November 20, 2009

FINISH LINE MARKS NEW START AFTER HEART SURGERY

by John Deem/Lake Norman Citizen

  
Zac Gordon raised his left fist and smiled as he crossed the finish line of Saturday’s Firecracker 5K road race at Huntersville Family Fitness & Aquatics Center.
   He removed the timekeeping “chip” from his shoe and dropped it into a volunteer’s blue plastic bucket, then grabbed a bottle of water from another volunteer, found a patch of dew-covered grass and bent over to catch his breath. After a minute or two, he straightened, let out a Ric Flair-like “WOOOO!” and said, “I’ve got to find my family.”
   That might sound a little over-exuberant for a longtime runner who placed 170th out OF 400 in the 3.1-mile race, but like many middle-of-the-pack runners, Gordon has a story that transcends his race place and time.
   Just four months earlier, the 50-year-old Gordon lay on an operating table at Carolinas Medical Center where a surgical team made an eight-inch incision in his chest, sawed through his sternum, peeled open his ribs, cut open his heart and replaced a valve in his aorta that had narrowed to a dangerously slight width. A surgeon replaced the faulty part with a one-inch section of valve from a pig.
   Yet, there was Gordon on Saturday morning, with the racers’ long shadows following silently like loyal running partners. “I was a little nervous about it,” Gordon said a few days later. “I’ve run a lot of races, so I know what to expect normally.”
   But little has been normal in Gordon’s life the last few months. “It was great to get out there and actually do a lot better than I expected,” he adds.
   The Firecracker 5K holds special meaning for Gordon, who is the land-use and transportation project manager in the Town of Huntersville Planning Department. Doctors first discovered Gordon’s faulty valve eight years ago, but at the time, the hardening that caused the narrowing had not progressed to a dangerous level.
   “Every year I would go in to the cardiologist and he would say, ‘You’re fine. Get outta here,’” Gordon recalls.
Despite the condition, Gordon felt no real symptoms. Shortly after moving to Huntersville, Gordon ran in the 2005 Firecracker 5K. During the race, he felt for the first time that something wasn’t right. He told his new cardiologist, who found that the valve had narrowed more, but still not enough to require surgery.
   Gordon felt okay until last year, when running became more difficult. “By last summer, I couldn’t run to the end of the block,” he recalls. “I just began to feel more and more tired, even when I was trying to do normal things.”
   On Dec. 9, cardiologist Jeff Rose of Sanger Clinic gave Gordon some news he wasn’t quite ready to hear: The valve had narrowed too much, and needed to be replaced.
   The fatigue made perfect sense, since the aorta pumps the oxygenated blood that gives the body energy. But just how bad was it? Rose decided he needed to find out, and scheduled a heart catheterization for January. The pictures weren’t good. Gordon’s wife, Lisa, watched the screen relaying video from inside his heart.
   “She said it looked like a barnacle-covered something or other,” Gordon remembers with a laugh.
There wasn’t much laughing then, though, especially when Rose told the Gordons that the surgery now was much more urgent. But the Gordons actually did leave Sanger Clinic that day with something to smile about — in retrospect, at least.
   Zac was experiencing his heart problems at the same time Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson was waiting for a heart transplant. “I had been joking that I wanted the same surgeon who was going to do Jerry Richardson’s surgery,” Gordon says. So, when the surgeon who would perform Gordon’s surgery stepped into the room to introduce himself after the catheterization, the patient decided to have a little fun with the doctor.
   “I looked at him and said, ‘You know, I was kinda hoping to get Jerry Richardson’s surgeon,’” Gordon says. “He looked at me and said, ‘I am Jerry Richardson’s surgeon.’”
Indeed, Dr. Mark Stiegel performed Richardson’s successful transplant Feb. 2, and Gordon’s valve replacement March 9.
   “The first thing I realized was how hard my heart was beating because it had slowed down so much (because of the faulty valve),” he says.
   After five hours of surgery and four more days in the hospital, Gordon began the painful recovery process. He returned to work five weeks later. All the while, though, the Firecracker 5K kept running through his mind. It was the event that had revealed his worsening condition four years earlier. Could it now mark his return?
   Gordon, who has endured extensive physical therapy, began running about a week before the race. By that Thursday, he was running three miles. He e-mailed his doctor and asked if he was recovered enough to race. Go ahead and do it, the doctor replied.
   And he did. So did his 17-year-old daughter Shayna, who took the top spot in her age group. But, she was still two minutes behind the old man.
   Lisa and Gordon’s other kids, Hannah, Kayla and Noah, were waiting at the finish.
   They wore the only smiles bigger than Zac’s.
 

About Huntersville Family Fitness & Aquatics (HFFA):
Huntersville Family Fitness & Aquatics is about family, fitness and fun. Dedicated HFFA staffers produce an exciting variety of programs and partnerships that connect the community and enable members to experience and achieve the most in health, wellness, and total fitness. Built in 2001, the 88,000-square-foot HFFA facility features state-of-the-art aquatic and fitness components, including a 50-meter pool, a 25-yard warm water pool, an outdoor family fun pool, full-court gymnasium, complete fitness center, and group exercise studio.  As the only public facility in the Southeast with an Olympic-sized, 50-meter competition pool and 10-meter dive tower, HFFA regularly hosts aquatics events with up to 2,000 spectators for regional, national, and international swim and dive competitions. For more information, please call (704) 766-2222 or visit www.hffa.com.

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