Nurse Reprimanded, Fined For Dropping Heart

A nurse who accidentally dropped a donated human heart, then threw it in a trash can without telling transplant officials, was reprimanded and fined, officials said Wednesday.

Fearing she had contaminated the organ, Wanda R. Condon, a registered nurse at Sacred Heart Medical Center, discarded it and then falsified documents to indicate the heart had been shipped to a tissue recovery laboratory, the state Department of Health concluded.

Condon was accused of unprofessional conduct for inappropriate handling of a human heart donated for transplant purposes, said Annetta Slettevold, nurse practice manager with the Health Department’s Quality Assurance Commission in Olympia.

The incident was revealed to the public in a statement from the Health Department summarizing recent disciplinary action against care providers statewide.

“What can I say? She screwed up and has been through hell over it,” Condon’s husband, John Condon, said Wednesday night. “My wife is not a criminal She made a human error.”

Wanda Condon was in Atlanta on business and not available for comment, he said.

John Condon said his wife was pregnant and tired from working a long day when she dropped the heart and then threw it away.

“She thought she was protecting the (potential) recipient,” he said. “I think her biggest mistake was not coming clean.”

Condon said his wife, who’d been a nurse for 15 years when she dropped the heart, regretted not coming forward about throwing the heart away.

“She is a good person, a good mother, a good nurse,” he said. “You don’t hear about the years of good service.”

Wanda Condon was relieved of her position as weekend relief coordinator for the Organ Procurement Agency, but remains employed by Sacred Heart, said Janet Steele, the agency’s director.

The heart had been brought to Sacred Heart from Alaska, but the transplant operation was canceled when the potential recipient’s condition deteriorated, Steele said.

Because no other transplant candidates were immediately available within the four hours an organ can be kept outside a body, doctors decided to recover valves so the heart would not be wasted, she said.

The incident occurred Nov. 28, 1993, while Condon was preparing the heart for shipment to a tissue processing laboratory, Steele said.

“This was an accident. An isolated accident can happen to any surgeon, any nurse at any time,” Steele said. “The failure in this was she didn’t report it immediately. A life was not lost in this. There was a loss of some valves, which are certainly precious, but no life was lost.”