on 9 4 and the address that i grew up was 904. um we just realized another thing that is pretty interesting that he was colorblind so all he saw was yellow and just recently this year

• Speaker #0

  we've had nothing but yellow daisies in our yard surrounding the entire house it just came about like i mean it's just random but you know i doing all this medium ship all right this is one of the few sessions where you know you would think that the disease hit you yeah 100 and um Pat, all I can keep saying is he made himself known. Well,

• Speaker #1

  he did. He definitely did. I mean, he's made himself known a couple different times, but that was definitely clearly evident there that he was there. He was there big time.

• Speaker #0

  You talked a little bit about having some of that survival skills. Yep. Do you feel like dealing with that?

• Speaker #1

  obviously we might talk about it oh stuff for the family yeah no so we um we outside of my own personal space we created a non-profit um organization foundation called the jackson foundation and um there are a lot of incidental costs that insurance companies don't cover so um we created the foundation to raise money to help other transplant patients with their co-pays with their fuel to drive to the hospital various expenses that you just don't account for i mean i alone have three three to four hundred dollars a month in co-pays from all the medicines that i have to take and it never goes away wow so i mean yeah so this will help that person you know i mean it they're not i mean we hope that it could be large amounts but it'll be enough to kind of get them going at least for the first couple months when they get out of the hospital so that they get back to work and they're they're they're not so overwhelmed with that that is one of the things that i notice on some of these groups that i belong to is that people get so frustrated and upset about it and some even have some regret of even having the transplant because of that financial burden that it adds on to you know four or five thousand hours a year just in additional costs times the rest of your life um can definitely add up it's all the doctor visits and time so it um but regardless of all that i'm grateful for for my life connection to your family or your friends changed since um you know it's been because life's too short and i realized that land and land on a deathbed um with only a few days left to live and when i got that second chance now i take every day as if it could be my last um because you never know you know even this heart even this heart that i have um even this even this heart that i have now um can reject and things could go wrong but you know i don't i don't think a life like that i just i just i just try to take it one day at a time and uh my relationship with my family have gotten a lot closer uh friends friendships and relationships just have been super close uh

• Speaker #0

  since the transplant fantastic man i mean you look great to me thanks And it kind of sounded coincidental that I was going through my own stuff. I just didn't know what was wrong with me at the time. And for anybody listening, if you have to recuperate from what was yours, it was even bigger than mine. It takes time.

• Speaker #1

  It does take a lot of time. I mean, the first, I mean, I was in the hospital for a good couple months after the transplant. And then when I got out, I was still trying to recover. And the crazy thing is that I, even though I was still recovering, I mean, I was recovering well enough that people thought that I was good enough and life went back to normal. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, hold on a second. I'm not even close to being normal yet. I'm still in recovery. I mean, it's almost two years out and I'm finally out coming out of the woods. I ran a 5k this past spring. So that was pretty awesome.

• Speaker #0

  Don't look at me. I don't think I do it.

• Speaker #1

  Next year you join me.

• Speaker #0

  I got rid of the cane, I guess, like a month ago, but I am doing stuff. How does Jack make connections with you?

• Speaker #1

  So he's made, so we were a crazy thing that happened during the run. So when I. me and my wife and Jack's mom, we were, um, we were in Philadelphia prior to the run and we were driving around looking for parking and going through the Vine Street expressway. And we ended up seeing, um, various signs. There was a number 22 is it was his baseball number. And that was on the top of the building.

• Speaker #0

  Oh,

• Speaker #1

  four, four, four was also, um, a charm that all the girls that his friends have around their neck. So that was also, we saw that. And the 444 was right around the corner from the gift of life program building downtown so we saw all that so those all those signs were clearly evident um and i really recall when i was doing the run and i was at my last stretch probably the last like half a mile where i was ready to give up and i felt like somebody just was pushing me to go like and i it was like this supernatural force just pushing me to the finish line and if if you saw the video of me come to the finish line it was like bolted in sprinted in and my wife was like she couldn't believe that i was able to go that fast after running for

