Brazilian Ivonette Balthazar taps her chest where the transplanted heart of a German Olympic athlete beats.
“The little motor’s in here,” she says.
Three-and-a-half months since a grueling but successful operation to replace her heart in the middle of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, Balthazar, 66, is amazed and thankful to be alive.
Photo: AP
Even as the huge scar running down her chest fades, the emotions of owing her survival to a man she never met and who first had to die himself remain almost too much to handle.
Balthazar’s health had been disintegrating ever since a heart attack in November 2012. By August, she could hardly walk or talk.
“I was in despair,” she told reporters at her small, neat apartment in Rio.
Then the Olympics came, bringing hundreds of thousands of tourists and the world’s best athletes. Among them was Stefan Henze, a German canoeing coach who won silver at the 2004 Athens Games.
After the 35-year-old was fatally injured in a car accident, Balthazar got the call.
According to Brazilian law hospitals cannot disclose an organ donor’s identity, but the German’s death was all over the news and Balthazar’s family soon put two and two together.
Now this unlikely pair — a Rio grandmother and a tragically killed Olympian — are bound in a strange, deep intimacy.
“When I’m alone I really put this hand on my heart and declare: ‘My God, this boy brought me back to life,’” Balthazar says.
Balthazar was a smoker and the hard-charging boss of her own human-resources agency.
Life was “work, work, work,” she said.
Then came the heart attack.
Despite attempts to treat her, she went through a terrifying decline in which she could measure the slow-motion breakdown of her heart, the pulse rate dropping down to 49 beats a minute.
“It had almost stopped,” she said.
In January last year she entered the heart donor waiting list at No. 8. An intensive series of exams followed to verify that she would be healthy enough to go through an eventual operation.
In May this year she had moved to first place, but was locked in a race against death.
“I already wasn’t able to breathe properly,” she said.
Twice a week — on Wednesdays and Fridays — the hospital called on her cellphone to check her condition.
“Then they called on a Monday and said come,” she said.
Balthazar said she was terrified as she went into the operating theater on Aug. 15.
She told her son, Fabio, and daughter, Renata, that she was “prepared to die.”
Today Balthazar still has trouble eating, has poor coordination and wears a surgical mask in the street to protect her weak immune system.
However, she is recovering rapidly.
“Everything has changed in my health. I couldn’t do anything before,” she says.
“I wouldn’t be here talking with you,” she says.
Next year she even plans to take part in a run with other transplant patients, dedicating the race as a “homage” to Henze.
The bigger change is in her attitude. She dreams of getting back to work, but also of enjoying simple things and watching her five grandchildren grow.
“I had such a busy life before,” she says. Now “I say to people: Pause, think — work is necessary, but it’s not healthy.”
Although she sent a letter of thanks to Henze’s family via the German consulate and would like to “give his mother a hug,” she is “not emotionally ready” for more direct contact.
Still, she thinks a lot about the dead athlete.
“I looked for more information on him, but didn’t find much. I found out about his professional life, but on his personal life I found nothing. I would like to know more about his life,” she said of her savior.
“I know he was happy, a lively person,” she says.
And she makes a promise: “To look after this heart very carefully.”
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