Greg Sabak’s heart thrummed with love and anticipation as he sat in the stands on the football field at North Marion High School on a mellow evening last May.
It was commencement for the Class of 2018, and one of those seniors striding across Husky Field to take a diploma was his son, Spencer.
Spencer caught his dad’s eye and grinned, and a father grinned right back through his tears as he witnessed his kid turning his tassel at the school in outlying Marion County.
There were shared smiles, a joint thumb’s up and maybe even a mouthed word or punchline from the time immemorial lexicon of fathers and sons.
“Watching Spencer graduate was the highlight of my new life,” Sabak said.
Notice he said, “new life.”
He didn’t know anything was wrong. He found out when he stepped on that treadmill on Nov. 6, 2000.
New job, new move
(to an old place)
Sabak, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., native who had gone to pharmacy school in Boston, had been hired just days before at the Louis A. Johnson VA Medical Center, in Clarksburg.
He grew up in the Sunshine State, but his family has deep roots in the Mountain State.
The Sabak family came to the U.S. and West Virginia from eastern Europe in the early 20th century to carve their purchase of the American dream in the coal mines here.
A great-uncle perished in the Monongah mine disaster of 1907. His grandfather, who also worked there, cheated death by way of religion.
The day the mine exploded, Dec. 6, is also St. Nicholas Day in the Russian Orthodox faith, and Andrew Sabak, who was devout, didn’t work that day.
When Greg’s father, also named Andrew, found out he was terminally ill, he wanted to leave Florida so he could die back home in north-central West Virginia.
A son followed, so he could care for both his parents. It started out as a temporary move, but his mother decided she wanted to stay.
Sabak, too, found he liked the mountains and small-town life. He’s now a Westover resident.
He got hired as a pharmacist at the VA and was required to take a stress test as part of a pre-employment physical. That’s when everything changed.
Not looking good
“I got two steps on the treadmill and collapsed,” he said.
The new hire at a hospital in Clarksburg became a hospital patient in Morgantown.
After all the tests, a white-coated cardiologist came in, unsmiling, with a diagnosis that Sabak didn’t like one bit.
It was a mouthful, but Sabak, with his medical background, knew exactly what he was hearing:
Nonischemic idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy.
Heart failure.
All the mechanics of the body are geared to proper heart function.
The main pumping chamber of Sabak’s heart (and everyone’s heart), the left ventricle, had become enlarged and weakened.
His heart wasn’t beating like it should, which meant it wasn’t moving blood like it should.
Sabak’s kidneys began retaining water and sodium, and congestive heart failure inevitably followed, since his body could no longer dispense of the fluid that was also building up in legs, ankles, feet and lungs.
At the time of his diagnosis, doctors told him his heart was operating at only 15 to 25 percent of capacity.
“The condition doesn’t always show up [in physical exams],” Sabak said. “You hear those stories where these world-class athletes just drop dead, they had what I had.”
Spencer was just 8 months old.
Soldiering on
Sabak was finally able to go to work at the VA in December 2000, a month after that stress test that he thought was just going to be a physical formality.
Just like an old-time miner with pick axes working a coal seam, though, the nonischemic idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy, that multi-lettered monster, was chipping away at the already diminished function of his heart.
A defibrillator was implanted, to shock his heart back to beating when the organ would just stop.
“You get this thump, and a tingling feeling,” he said. If you want to know how it feels, he said, jam something metal into a wall outlet.
The life-saving jolts became so frequent, they were actually risking his life behind the wheel. He could no longer safely drive.
By May 2014, doctors at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh told him he needed a heart transplant to live.
He lasted at the VA until December of that year, when his dying heart forced a retirement and medical disability.
He was amazed he got 14 years in, he said.
“You can sit around and worry about your fate,” he said. “Or you can go to work.”
Routine call that wasn’t
Allegheny General put him on the waiting list for a transplant. After two years, he got a phone call from Bridget Flynn, the hospital’s transplant coordinator.
Sabak was amazed at how ordinary that extraordinary call seemed.
“Hey, Greg. We got you a heart. We’re gonna need you here tomorrow.”
“Uh, sure.”
Dr. Masaki Tsukashita performed the six-hour surgery that following morning. It was July 24, 2016.
He was 55 years old, but his cardiac odometer was reset: “My second birthday.”
Lovingly loopy
When he came around a couple of days later, he told his sister, who had flown up from Florida, that he was ready for the surgery.
She smilingly told him that not only did he already have it, he was also doing quite well.
“Oh.”
When Spencer came to see him, he was a fashion critic.
“I had just gotten glasses,” said Spencer, who is now 18 and attending classes at Pierpont Community and Technical College in Fairmont.
“He was still loopy from the anesthesia, and he looked at me and said, ‘Those frames look awful on your face. I wouldn’t wear ‘em.’ I laughed and said, ‘I love you too, Dad.’”
When he got old enough to get a driver’s license, and to start filling out other official forms and paperwork, Spencer registered as an organ donor. Visit Donate Life America at https://www.donatelife.net/ for more information on how you can do the same.
“That’s how I got my dad back,” the son said.
“He’s completely different now. He used to be bitter. He’d snap at you sometimes. I would have been the same way.”
Yes, dodge ball (really)
Today, the father and son, who share a love of sports, play golf and go skiing.
The elder Sabak got reacquainted with his beloved bowling. He also runs in 5K races and even participates in an adult dodge ball league.
“For the cardio,” he said.
Does he ever worry about taking one to the chest?
“Nah. They superglue you back together. Your sternum is actually stronger. You can’t worry about what could happen.”
Ace of hearts
Sabak knows his heart came from a younger person.
Like his grandfather before him, his faith moves the heart of who he is now in everything he does.
“Every day I thank God and my donor,” he said. “Every day.”
Last month in Salt Lake City, Sabak participated in the 2018 World Transplant Games — the Olympics for competitors who have undergone organ transplants.
He took home a gold medal in Texas Hold ‘Em Poker, which he credited in part to his medical training.
That’s because while some card players are great at keeping a poker face, not a one can bluff biology.
Blame it on the carotid artery, he said, grinning. That’s the vein on the side of your neck that sometimes carries a visible pulse.
“Watch for the pulse,” he said. “If it’s thumping, that means the guy has got something.”
Silver and bronze medals were also draped around his neck for bowling.
‘It just means
everything’
What he really took home, though, was even more love, and even more appreciation, for the people who check the organ donor box.
He met a husband and wife from Wheeling whose daughter had been killed.
In turn, they told him of their meeting with a person who was still here because of her: A person walking around with her transplanted heart.
They listened through a stethoscope.
“They got to hear that heart,” he said, his eyes welling and his voice going thick with emotion.
“They got to hear that beating heart. That’s their daughter. Their kid. It was like she was still here. It just means everything.”
Tweet @DominionPostWV. Email jbissett@dominionpost.com.
