As pink and red heart-shaped balloons bob in the breeze outside their home, Paul and Lynnette Cardall are examining prescription bottles inside.
There's a new heart beating in Paul's chest. Lynnette's heart, for the first time in more than a year, is finally beginning to rest easy.
The LDS musician and his wife came home from the hospital on Wednesday, weeks before anyone had believed would be possible after Paul's heart transplant two weeks ago at Primary Children's Medical Center.
Doctors had told them it would be five to six weeks before he would be strong enough to unplug all the oxygen and IV lines so he could walk away a free man, but as he has done so many times before, Cardall surprised them all.
Before his recent surgery, the 36-year-old husband and father was the oldest Utah patient with his specific type of congenital heart disease to have survived to his age without a transplant. To have him home so soon, and without experiencing any major complications, "is a dream come true. It's just a miracle," Lynnette Cardall said.
Before leaving the hospital, the couple was shown Cardall's old heart, "a football-sized" organ he said he had been lucky to live so long with, considering it was only about half-functional. He said that as he held a portion of it in his hands, turning it over and over and examining the stitches from past surgeries, that was the moment when he "truly understood that somebody else is clearly in charge of our lives."
Future medical students at the University of Utah will hold his old heart in their hands also as a learning tool to help understand congenital heart disease, even as Cardall continues on a series of anti-rejection drugs to keep his body from rejecting the new organ.
Surgeons removed most of his old heart, but the left ventricle and the left atrium remain in his chest because they were in such good shape after doing all the work his full heart should have been doing.
When the new heart was placed inside his chest on the operating table, the surgeon turned around for a moment to grab the paddles that would send an electric current through the heart so it would start beating again.
"He looked back and the heart had started beating on its own, just like it was meant to be there," Cardall said. His year-long journey to a transplant, after he was listed for a heart in August 2008 through the surgery and recovery itself, has been "sobering, miraculous and divinely orchestrated," he said Wednesday, standing in his kitchen next to a cache of pill bottles as if he were just preparing to fix dinner.
The normalcy of life without oxygen tanks, constant fatigue and the continuous "what if" thoughts has yet to really sink in, but the Cardall family is more than ready to let that happen. Three-year-old Eden has seemed to take it all in stride, back from her tap dance lesson in a pink tutu and blithely oblivious to the life-or-death drama that her dad's most recent hospital stay entailed.
Cardall will return to see his doctors often as they monitor his daily intake of medication via computer, including at least five anti-rejections drugs.
He's set a text message on his iPhone to be sent 15 minutes before he is scheduled to take each of at least a dozen different medications.
It will take time for his sternum to heal and his immune system to rebound, so he'll be spending a lot of time at home with family. He looks forward to the rehab program doctors will implement to help him rebuild muscle lost as his body grew steadily weaker before and after surgery.
He's also anxious to "be athletic" with activities like running and hiking that haven't been possible for years, and looks forward to a stay in the family cabin in the coming weeks without the altitude sickness he used to experience there. Skiing is a goal he's set for next spring, with a climb to the top of Mount Olympus scheduled for summer, in commemoration of his late brother Brian's life.
As for his music, Cardall said he's ready to work on some things at home, but he won't be performing publicly until a February concert dubbed "Living for Eden," part two, named after a recent album he released in honor of his daughter. Last spring, fellow LDS musicians put on a benefit concert by the same name, donating the proceeds to the Cardall family for medical expenses.
He now plans to do the same for others who are dealing with large medical bills caused by congenital heart disease.
He'll also be making the final posts to his transplant blog in the next week or two, though the contents will still be available online for anyone looking for information about congenital heart disease and his experience with the journey to — and through — surgery.
As an initial nod to what he expects will be a new lease on a life of more normalcy, Cardall said one of his first acts on arriving home was to "eat a plate full of tomatoes," after neighbors came Tuesday night to clean up his yard and harvest the tomato plants they placed there last spring.
Despite the gravity of his illness, they planted with the hope that he would be around to at least see the fall harvest.
So when they see him walking the neighborhood soon, it's certain they won't be disappointed.
For more information on becoming an organ donor, call the Utah Donor Registry at 866-YES-UTAH or see the Web site at www.yesutah.org.
The United Network for Organ Sharing has detailed nationwide information at www.UNOS.org.
e-mail: carrie@desnews.com