THE FRONT ROW with MARK NELKE: The heart of the matter — The story of Dan Christ's heart transplant, and the Coeur d'Alene man's message of hope to others

May 5 was an otherwise dreary day in the Inland Northwest. 

It was cold and rainy, but Dan and his wife Nicole Christ of Coeur d’Alene were participating in Bloomsday for the first time. 

One of Dan’s cardiologists had invited him to join him on the 7.46-mile event, where many of the thousands of participants run, and many thousands walk, on a course that begins and ends in downtown Spokane. 

“And we actually jogged one of the miles, and I hadn’t jogged a mile in five years,” recalled Dan, 51. 

“It was kind of a gross, rainy day, but we did it, and it was pretty amazing,” Nicole remembered. 

That’s because it was the first major activity for Dan Christ with his new heart. 

IN JANUARY 2020, Dan Christ (pronounced Chryst, not like ... you know ...) had surgery to remove a malignant melanoma from his abdomen. 

Some three months later, his wife Nicole noticed he was short of breath. They would go on walks, and he was fine on the flat parts, but once they hit a hill, he was exhausted. 

“Which was really odd,” Dan recalled. “Because I’ve done a lot of triathlons. I’m a runner, super active, and it’s like ‘Wait, I can’t even go up this little hill.’” 

“I actually teased him that he was breathing like a fat man,” Nicole recalled. “You don’t think anything of it.” 

Ditto after his first bike ride of the spring. 

“Something wasn’t right, but I really couldn’t tell you what was wrong,” he said.  

He went to his doctor in May, who ran some tests and called back the next day and said, “I’m concerned about your heart; you need to get a stress test really soon.” 

Dan went to Kootenai Health on June 11 for a stress test and discovered his resting heart rate was 170. 

“Their goal was to get me up to 150 and I was already sitting at 170 doing nothing,” Dan said. “I couldn’t tell you what the term ventricular tachycardia was, but that’s what I had.” 

He was told his ventricle was beating out of control. The doctor in the emergency room told him 170 was a great heart rate if you’re a hummingbird, but not if you’re a human. 

“They took me by stretcher to an ambulance and literally drove me across the street to the ER,” Dan said.  

“I had no idea how serious this was.” 

THAT NIGHT, doctors did a cardiac MRI and saw scarring on Dan’s heart ... but they didn’t know why. They cardioverted him — low-energy shocks to restore a normal heart rhythm — in an attempt to get his heart rate down. The next day they gave him an angiogram, and inserted an ICD — basically a pacemaker/defibrillator, the thought of which seemed shocking to him. 

“I went from super healthy to, 'What are you putting in my body?’” Dan said. “I asked the doctor, ‘Why are you doing this so fast?’, and she said it’s for life-saving measures. 

"OK.” 

He spent a few days in the hospital, where initially doctors were looking for some sort of cancer, based on his melanoma. 

Eventually he was referred to Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane, to its center for advanced heart disease and transplant, “which even the title of that was quite unnerving,” Dan said. 

Sacred Heart was one of three heart transplant centers in the Pacific Northwest, along with ones in Seattle and Portland. 

After multiple tests over the next six months, including a heart biopsy in November 2020, doctors diagnosed Dan with cardiac sarcoidosis. 

According to Johns Hopkins Medicine: 

“In cardiac sarcoidosis, tiny collections of immune cells form granulomas in the heart tissue and can interfere with normal functioning. This can result in heart rhythm abnormalities, also known as arrhythmias, such as ventricular tachycardia or heart block. It can also lead to cardiomyopathy or heart failure.” 

“It was really good that they got that diagnosis,” Dan said. “In a sense it (my heart) was overworking. It was the electrical, and that was getting out of control.” 

They tried treating the sarcoid with medicine, but that didn’t work, so Dan would have to make occasional trips to the hospital to get cardioverted — even once while on vacation — because his heart would get up to 160, 170 beats per minute and he couldn’t get it lowered. 

Doctors tried ablations — the removal or destruction of a body part or tissue or its function — to help with the scarring on Dan’s heart, to no avail. 

“A few days before Christmas,” Dan said, “the doctor looked at me and said, ‘You need a heart. I’m very sorry, but you need a heart.’” 

IT WAS, Dan said, a mixture of “shocking news” and “the best news I could hear, because I was in bad shape.” 

Dan went on the transplant list in February 2022. 

A third ablation followed, and he felt pretty good for about six months. 

Then, the symptoms returned ... the high heart rate, etc. 

“By mid-August I passed out a couple of times,” Dan said. “Once was in the middle of the street, trying to get into my car. I could feel it coming on, I was trying to get in my car, and the next thing I knew was, I was looking at the sky. Good thing I was on the phone.” 

