Heart patient climbs Mt. Fuji, credits donor

CATHERINE JUN/Daily Bruin Senior Staff Heart transplant patient
Kelly Perkins, with husband
Craig, speaks at Westwood Plaza about her plans to
climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in a few days.

By Hemesh Patel
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

Before Kelly Perkins’ heart failed due to a virus that
disrupted her heartbeat rhythm, mountain climbing was one of her
main hobbies.

Without undergoing a heart transplant, Perkins would not have
been able to continue climbing. But since her 1995 operation, she
has climbed Mount Whitney again and reached the top of
Yosemite’s Half Dome and Japan’s Mount Fuji.

And now her mission is to reach the top of Mount Kilimanjaro,
which towers three and a half miles above the African savanna.

“We’re just taking this one step at a time,”
said her husband, Craig. “Right now we’re focused on
Kilimanjaro, and that’s all we’re thinking
about.”

Perkins was at Westwood Plaza Wednesday to share her story as
part of Be Carded Donor Awareness Day to encourage others to be
organ donors.

Angela Marquez, co-director of UCLA Be Carded, said this is the
first annual event to raise awareness about organ donation.

With the music of the local Luke & Chris Band playing in the
background, students signed up to be organ donors. To be an organ
donor, one must fill out a uniform donor card and have a family
member sign it.

“It doesn’t take any extra effort, and it has the
possibility to save someone’s life,” said Elizabeth
Newman, a first-year undeclared student.

Recent statistics from the United Network for Organ Sharing
indicate that 78,353 patients nationwide are waiting for an organ
transplant.

One-third of these patients will die waiting, said Barbara
Lindburgh, manager of marketing and public education of Golden
State Donor Services.

According to Dr. Daniel Marelli, an assistant professor of
surgery, 2,400 heart transplants take place in the country each
year. One hundred of these surgeries occur at UCLA, making it one
of the busiest heart transplant centers in the world.

Despite these figures, the number of patients waiting for
transplants continues to increase.

“The number of patients added to the waiting list
continues to balloon,” said Dr. Abbas Ardehali, an assistant
professor of surgery. “Unfortunately, there’s no great
solution, with the exception of artificial organs.”

For now, officials at organ transplant centers are concentrating
their efforts on raising awareness to get more people carded as
organ donors.

Perkins said she was given a second chance in life because of a
donor.

“Transplant patients don’t have to stay home and
don’t have to hide,” she said.

While scaling mountains can take a toll on the average person,
the challenge can be even greater for heart transplant
patients.

At higher altitudes, the amount of oxygen available decreases.
To compensate for this, electrical impulses by nerves direct the
heart to pump harder to circulate more oxygenated blood throughout
the body.

But the heart of a transplant patient does not have nerves, so
the body must find alternative ways to make it beat faster,
Ardehali said.

Perkins is aware of the differences in her heart compared to
others and sees her upcoming trial not merely as climbing a
mountain, but as a culmination of many things that allowed her to
reach this point in her life.

“It’s not about hiking mountains, but what it takes
to get me there,” she said. “You think of heart
transplant patients as hanging on to life ““ it doesn’t
depict a good picture.”

She recalled her latest accomplishment of trekking Mount Fuji,
Japan’s most sacred mountain, as an emotional one.

As soon as she reached the apex of Mount Fuji, her husband
presented her with a gift.

“My husband surprised me with the ashes of my donor at the
top of the mountain,” Perkins said. “It was an amazing
moment ““ it was huge.”

For more information on UCLA Be Carded, call (310) 825-8900.