The unsettling memory from more than 30 dusty years ago, tucked away for so long, jarred Scot Pollard as if he was being struck by a lightning bolt from the past.
A doctor was trying to explain how the complex medical tangle of genetics, a virus and a big body led to the need for a heart transplant.
As the cardiologist made an opening-and-closing fist to illustrate the organ’s normal way of pumping blood, he held out his fingers and wiggled them in a fluttering motion to show how Pollard’s heart was struggling.
It was the same set of hand motions another doctor made to his father, Pearl, when Pollard was 16.
“That about broke me when my cardiologist did the same thing,” said Pollard, 49, the former NBA mainstay who starred at Torrey Pines. “I lost my (mind). It was the exact same thing they did with my dad. I’m like, I’m going to die.”
Pollard had watched helplessly as his father waited on a San Diego transplant list for a heart that never arrived. Now he was facing the same thing with the same sort of body-size challenges.
As he grew tired of being tired and considered accepting his fate without a fight, a sobering thought arrived.
His son Ozzy is 16.
“I joined this Facebook group that helps other people like me,” Pollard said. “Someone had put a quote on that page, essentially saying you’re not doing this for you. It’s for your loved ones, basically. I’m getting teary-eyed thinking about it.
“I have a 16-year-old son. I was 16 when my dad died. How (expletive) selfish am I being? I’m throwing in the towel? I’ve never quit anything in my life and I’m going to quit life?
“That was the mental punch I needed. Get back in the game, dumbass.”
So, Pollard did. He began scrambling to get on transplant lists at multiple hospitals. A friend pointed him toward someone at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn.
The harrowing wait of his father was now his, but advancements meant he would not necessarily need another 6-foot-11 man’s heart.
On Feb. 16, while waiting in Vanderbilt’s ICU because of his deteriorating condition, the heart came. Three months later, it has become a mix of complicated adjustments and gratitude.
“It’s a roller coaster,” Pollard said. “More good days than bad days. Any transplant recipient will tell you, it’s trading one set of problems for another set of problems. The anti-rejection drugs are just brutal. They decimate your immune system and make you sick.
“There’s a new diet. You can’t eat anything not cooked well. I loved rare steaks, but I’ll never have another one because the risk of bacteria is too great. You have to take meds every 12 hours on the dot or you risk rejection.
“Is it horrible? No. I’m alive. And I never want to seem like I’m complaining about that. It’s just been a really big life adjustment.”
The joy spilled out after waking up from the 5 1/2-hour surgery, when a breathing tube was removed.
“I hadn’t sung in a long time because I didn’t have the breath to do it,” Pollard said. “Now I had blood and oxygen getting to my brain. I started singing, ‘I left my heart … in San Fran-Nashville.’
“My wife starting laughing and crying. She said, ‘He’s back.’ She jokes that I haven’t stopped talking since I woke up.”
Pollard always worried this darkness might be looming on an uncertain horizon.
The large frame helped Pollard excel on the court, first at Torrey Pines and then at the University of Kansas, where he helped lead the Jayhawks to four consecutive Sweet 16 runs in the NCAA Tournament. He played for five NBA teams, including the 2008 NBA champion Celtics.
That same physical reality, along with a genetic condition that mirrored his father’s condition, also made it possible Pollard also would face a dire need for a heart.
“We knew my dad wasn’t likely to get a transplant,” Pollard said. “They told him it was not likely, slim to none. He had been given a death sentence, basically.
“It wasn’t a death sentence for me. It has to be a big person, but now someone 6-1 or 6-2 could be my donor as long as the heart pumps enough blood.”
Though Pollard ticks off the hurdles in his new life, he also marvels at drastic changes for the better.
“Your qualify of life is better,” he said. “If you and I had been talking in January, I would’ve had to stop by now. I have oxygen in my brain now. The new heart is pumping three times what it was before I almost died.”
Three months in, the learning curve remains steep. Pollard was told six months is a good gauge of where someone will be moving forward, after the near constant adjustments of drugs and dosages find a sweet spot.
Worth the fight? What do you think?
As Pollard talked about it all, he watched a son at soccer practice.