As it turned out, he had an appointment scheduled that day at Sacred Heart. The doctor told him he was likely to admit him, but wanted to run one more test in a couple days. 

After that test, he told Dan, “You’re staying.” 

The doctor let him have the weekend at home. Dan mentioned going to the Boise area the following weekend to watch his son Nolan’s football game and was told, “You’re not going anywhere outside of Coeur d’Alene.” 

On Monday, Aug. 29, 2022, Dan moved into a sixth-floor room at Sacred Heart, where he would spend the next 200 days.

A social worker, Dan worked remotely from the hospital when he could.  

“They had me in the hospital because they had to keep me on a medication that would help my heart not work so hard,” Dan said. “Actually, that helped me overall feel decent, because it just maximized my heart and didn’t put too much work on it.” 

But, Dan was progressively getting worse. 

He was in the hospital for most of his son’s junior year. Thanksgiving and Christmas were “celebrated” at the hospital with family, as was his 50th birthday.  

Nicole, a bookkeeper, would visit on weekends, and sometimes during the week, often bringing a crock pot meal as part of a “date night,” which often included a movie. 

Dan and Nicole, who have been married 27 years, moved to Coeur d’Alene in 1999, then started a family.

During the week, there would be phone calls and FaceTime calls with the family — including Nolan, a recent graduate of Coeur d’Alene High who has signed to play baseball at Centralia (Wash.) College, as well as their two daughters, Olivia, 23, living in Seattle and preparing to go to law school at Northwestern; and Claire, 21, finishing her nursing degree from Grand Canyon University in Phoenix. 

For those 200 days, it was just Nicole and Nolan at home. 

“I’m naturally not a real emotional person, so that probably helped,” Nicole said. “But it was exhausting, because our girls were not at home — either working, or away at school, in different cities. There was a lot of FaceTiming, and a lot of phone calls. I would say exhausting to navigate everyone’s different stages on whatever they were going through, and trying to help everybody the best.” 

For Claire, the nursing student, some of the things she was learning at school hit a little too close to home. 

JUST BEFORE Thanksgiving, Dan said he was “feeling pretty crummy — physically, mentally, emotionally.” 

He was alternately frustrated, but grateful for the world-class care. He read some scripture for encouragement.  

One day he went out into the hallway to take a walk — accompanied by a nurse, in case he fell. 

“And then I saw Paul Manzardo,” Dan recalled. 

Paul is a longtime baseball coach in the area, coaching at every level from Little League to Lake City High to North Idaho College. 

Paul shared with Dan the story of his wife, Windy, who had been admitted to the hospital a few days earlier, after being diagnosed with cardiac sarcoidosis. 

Windy remains on the heart transplant list, but has been cleared to travel, and was able to fly to Cleveland to watch their oldest son, Kyle, make his major league debut in May. 

“I looked around, and it was just outside the nurses’ station, and you just see all the nurses with huge smiles on their faces,” Dan said. “Because Windy had been there through the weekend, but they couldn’t tell me, because of HIPAA. So Windy had been there for a few days, and they even said when Windy came up to the floor, they said, ‘This is Dan’s twin. Same age. Coeur d’Alene. Same odd disease that hardly anybody ever has,’ and yet they couldn’t say anything. So they were all so glad that I saw Paul.  

“And Paul was telling me all these things about Windy, and he says, ‘What are you doing here? “I said, ‘For the same reason.’” 

Dan went and talked to Windy, and they reconnected. 

“To have somebody to identify with was huge, somebody who was going through what I was going through,” Dan said. 

By January and February, Dan’s condition worsened. Dan said he has an unusually high amount of antibodies, which limited his potential match. The doctors were getting “hits” on hearts for Dan, but they weren’t a match. 

“Once the holidays had passed, I think some anger for both of us set in, that it just felt like kind of a cruel joke ... Is this ever going to happen?” Nicole said. “It started feeling like maybe it would never happen.” 

THEN CAME Feb. 27, 2023. 

Dr. Mudd was the doctor on call that day. Every day, Dan was visited by his health care providers. The doctor had come off call, but two hours later, he popped into Dan’s room. 

“What we had been told was, you’ll know you’re getting a heart when both the doctor and the surgeon come in together,” Dan said. “Because they will not come in under any other circumstances than to tell you the news.” 

It was around 8 p.m. He figured Dr. Mudd was just stopping by to say Hi.  

But right behind him was Dr. Smith, the surgeon. 

“He immediately gave me two thumbs up, and I immediately started bawling,” Dan said, getting choked up at the recollection. “I just said ‘No way, no way.’ 

