Two Black heart failure patients beat the odds after waiting just weeks before they learned they would get a second chance at survival.
They are rare exceptions because African-Americans needing an organ transplant typically wait at least a year before hope arrives.
“I was at the lowest point in my life. I had no energy to do anything,” Dave Ford told KOVR-TV.
Ford, 63, of Rancho Cordova, California, is a retired lieutenant with the Department of Corrections. He needed a heart transplant to replace his damaged or failing heart. While he waited for a donor, he met Wendell Stallworth, 62, who was also waiting for a new heart. The duo often saw each other during their month-long stay at Sutter Medical Center in Sacramento, California.
“We both spent over a month in CVICU as pre-heart transplant patients,” Stallworth said to Sutter Health.
The month-long wait Stallworth and Ford experienced was relatively short compared to the average wait time. Black heart transplant patients between 2005 and 2016 experienced longer wait times for a heart transplant than other racial and ethnic groups. A 2018 study found the wait can last at least a year.
Black people experience the highest rates of heart failure but receive heart transplants at lower rates than white people. Black people are also “four times as likely” to develop kidney failure as white people but are less likely to receive a kidney transplant, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.
In a report released by the Department of Health and Human Services last October, a little more than 33,000 Black people, who make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, were on the U.S. transplant waiting list for organs for a kidney, liver, heart, or lung. By comparison, a little more than 46,000 white people needed an organ.
On average, 16 people die every day because they don’t receive an organ transplant in time, according to the American Transplant…
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