Man misses shot at heart transplant as flight after flight canceled. ‘My worst fears’
Patrick Holland was hopeful after finding out he had a shot at getting a new heart, as long as he could make it from his home in Alaska to Seattle in time.
But that proved easier said than done. Holland got caught up in the flying fiasco and watched helplessly as flight after flight got canceled because of winter weather and his hopes were dashed again and again, according to the blog his wife, Haley, uses to document his journey to a new heart.
“The 25 hours starting just after 8 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 22nd, and ending just after 9 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 23rd, were the most traumatic, difficult hours of Patrick’s life,” she wrote on the blog, Big Heart. “Numerous times his hopes and dreams were lifted to astounding heights, and then left to tumble down to the lowest depths of nightmarish proportions, often in the blink of an eye. This cycle repeated itself over and over.”
Holland booked a flight to Seattle but got to the airport and learned it was canceled, KIRO7 reported.
He explained his critical situation to Alaska Airlines staff, who jumped through hoops to get him on another flight out, the outlet reported.
“She said ‘I will get you on a plane,’ and she did,” Holland told CNN. “She got me on a plane. ... My excitement of getting a heart was overwhelming.”
He felt like he was getting a shot at another few decades of life, “or at least watching my three-year-old son graduate filled me with the sense of being blessed beyond all measure,” he told the Anchorage Daily News.
He was in flight for four hours, and then he heard the captain welcome them to Anchorage, he told the outlet. He thought it must have been a mistake — it doesn’t take four hours to get to Anchorage. Maybe he had been put on the wrong flight, he thought.
But a flight attendant confirmed that the plane was rerouted to Anchorage instead of Seattle because of severe storms in the area, the Anchorage Daily News reported. “I felt like my life was slipping away,” he told the outlet.
On Big Heart, his wife wrote that Holland had set a goal for 30 more years of life from the time he received his new heart. “And on Friday he felt that he had lost 30 years of his life,” she wrote.
The heart transplant coordinator told Holland they would keep the heart for him as long as they could if he could catch the next flight in 45 minutes, CNN reported. But then he got the bad news that flight had been canceled, too. “My worst fears were overwhelming me,” he said.
“I told my brother, I said the next phone call is not gonna be good,” he told the outlet. “And just as I was calling her, she was calling me back to tell me that they were gonna give the heart to somebody else.”
Now this family plans to have Holland live apart from them in Seattle to avoid the same thing happening again.
“Our next discussion is how to get Patrick a place to stay in Seattle so he doesn’t miss another opportunity,” Haley wrote on their blog. “The time for him to be away from us is now.”
This story was originally published December 29, 2022 at 3:56 PM with the headline "Man misses shot at heart transplant as flight after flight canceled. ‘My worst fears’."
