Final Beat Of A Golden Heart

We have no regrets about the decision we took in 1994.

- Reg Green

THE BOY WHO RECEIVED MY SON’S heart died on February 7th this year, although he wasn’t really a boy any longer. He was 37 years old. But when my 7-year old son, Nicholas, was shot in an attempted carjacking on a family vacation in Italy, Andrea Mongiardo was just 15.

At the hospital in Sicily, my wife, Maggie, and I decided to donate Nicholas’s organs and corneas for transplant. They went to seven very sick Italians, four of them teenagers. 

Andrea, who lived in Rome, had been in and out of hospitals because of a defective heart. Several operations had failed to help, and at the time of Nicholas’ death in 1994, he was receiving transfusions of blood products twice a week. In the words of his physician, Andrea was “struggling to survive.” His parents were in despair, knowing that a transplant was not only his best hope, it was his only hope.

In those days, the rate of organ donations in Italy was among the lowest in Western Europe. Andrea’s chances of getting a new heart in time to save his life were slim to none.