“Because I was starting to believe, for the previous two weeks, that it just wasn’t going to happen. Not that I was going to die; but I was starting to give up hope.” 

Dan looked at the surgeon, Dr. Smith. 

“Is it a good one?” he asked. 

“She said ‘Dan, I promised you a Ferrari. You’re getting a Ferrari.’ 

“She said ‘I would put this heart in my own son.’” 

MEANWHILE, Nicole and Nolan were attending a preseason meeting for the Coeur d’Alene High baseball team, for players and parents. They had just returned home, when Dan called Nicole with the good news. 

"He was really emotional, and I thought something was drastically wrong,” Nicole said, “because he was so overly emotional and excited. He had a hard time getting the words out that they had a heart for him.  

“I was saying, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure?’ 

“And Nolan comes whipping around the corner, because he can hear the commotion, and he was super-excited, because he could hear what was going on.” 

They arranged for a family FaceTime call. 

One holdup — Olivia, preparing for law school, was taking a practice LSAT (Law School Admission Test). It was timed, and she wasn’t answering her phone. 

Finally, Claire texted her: “Olivia, you’ve got to get on this call.” 

Olivia finally did, and said “You guys, I’m doing ... “ 

Then she saw the excited faces on the FaceTime call, and she gasped. 

And gasped again. 

“But that was so symbolic,” Dan said. “We had been waiting so long that we were wondering if it was ever going to happen.” 

Surgery was two days later, late in the afternoon on March 1. 

Dan was in the ICU for 12 days. He had some lung complications, not unusual for a first-time heart surgery patient.  

Around September, Dan started feeling much better. 

“I feel better than I’ve felt in years,” Dan said Monday, sitting in the bleachers at Thorco Field, watching his son play in a Legion baseball game. “I’m a new man ... I’m a miracle.” 

He said there was no connection between the melanoma and the heart issues; he was told the sarcoid could have been brewing for years, an auto-immune disease. It’s not hereditary.  

Before his heart issues, Dan competed in a half-Ironman, several Olympic-distance triathlons in Coeur d’Alene, and half-marathons in Coeur d’Alene and Seattle. 

“At first it was hard for me to see other people jogging, riding, and I resented that, because I was stuck,” Dan said. “I would get a little bit of an attitude toward people who could exercise, because I was stuck." 

And now? 

"I can’t say enough about organ donation,” he said. “I’m alive today, because somebody checked the box. That person is a lifesaver, because especially in my case, if that heart hadn’t worked, my condition was getting so bad, we just don’t know when the next heart would come available.  

“So I can’t say enough about the donor’s family, and how grateful I am to them.”

DAN IS not quite back to running yet, but is working on it. He plans to get on his bicycle soon. One of his daughters wants him to do a half-marathon next spring, so he figures he’ll work up to that distance with a 5K run, then a 10K ... and another triathlon is a possibility. 

Dan keeps in touch with Paul and Windy. 

“I just want to see her get that heart, and be able to experience what I’m experiencing right now,” Dan said. “Even for us, we never knew anybody who had a heart transplant, and I don’t know that we thought that life could really be this good afterward.” 

Dan said he’s happy to share his story — and has, with small groups. 

His message? 

“I think it gives hope to people going through something unimaginable,” Dan said. “Who would have ever thought you would hit a point in life where you would face something like this? You can’t imagine, so I want other people to know ‘Hey, you can make it. It’s going to be hard; it can be hell, but you can make it.’” 

Hospital workers called him “the healthiest sickest person on the floor,” he said, “because ... I was on very thin ice because of my heart condition, but the rest of my body was very healthy.” 

He thinks back to the night of his 50th birthday, when he had 40 VTs (ventricular tachycardia flareups), just the evening of his birthday, which required attention. 

He kept a journal while in the hospital, read a book written by a Holocaust survivor, and tried to keep a positive attitude. 

Then last month, he did Bloomsday for the first time. 

“No matter how challenging life can be, there’s always a reason to hope,” he said. “My personal mission is to inspire others to overcome any challenges they face. Because, with the help of my wife, family, friends, amazing doctors and nurses, I was able to overcome something I never thought could have possibly happened. 

“I’m just very grateful, humbled by what was given to me,” Dan said. “I don’t ever want to lose that sense of awe.” 

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 208-664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @CdAPressSports. 

    Photo by BUSCEMA PHOTOGRAPHY The Christ family, in August 2023, from left: Nolan, Claire, Nicole, Dan and Olivia.
  

    Courtesy photo Dan Christ, surrounded by family, friends and medical personnel, prepares to leave Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane in March 2023, after receiving a heart transplant.

    Courtesy photo Dan Christ's home away from home for some 200 days, as he awaited a heart transplant — a room on the sixth floor at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane.