It was easy, once he got those Aussie swirls figured out.
“It’s the oil pattern,” Greg Sabak said.
“They do theirs way different than we do on American lanes,” he said.
“You have to adjust, and readjust,” he explained, “then after a few frames you’re locked in.”
For the uninitiated, the Westover man is talking about bowling.
Specifically, the kind practiced in Australia.
A place where a kegler can exclaim, “Crikey!” — or some such other Down Under-ism much more unprintable, mate — during those happenstances when his bowling ball suddenly veers to the disaster of the gutter, due to the province of the above.
“Oil patterns,” are just that: The slippery coating applied in select places to the lane allowing the ball to hook (or not) or dig in (or not).
Sabak just got back from Perth, Australia, where he did lots of bowling.
He brought silver and bronze medals in that sport back home, after competing in an Olympic-style gathering there last month that carried a tough admission ticket.
It was the 2023 edition of the World Transplant Games.
The 1,499 other athletes, from 45 nations, were all sporting the snaking surgical scars just as interesting as his.
All received life-saving organ transplants.
Sabak, 62, is coming up on his new birthday.
He underwent a successful heart transplant in Pittsburgh in 2016 — after being a medical inmate on cardiac death row for years.
For him, it’s not about the bowling.
It’s about the beat.
“I wasn’t going to just sit around, waiting to die.”
Treadmill days
In 2000, Sabak was newly relocated to West Virginia from his native Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
He had gone to pharmacy school in Boston. The Louis A. Johnson VA Medical Center in Clarksburg offered a job, which he accepted.
He was required to take a stress test on a treadmill as part of a pre-employment physical.
“I got two steps and collapsed,” he said.
Later, after all the tests at J.W. Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, a WVU 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.
Thing was, he didn’t even know he was dying.
Fading fast
Around 1 in 500 people, from adolescents to competitive athletes, are walking around with the condition.
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.
Plus, his kidneys began retaining water and sodium, and congestive heart failure inevitably followed.
The machine that is Sabak’s 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% of capacity, and those numbers were fading like a Key West sunset.
“It doesn’t always show up,” he said.
“When you hear stories where these world-class athletes just drop dead, they had what I had.”
‘Hey, Greg — we got you a new heart’
Because grit doesn’t show up on an EKG, either, he soldiered on.
He worked his pharmacy job as long as he could.
A defibrillator was implanted, to shock his heart back to beating — during those times when it would just stop, which was a lot.
Sometimes, it happened when he was attempting his favorite sport, all short of breath and halting.
“You get this thump, and a tingling feeling,” he remembered.
“I’d say, ‘Yep. There it is.’”
Then, he’d try to go pick up that 4-7-10 split.
He was dying, in a ventricle-increment kind of way, but he was fortunate, in that he was also able to get himself on the transplant list.
WVU Medicine now performs heart transplants for adults, but that was a few years away.
His was done in Pittsburgh.
He got to be friends with the hospital’s transplant coordinator, and when she called with the biggest news of his life, it was amazingly casual.
Small talk, even.
“Hey, Greg. We got you a heart. We’re gonna need you here tomorrow.”
“Uh, sure.”
Sabak underwent 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.”
Fathers and sons
Because he received the healthy heart of a younger person, Sabak has been able to enjoy his love of sports over the years.
That’s his second love, actually.
His gold medal, he said, comes in getting to be dad to his son, Spencer, who was eight months old when Sabak made that fateful step on the treadmill.
They go skiing and running. They enjoy the outdoors, and each other’s company.
“We have the time, now, which I didn’t think we were going to have,” Sabak said.
He hopes you take the time to check the organ donor box when you renew your driver’s license.
“Someone did,” he said, “and saved my life.”
Mother’s Day
Today is Mother’s Day, which always makes Sabak think of the 2018 USA Transplant Games.
They were in Salt Lake City that year.
By chance he met a woman from Wheeling who wasn’t competing — but still had every right to be there.
Her daughter had died, and that checkmark the lost child made in the organ donor box gave gratitude to a mother’s grief.
She eventually got to meet the person walking around the transplanted heart of a woman, forever young — a woman who would always be her baby girl, no matter what.
For her, it was a gift more profound than any bouquet of flowers or a greeting card for today’s observance and acknowledgement of maternal love.
The recipient produced a stethoscope.
The mom listened to a message.
“She got to hear that beating heart,” Sabak said, his voice falling off the beat (just a bit) from the emotion of it all.
“Her daughter. Her kid. It was like she was still here.”
Because, he said, she is.
Strike.
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