The Beat Goes On Heart Patient And Her Family Pull Together To Get Through Agonizing Wait For Transplant

Before she got sick, Mikie Duncan never thought the sound of her heart would someday fill a room.

Now, a machine that keeps the 40-year-old woman alive until a donor heart can be found goes “kerchunk, kerchunk” 70 times a minute, like a tennis shoe tumbling in a dryer.

The sound drifts in and out of the consciousness of Duncan’s family. It’s a constant reminder of how close to death Duncan is, but a comfort as well, since every “beat” means a longer life for Duncan.

“My little girl loves the sound,” said Duncan’s sister, Jamie Hanna. “She jams to it.”

Duncan is one of 63 people in Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Alaska waiting for a heart transplant. With them are the hundreds who wait vicariously.

For Duncan, that includes her friends and family.

Duncan’s family, which grew up on the South Hill, near Manito Park, is never far from the room Duncan has called home for eight months, on the sixth floor of Sacred Heart Medical Center.

They have steadfastly sat through her pain, the eight hours of surgery during which Duncan’s life hung in the balance and the days when it hurt her to shift even an inch in bed.

In February, they sat nervously through a “dry run,” when doctors believed they’d located a donor heart only to learn, a few excruciating hours later, the heart wasn’t a match.

Duncan’s mother, brother, seven sisters and Jeff Duncan, the man she married a year ago, have held their breath, crossed their fingers and prayed, as if their names were also on the life-giving list.

“We hope the wait won’t be forever,” said Hanna, 32.

Duncan has dealt with the heart condition since she was 26. She went to a clinic and doctors told her it was a virus that would last about a month.

“But I began having problems breathing at night,” she said, weaving a handkerchief through her slender fingers.

“All you had to do was look at my heart; it was beating out of my shirt.”

Duncan had contracted rheumatic fever, a viral disease that can attack the heart, permanently weakening the muscles. In the past year, her heart deteriorated, and she came to depend on her family.

“We come from a small Irish family,” said sister Gail McWilliams, referring to the 11-member clan in which Duncan has always played a special role.

“Mikie has always been the mediator.”

Ironically, Duncan’s illness has brought the family closer together.

“Not that this is the way to do it,” McWilliams added.

“Some of the sisters weren’t getting along,” Duncan explained. “I’ve always spoken to them even when they weren’t speaking to one another. This has been good for them.”

Sisters Laura Wallingford, Tami McWilliams, Gail McWilliams, Lynn Snow, Julie Hurst, Becky Squier and Jamie Hanna, and brother Stu McWilliams share what they can with Duncan, including their own families.

“I can’t have kids … never been able to,” Duncan said. “So Jamie and I share one baby, Jenny Leann,” Jamie’s 14-month-old daughter.

Five years ago Jeff Duncan joined the family.

Jeff met Mikie at a bar one night after work.

“She came up to me and said she thought she knew me,” he said. “I thought she was kind of cute.”

As their relationship progressed, Mikie told Jeff just how sick she was, how she might have to face a heart transplant some day.

The revelation gave him pause, but he never drew back. Mikie was too full of life.

“It was scary,” he admitted. “I didn’t know if I wanted to proceed in our relationship with that kind of problem.

“But she acted healthy, and nothing seemed to get in her way.”

A year ago, on New Year’s Eve, Mikie and Jeff married.

Mikie had gotten sicker. The time when she might need a new heart was drawing near.

Jeff visits Mikie every day after work and on weekends.

“It’s kind of hard, having all your holidays here,” he said. “Even our anniversary.”

A few weeks after her anniversary, Duncan and her family faced a major setback.

Seven weeks ago, Duncan’s heart failed after waiting eight months for a donor. The wait would be over unless doctors could implant a blood filtering device to do the job her 10-ounce heart couldn’t.

The operation was risky and had been performed only 11 times in the past six years. The filter would run from Duncan’s heart to a 125-pound machine that pumps the blood through her aorta into the arteries.

Would Duncan consent to the procedure? She talked it over with her husband and sisters.

“We were scared,” Hanna said.

Suddenly, Duncan’s sisters and her husband were pacing outside an operating room, no longer waiting for news of an available transplant but for the quick word of life or death.

The surgery dragged on.

Surgeons spent eight hours working on Duncan, twice the normal time required to implant the two-pound metal device into the abdomen. The filter, the size and shape of a small cast-iron frying pan, was too big to fit inside a 5-foot-4-inch-tall, 102-pound woman.

The operation turned into a precarious form of child’s play - how to fit a too-large peg into a too-small cavity.

“They filleted me like a fish,” said Duncan, whose flowered shift barely conceals the bulge in her right side where doctors implanted the device - backwards - to fit the contours of her body.

“The surgery was the hardest part,” said Hanna. Everyone was scared.

Duncan had to pull through - and she did.

Hanna had seen Duncan sicker, 14 years earlier, when she helped care for Duncan when she was first diagnosed.

It took several years for Duncan to recuperate from the virus that attacked her heart. Once well enough to get around, Duncan struggled once more to make a life for herself.

“She could have collected disability, but she went back to work,” Hanna said.

Duncan earned a business degree from Spokane Community College and then went to work for Nancy Bezdicek, a local chiropractor.

Duncan worked for Bezdicek for 10 years, until her boss retired last spring.

“Most people didn’t know she had a heart condition. She kept it from everyone,” Hanna said.

Duncan gave up water skiing, dancing, volleyball - the things she loved. But she’s continued her role as family mediator; it’s obvious how she brings people together during a family gathering.

Gail, Julie and Jamie have stopped in to chat with Mikie in the hospital’s visiting room. They finish one another’s sentences. They reminisce about growing up, about being one another’s baby sitters.

Mikie cracks a joke about her feet. They are swollen from water retention.

“I have fat toes,” she says to her sisters. “They feel like they’re ready to burst. Like big, fat, stuffed sausages.”

Duncan hopes to go home from the hospital in two weeks. Hooked up to the 125-pound pump, with its three drive-lines running from her body to the machine, Duncan will wheel the pump with her wherever she goes.

She will need 24-hour nursing. But she will be home.

The wait for a donor heart will continue. The call could come tomorrow or a year from now.

“I can do a little cooking and cleaning and vacuuming,” she says. “Well, maybe not vacuuming.”

Hanna, a golf instructor at Eastern Washington University, has bigger plans for Mikie.

“We’re going to throw that whole thing on a golf cart and make her play,” she says, above the “kerchunk, kerchunk.”

After her sisters leave, Mikie walks painfully back to her small hospital room.

“If you didn’t have family, what the heck can you do,” she says.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 Photos (2 color)

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: MEDICAL FUND Mikie and Jeff Duncan’s family have established a fund to help with Mikie Duncan’s medical expenses. Donations may be made at any Washington Mutual Bank.