A young Sunshine Coast surfer who was “weeks from death’’ before receiving a life-saving heart transplant is using his amazing story to help others.
At 22, Beerwah’s Nathan Pain fell ill with a virus that doctors believe led to him developing cardiomyopathy, where his heart became inflamed and started to fail. It was operating at less than 20 per cent capacity.
The former Glasshouse Country Christian College student recounted the day his life turned upside down when he went into cardiac arrest and had to be rescued while surfing at Wurtulla.
“I just caught a wave. All my friends had paddled back in and I was just going out to get one last wave in and that’s the last thing I remember,’’ he said.
“I just blacked out – on the board facedown. And I was probably out for about 15 minutes, waking up on the beach after having CPR done.’’
His partner and now wife, Eleisha, was on the beach when the emergency unfolded.
“All of a sudden he collapsed in the water. When we dragged him back to shore, he was completely unconscious,’’ she said.
“Luckily, there was a doctor surfing nearby who started giving him CPR. At that point I really thought he was dead. He was just not conscious. He was not there. I really thought it was the end.
“But luckily he came to and the ambulance arrived and took him to the hospital where he was helicoptered down to the Prince Charles Hospital in Brisbane.’’
Nathan (pictured) said that doctors told him he would need a transplant – and urgently.
However, this proved a lengthy process.
He was waitlisted for a heart transplant in late 2018 and placed on a heart assist device not long before the pandemic struck.
Nathan spent 13 months on this device, under the care of The Prince Charles Hospital specialists, unsure whether his life-saving call would ever come.
He would find out later that he was within weeks of death as his heart had weakened and the mechanical support struggled to keep him alive.
Nathan, now 25, described the phone call that would give him another chance at life as “all very surreal’’.
“I completely lost my breath for a minute and had to regain my composure, in total shock for the moment,” he said.
“I had to stop to think that for me to achieve this outcome, it meant someone else had undergone tragedy, loss and ultimately they had to make the final decision to donate their loved one’s organs.’’
DonateLife has revealed that despite the many obstacles faced in 2020, 1,270 Australian lives were saved through an organ transplant due to the generosity of 463 deceased organ donors and their families.
The number of Queensland donors declined by 19% from 2019, and the number of people who received transplants was down by 16% last year.
There are currently around 1,650 Australians waitlisted for a transplant and more than 12,000 additional people are on dialysis – many who may need a kidney transplant.
Nathan, who is back surfing and enjoying his life with Eleisha, could not be more grateful.
“I think it would be pretty hard to put into words the gratefulness that I feel towards the family that said yes to donating their loved one’s organs to me.
“It’s given me my life back. It’s given me the opportunity to live again, to do the things that I love.
“I didn’t come from a family with heart disease. It was just totally random. For people thinking: ‘ah that won’t happen to me’. I didn’t think it would either.”
DonateLife Queensland Medical Director, Leo Nunnink, said he was proud of how the team had pulled together to overcome one of the most challenging years the donation service had ever faced.
“We’ve never seen anything like what we faced in 2020, with border closures, flight cancellations, restrictions on families visiting their loved ones in Intensive Care Units and necessary changes to health protocols,” he said.
“I’m extremely thankful for the resilience of donor families who pushed through very difficult circumstances to ensure their loved ones could save lives, and I’m proud of how our nurses and doctors adapted to the challenges.”
Challenges included new infection control measures, a national six-week suspension of kidney transplants to protect compromised patients, and the scarcity of commercial flights for timely pathology tests and tissue typing.’’
Latest data shows 86 Queenslanders saved the lives of 253 Australians in 2020 through organ donation, with many more gifting tissue such as eye, heart tissue, bone and skin.
It’s easy to register. It takes around 60 seconds on the Australian Organ Donor Register at donatelife.gov.au.
QUEENSLAND DONOR FACTS
- 86 Queenslanders who died last year became organ donors, saving the lives of 253 Australians.
- Challenges associated with COVID-19 resulted in small declines in both the number of transplant recipients Qlders saved (-16%) and donors (-19%) in Queensland.
- Staff worked exhaustively to develop new ways of delivering compassionate end-of-life care, and to minimise the disruption to the organ transplant program.
- The proportion of Qld families who consented to organ donation last year remained steady at 62%.
- Queensland organ donor numbers have almost doubled in the decade since Australia’s national program began.
INFORMATION: www.donatelife.gov.au
