For Cheney, 71, New
Heart Ends 20-Month Wait
Alex Brandon/Associated Press
Former Vice President
Dick Cheney had a heart transplant on Saturday after 20 months on a waiting
list, and was recovering in a Virginia
hospital, a statement from his office said.
Mr. Cheney, 71, who
has suffered five heart attacks and was in end-stage heart failure, was
recovering in the intensive care unit of Inova
Fairfax Hospital
in Falls Church, Va.
“Although the former vice president and his
family do not know the identity of the donor, they will be forever grateful for
this lifesaving gift,” said the statement from an aide, Kara Ahern. Mr. Cheney
and his family thanked doctors and staff at that hospital and at George Washington
University Hospital
in Washington
for “their continued outstanding care,” the statement said.
Mr. Cheney’s wait for
a new heart was not unusual, though it appeared to be longer than the average
wait, which has varied in recent years from six months to a year, according to
several studies. In June 2010, 3,153 patients were on the waiting list for a
heart transplant, and 80 were awaiting a heart-lung transplant, the American
Heart Association’s journal Circulation reported last year.
Patients on the list
generally have to be ready to rush to the hospital when a suitable donor is
found, so there is little notice before a transplant takes place. It is not
unusual for recipients not to know the identity of their donor; notification is
determined by the rules of organ donation networks and the wishes of the
donor’s family.
At 71, Mr. Cheney is
near the upper age limit for such an operation, though that limit has been
steadily rising. As recently as 2006, the International Society for Heart and
Lung Transplantation said that while patients recommended for a heart
transplant should generally be 70 or under, “carefully selected patients” over
70 could be considered. In 2008, about 12 percent of heart transplant patients
were 65 or older.
In 2010, the former
vice president had a left ventricular assist device, a battery-powered heart
pump, implanted by surgeons. They pose significant risks and are a last resort,
either for permanent use or as a bridge to transplant until a donor heart can
be found. It was among a series of operations over several decades on Mr.
Cheney’s heart and leg veins. He suffered his first heart attack at the age of
37 in 1978 as he was campaigning for Congress; a decade later, he underwent
quadruple bypass surgery.
In appearances since
he left office in 2009, Mr. Cheney has appeared gaunt and increasingly frail.
Last August, he published an autobiography, “In My Time: A Personal and
Political Memoir,” written with his daughter Liz Cheney, in which he reported
that a team of doctors assessed his heart condition before George W. Bush chose
him as his vice-presidential running mate in 2000. He also described writing a
letter of resignation shortly after taking office and giving it to his counsel,
David S. Addington, to be delivered to President Bush if he were incapacitated.
In a government career with few parallels, Mr.
Cheney, who was vice president for all eight years of Mr. Bush’s presidency,
has been chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford, represented Wyoming in
Congress and served as defense secretary under the first President George Bush.
He is widely
considered to have been among the most powerful vice presidents in American
history, working behind the scenes on policies as varied as energy and
counterterrorism and advocating an aggressive assertion of presidential power.
He was a lightning
rod for critics of the Bush administration, and his influence as vice president
during Mr. Bush’s second term was considerably diminished. But he remains
revered on the political right and in the Republican Party and has been one of
the Obama administration’s toughest critics, speaking out regularly despite his
fragile health.
There were no advance
news reports of the transplant, but it did not come entirely as a surprise. On
the “Today” show on NBC in January 2011, Mr. Cheney discussed his heart pump
and said he might need a transplant.
“I’ll have to make a decision at some point
whether or not I want to go for a transplant,” Mr. Cheney said, “but we haven’t
addressed that yet.”
Since the first heart
transplant was performed by the South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard in
1967, the operation has become common, though it remains an arduous, risky and
costly procedure. Most patients stay in the hospital for about a month after
surgery, and recent studies estimate that first-year costs for a heart
transplant and follow-up care are close to $1 million.
According to a
statistical review last year in Circulation, there were 2,211 heart transplants
performed in the United
States in 2009, 72 percent of them in men,
who have a higher rate of heart disease than women. From transplants between
1997 and 2004, the survival rate at one year after surgery for men was 88
percent, and at five years it was 73 percent, the journal reported.
A 2008 study in The
Annals of Thoracic Surgery found that outcomes were significantly worse for
older patients. For patients over 55, the study found, 63 percent were still
alive five years after their transplant, 48 percent survived a decade and 35
percent were living 15 years later.
With new heart, Dick
Cheney speaks for more than an hour in Wyoming
JOSHUA
ROBERTS/Reuters - Alex
Brandon/Associated Press
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Former vice president Dick Cheney walked
onstage without any assistance Saturday and spoke for an hour and 15 minutes
without seeming to tire in his first public engagement since he underwent a
heart transplant three weeks ago.
He sat in a plush
chair throughout the long chat with daughter Liz Cheney, but looked better,
even, than during recent appearances in which he has been gaunt and used a
cane.
A look back at Cheney’s
political career. The former vice president has suffered five heart attacks
since his late 30s. He underwent a heart transplant in March after more than 20
months on a transplant list, according to his office.
He said presumptive
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is going to do a “whale of a job.”
He said it’s never been more important than now to defeat a sitting president,
and the Republican Party should unite behind Romney.
“He has been an
unmitigated disaster to the country,” Cheney said of President Obama.
Cheney’s heart
transplant in Virginia
on March 24 had forced the cancellation of his trip to the state party
convention, but he got last-minute medical clearance to go.
He owed a “huge debt”
to the unknown donor of his new heart, Cheney said, and to medical technology.
He did not take the opportunity to weigh in on health-care politics.
“I was amazed he was
able to say so much over the whole course of an hour,” said one delegate to the
convention, Helen Bishop of Moran in Jackson Hole.
“I thought it would be a really brief, ‘Hi.’ ”
Nearly all of the
talk traced the more than 40 years of Cheney’s political career, including the
controversial waterboarding and other interrogation practices the Bush
administration employed to extract information from terrorism suspects.
“It produced a wealth
of information. Don’t let anybody tell you the enhanced interrogation program
didn’t work. It did,” he said to the loudest applause of his visit.