Couples share gift of life after infant heart donation

LOS ANGELES – Tracey York cradled Nick Draper in the crook of her left arm.

“Hi, baby,” she said. “Hello, baby.”

She looked down at his round cheeks and deeply into his soft gray eyes, as if she were searching for his soul. There were tears in her eyes.

“Baby, can I hold your hand, please?”

She rocked him gently, she kissed his forehead, she held her right hand over his chest and stroked it. Then she handed him to his mother, placed a stethoscope over Nick’s heart and listened.

“Can you hear it?” someone asked.

A single tear trickled down her cheek.

Yes, she nodded. She could hear it. His heart beat strong, sure and steady – just as she had hoped. This heart was special. It had been her son’s before it was Nick’s.

Tracey York’s son, Jordan, 4 months old, had died four weeks earlier in Pensacola, Fla., after he accidentally suffocated under a pillow on his grandparents’ bed. In that terrible moment, Tracey York, 27, and her husband, Russell, 28, decided to donate his heart and other organs.

The heart was flown to the University of California, Los Angeles, Medical Center in Los Angeles, where it was transplanted into Nick Draper’s chest. Nick, 7 months old, and his twin, Nate, suffer from rare and fatal dilated cardiomyopathy.

Jordan’s tiny heart was the gift of life.

Now Nick is nearly ready to leave the hospital. Nate, behind him on the transplant list because he was sicker at first, is still waiting for a new heart.

Because of stories in the Los Angeles Times, the twins’ parents, Nicole Draper, 32, and her husband, Mike, 33, discovered the Yorks, and they met for the first time Friday. The Yorks and the Drapers spent most of that evening and all of Saturday together.

The Yorks showed pictures of Jordan, a chubby baby with big ears, being held by his parents, or lying contentedly in a baby carriage. They offered a gift to the Drapers: a silver jewelry case, shaped as a heart. It bore a simple inscription: “From Jordan, To Nick, 2-16-06.”

Nicole Draper wept again as she held the case in her palm. Inside, she would say afterward, her emotions swirled. “I just lost it. Thinking about Jordan and his little spirit living inside of Nick. Thinking about how they were so thoughtful to bring us a gift after all that they have done and gone through.”

After nearly an hour, the Drapers and the Yorks headed for the 3rd floor, where Nick and Nate have lived for most of their lives. The families were followed by camera crews from ABC-TV, which paid for the Yorks’ trip to Los Angeles.

First the families visited Nate, struggling so hard that doctors had given him a blood transfusion just days before and increased the powerful medicines that help keep him alive.

Then they visited Nick. With the gift of Jordan York’s heart, he should be able to live a normal life, at least until he is a teenager, when he might have to have another transplant.

The fathers stood behind the mothers as they looked at the baby in his small bed. Russell York stood straight and rigid. He couldn’t bring himself to touch Nick. He said afterward that he had been overwhelmed with joy and pain.

But Tracey York swooned over the little baby, so weak from the long months in the hospital that he had a hard time holding his head up. It was then that she picked him up and held him delicately against her chest. She kissed his reddish cheeks. She felt his heartbeat. She heard it through the stethoscope.

“Isn’t that cool?” she asked.

Russell York listened next. Nick’s round eyes opened wide. He looked straight into their eyes.

“Right then, it was almost like I saw Jordan,” Tracey York would say later. For a moment, at least, all the pressure she had been carrying around lifted away. “That was a strange and wonderful thing He was looking at me, and it was like he knew – he knew that I was Jordan’s momma.”