Kalamazoo College will have an additional reason to celebrate life in February alongside Wendy Fleckenstein, K’s administrative secretary to the president and provost. About four years ago, Wendy was seriously ill and awaiting a heart transplant. Now, she will be the featured survivor at an American Heart Association Go Red for Women Gala on Friday, February 28, at the Radisson Plaza Hotel in Kalamazoo.
Locally, the event this year concludes American Heart Month, which raises awareness about heart disease and how to prevent it. It’s a time to encourage people, especially women, to focus on their cardiovascular health with cardiovascular disease being the leading cause of death for both men and women, as well as most racial and ethnic groups, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
“It’s such a huge honor for me and a way to recognize the donor and his family, because without them, I wouldn’t be here to tell my story,” Wendy said. “I hope I can be an inspiration to anybody to get them to make sure they’re staying on top of their heart health, especially if they have a family history. I think that’s really key.”
Emerita Professor of Physical Education Jeanne Hess introduced Wendy to American Heart Association Development Director Caleb Porter when Wendy’s health stabilized after the transplant.
“Caleb told me what they do, and he said I would be an incredible survivor story for the gala,” Wendy said. “They will play a video interview of me, have a silent auction, a live auction, and an open-your-heart donation request. I’m glad to be participating in it.”
The video will show that in January 2018, Wendy thought she had a cold. The timing was annoying considering it coincided with her first days as a K employee. It lingered for several days, forcing her to visit an urgent care facility.
“They didn’t have an x-ray machine there, so they just said, ‘It looks like you’ve got a sinus infection. Here’s an antibiotic for that,’” Wendy said.
A week later, she still wasn’t well. Wendy could hear a crackling sound coming from her lungs when she tried to sleep, prompting a pneumonia scare and a trip to a second urgent care center.
“They did an x-ray and that doctor didn’t wait for the radiologist to read it,” Wendy said. “She said, ‘Yes, there’s something in your lung. Here’s an antibiotic for pneumonia.’”
A diagnosis more serious, though, was coming. Before she could even get home, in fact, Wendy’s doctor called back with news from the radiologist and said, “You need to get back here. It’s congestive heart failure.”
Wendy was stunned. Heart conditions are common in her family, although she was still three months away from her 48th birthday. To her knowledge, no one that young among her relatives had ever suffered such an ailment.
“They never were able to figure out what caused it, other than perhaps an illness that just settled in the heart and the heart just didn’t recover,” she said. “They did a nuclear stress test. They did a heart catheter and all of that showed nothing. My arteries were pristine and I did fine on the stress test.”
Wendy thought she was in the clear after her doctors installed a defibrillator shortly after the College’s Commencement in 2018. Her condition already was responding well to medications and the procedure strictly was a safeguard in case her heart rate got too slow or she experienced cardiac arrest.
Yet something happened in November 2019, a short time before the pandemic shuttered much of the country.
“We’re pretty certain that I had COVID,” Wendy said. “I was very sick. I was in bed for about a week with no smell, no taste, a high fever and a cough that lingered into February and March.”
Her heart health soon varied significantly, often from day to day, and it was quite noticeable to her family and friends that something was wrong. April 30, 2021, was her last day working at K before her health required her to take a break.
“Louise, one of my best friends here, told me we had to do something,” Wendy said. “She said, ‘You can’t just stay in bed. You’re not getting better,’ so she picked me up and took me to the ER. I had no idea that my body was shutting down. We think now that the COVID took out my heart.”
Wendy was hospitalized for six days in early May, leading her cardiologist to suggest she be moved to another facility to receive a pump called a left ventricle assistive device (LVAD). Yet upon arrival, tests found that Wendy’s heart was bad on the left and right sides, leaving a transplant as the only option.
Her condition became dire, even grave at times. Thankfully, after some improvement helped her get well enough to potentially survive the operation and get stronger afterward, she went on the transplant list and the heart of a 16-year-old boy saved her life. Although Wendy knows her body could still reject the heart at any time, the transplant went well.
“I don’t know anything about him,” she said. “I don’t know where he’s from, just that a donor can be from up to about 1,200 to 1,250 nautical miles away. I really wish that I knew at least his name, his birthday and something that he liked to do. I’ve developed a passion for drawing and painting that I never had before, so I wonder whether he was an artist. I didn’t have curly hair like this before either. I asked my doctor if there was any chance this boy had curly hair. He said he didn’t think there could be anything that connected our DNA, but I would rather think it’s that than the medication.”
Wendy feels better today than she has in a long time and her recovery allows her to think of the donor and his family often.
“In the first days when they had me up and walking around the hospital, the psychiatrist saw me in the hallway and asked me how it felt to know I had somebody else’s heart beating inside me,” Wendy said. “I hadn’t really thought about it until he asked me and I said, ‘guilty.’ I didn’t know why I got to live and someone else had to die. I don’t think I knew until about the two-year mark that a kid saved my life. It hits especially as a parent, knowing that because of him, and because of their decision to donate his heart to me, there are so many things I get to do that they will not experience with him. They’ll never see him graduate high school or college, get married, have children. Their holidays will never be the same. I just decided that this young life saved me and I was going to fight to get back. I do everything I can to live my life and celebrate him.”
There’s no guarantee Wendy will ever meet the donor’s family, although she has opportunities to write to them despite not knowing their names. It ultimately will be up to the family to decide whether they want to meet her, but if she has the chance one day, she will tell them how grateful she is.
“I would tell them how much their gift means, not only to me, but to my family,” Wendy said. “It would’ve destroyed my mom to lose a child, so just to be here is so special. I’m so proud of my kids and what they’re doing in their lives, and to watch them be parents is just the greatest feeling.”
Wendy said that if not for having to fill a big medicine box every month, she wouldn’t know she has a heart problem anymore. Because of that and more, she’s eager to tell her story at the gala.
“I probably don’t work out as much as I should, but I try to keep the donor and his family in my mind every day,” she said. “Being asked to share my story with the American Heart Association is so important with their mission to educate women about heart health and how to get the help that they need. I never realized until the last few years that women are at the highest risk for cardiovascular issues, and the symptoms of a heart attack for women are different than they are for men.
“I had no clue that I was so sick, and when you get the rug pulled out from under you, you realize you might not get a chance to do the things you want to do again. It’s overwhelming and pretty scary, so I’ll just say to live your life to the fullest, love your family and friends, and tell people you love them.”
