ST. CHARLES – Thanks to a recent heart transplant, St. Charles resident Ralph Nuti will be able to spend the Christmas season playing with his grandchildren.

“The last 10 months or whatever, I could barely walk 20 feet,” Nuti said. “I just couldn’t breathe. It was very hard to do almost anything. I have a 2-year-old granddaughter and a 6-year-old granddaughter and the 2-year-old wants to play tag all the time. Well, in the past, all I could do was sit in a chair. And now I can chase her, which is a lot of fun.”

Nuti was one of a record number of patients to get heart transplants at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago this year. As of Dec. 17, Northwestern Memorial Hospital had completed 54 surgeries in 2018, breaking a 23-year-old Illinois record for number of heart transplants in a single year. The previous record was 45 in 1995.

According to national statistics, at any given time, almost 3,500 to 4,000 people are waiting for a heart or heart-lung transplant. Luckily for Nuti, he didn’t have to wait long for his new heart.

“Surprisingly, I only waited 99 days,” he said. “It can take three or five years and some people never get them.”

Time was of the essence. In early June, he had to have a left ventricular assist device installed because his heart was failing. The device is a battery-operated, mechanical pump that helps the left ventricle (main pumping chamber of the heart) pump blood to the rest of the body.

“My heart was failing very badly,” Nuti said. “I could only pump 18 percent of my blood, and that’s why I could barely walk or anything. It’s a procedure that kind of extends your life and puts it in a holding pattern before you get a transplant. Without that, I probably would have been dead in September.”

Because his heart was failing, he was moved to the top of a waiting list for heart transplants. And then he developed a blood infection.

As it turns out, the blood infection was actually a good thing. As his doctor told him, the infection pushed him even higher on the waiting list for a new heart.

The heart transplant took place on Sept. 23, with the procedure taking 12 1/2 hours.

“I had a pacemaker and a defibrillator put in, so they took that out and took out the machine that was pumping my blood,” Nuti said. “Then they had to take the heart out and then they put the new heart in.”

He woke up four days later in the hospital’s intensive care unit, and the benefits of having a new heart were noticeable to him right away.

“I could breathe,” Nuti said. “That was amazing. And that was something I really hadn’t been able to do in a long time.”

Nuti’s heart problems started when he was 40 and he experienced back-to-back heart attacks.

“Nine years later, I had a quadruple bypass,” he said.

Heart problems run in his family.

“My dad died of heart disease and my grandfather and great-grandfather died of heart attacks,” Nuti said.

Nuti is doing better than expected after his heart transplant, said Dr. Duc Thinh Pham, surgical director of the Center for Advanced Heart Failure at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

“He looks great,” Pham said. “Most patients really don’t look this good that soon after their transplant. He’s doing phenomenal.”

And his long-term prognosis also is good.

“Just to put it in perspective, patients like him, with end-stage heart failure, less than 50 percent of those patients will live beyond a year or two once they get to the stage he did,” Pham said. “Now, with a heart transplant, he has a greater than 90 percent chance of living beyond two to three years from his transplant anniversary. And the long-term survival for heart transplant patients is about 70 percent at 10 years.”

Although Nuti’s family has a history of heart problems, Pham said there are many things the average person can do to avoid heart disease.

“People can eat a heart healthy diet, get good regular exercise and stay away from smoking,” Pham said. “Those are the three main things that can really add up to preventing heart disease.”