• Speaker #0

  40 minutes or so and you don't miss guys

• Speaker #1

  family now because you're the recipient we are um do you feel closer to them um do you feel the closeness to them so I have a different relationship with each one of them so Sherry the mother we're probably out of the four family members so it's Sherry CJ um Casey and Jordan their two daughters Sherry and I and my wife, we're close. CJ's been a big help with our website, and we talk on different levels. And then the daughters, I don't really talk with them that much, but when we see each other, it's a big hug and everything. However, we met. This is where it's pretty cool because last year around the time of the anniversary and Jack's anniversary, we met. Well, I'll take it back a step. I had written a letter to the Get the Life program. Sherry also wanted to know who the recipient was. So for about a year after the transplant, we tried to figure out like, I wanted to know who she was. She wanted to know who I was. And the Get to Life program set us up and we talked and then we ended up meeting at an event that the kids held, 150 friends and family up at the New York Met Stadium. And I went up and I met all the friends and family. So that was my first interaction with them was meeting all these people. And the interaction, and the the responses that i would get from when sherry would introduce me to them and saying that i'm jack's art recipient for just he speaks i was surreal just the amount of love that this guy had from people and impact he had on life which is amazing i

• Speaker #0

  got the sense in doing my session with you and it was medium shift we got to talk to jack a little bit that um

• Speaker #1

  he's pretty glad you've got it that you have the yes you know he is he is along with um along with his parents mother you know they are definitely very grateful that i have received his heart um really super super grateful and blessed and

• Speaker #0

  people ask me is there an energy you know when the soul is this way and then they're they pass are they different um yeah i feel through you The person who gave you your heart is light right now. Just like I can feel his energy. Like I don't have to carry the heart. I don't need it anymore. It's yours.

• Speaker #1

  Yep. it's almost like a big smile he doesn't need well that was another that was kind of a struggle that i was having to hold on to that of uh having jack's heart the fact that he's younger than two of our two of our kids which was a hard thing to deal with and then also mourning my own heart you know i was being warned jack and he worked my own heart because i love my heart you know i mean yes so

• Speaker #0

  to carry a piece of someone with you i know we do it through our kids but this is a little different um it's uh it's like carrying a to me it's like carrying precious cargo wow that's

• Speaker #1

  how i take that's how i treat it um i you know physically mentally emotionally like i try to do my best to take care of the heart because it's a gift

• Speaker #0

  it was a gift for life i mean you ran in our like a 5k after you i mean you're my hero in that respect you're a little over your hand man me getting up the stairs the apart now i can do that well so i'm really excited that's good um you know but it was like that for you i remember pictures of you that i need your hand walking down the hallway and that was a big day for you that was a huge day

• Speaker #1

  I mean I was pre-transplant and a little bit post-transplant. I was in ECMO and ECMO is life support. They had two tubes in my thighs that kept me alive for the transplant. It was my heart and lungs outside of my body. I was one of the only patients that were intubated while most of the patients are out cold with breathing tubes in there and knocked out. I was wide awake with these huge huge three-quarter inch tubes going into my femoral arteries.

• Speaker #0

  imagine this and um this is great summertime talk like like i'm trying to say to people is that you look fantastic thank you you know he's getting ready to try try his blackened uh chicken quesadilla here at the social yep and uh looks good by the way it is good i'm gonna let you eat it here in a second uh just to let some people know you we're getting ready to do our paranormal investigation coming up this week here at social because this was built this was a crematorium this was a funeral home what's the uh what's the agent's place what what's the age of this place i would say it's been here since

• Speaker #1

  1800s

• Speaker #0

  1800s late 1800s it's like an awesome place but you know it's haunted very this really oh yeah this is that's stories for other times and don hoffman and i are going to do a walk through do some filming and do on all of that so also too i want to thank all of you guys who've been sending me in photographs and stuff with all the gear right now we're waiting for someone to pick up gears for a raffle they're doing in town here i can't thank you enough oh thank you for the opportunity i appreciate it now what is the website is there a website you want to send people to yeah it's uh www

• Speaker #1

  How do you spell SINOT? S-I-N-N-O-T-T.

• Speaker #0

  And they're raising money there, too.

• Speaker #1

  So we're raising money to help other transplant patients, as well as we have the event. So we have a bag bingo night. It's September 8th. Okay. Immediate. So it's our first annual event we're doing.

• Speaker #0

  I think it's a great thing that you're doing because you need. to cover those incidentals so thanks for coming aboard brother i appreciate it guys thank you for always listening i'll be here again on wednesday so let me know all right if you ever want to be here on the show just contact me through the website and we will have you on here thank you good night