Deena's Story

Deena Newberg was the girl across the street four decades ago, and in the last few weeks I haven't been able to stop thinking about her. In the middle of the afternoon I've taken to wondering: How's she doing? For days on end I'm obsessed with this question: What's she doing?

Now I don't carry a torch for Deena Newberg, whom I haven't seen since 1969, and I'm pretty sure she hasn't given me a second thought since ninth grade, and so there's nothing sordid about the story I'm about to tell you, even though it is an affair of the heart -- a broken-heart story.

It's just that 42 years ago Deena Newberg had open-heart surgery when that was a very frightening operation, though I hasten to add that it's not exactly a trivial, breezy matter today. So the other night, as I was recovering from open-heart surgery myself in a very different era, I called up Deena Newberg -- called her up right out of the blue, just to find out how she was doing and what she was doing. What I heard was the unforgettable story that I was too young, or too squeamish, or too incurious, or probably just too shy to learn back then. (I didn't possess the courage to talk to an actual girl until I was a high-school senior, even a pretty one who lived right across Stanley Road.)

But Deena's story is a remarkable one, even more remarkable because it makes the miracle that Dr. Bradley S. Taylor performed on my tired old heart at UPMC Presbyterian in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago seem unremarkable in contrast -- and because with six words she put in perspective all the frustration I am having with my own relatively uneventful but short-of-breath recovery. Those six words are more powerful than any six words of my own that I've ever typed: "You're alive. That's a great thing."

Here's Deena's story: She was born with just about everything wrong with a heart that anybody can have. She had exploratory surgery in the first grade, then four years later bravely undertook the open-heart surgery that so stunned Miss Waterman and Mrs. Nelson and all of us in the fifth grade of Stanley School. "This was the dark ages," Deena said on the phone the other night. "It wasn't like it is today, when you're in and then out." At 53, the woman has a way with words, perhaps because words cannot begin to describe her experience.

Overall Deena missed two years of school, which is why she does not appear between Bob Murray and Pam Nickerson -- her rightful place alphabetically -- in the Alice Shaw Junior High School yearbook four years later. She had a lot of roommates in Boston's Children's Hospital. Most of them died, one of them as her brother, Michael, wheeled the frail young patient, one of Deena's ward friends, down the hospital corridor just to give her a little change of scenery.

But there is more. Our little town held two blood drives to gather the 14 pints of blood Deena would need for the operation. She was fully awake during some of the terrifying preparatory procedures I had (though I was safely, and cowardly, under sedation the whole time). For interminable periods she was in an oxygen tent (she remembers how her father unzipped that tent carefully, so he could hold her hand). Her mother had to prepare every meal especially for her (no lines of salt-free food in those days at the Beach Bluff Supermarket down the street). Nurses wrapped her legs in hot towels. And the most remarkable thing of all: The doctors were at her house a lot.

There was no after-care (the term didn't exist) and no cardiac rehab program (those were years in the future). "I was weak, and I was sick," she said. "I spent a lot of time on Stanley Road looking out the window watching everybody play." That sentence pierced my own recovering heart. I played ball with Richie Remis and John Weighs on the street right there in front of her house maybe 200 days a year.

"No one had this surgery then," said Deena, who now may be one of the longest open-heart survivors. "It's like going from the dark ages to the microwave oven."

Deena was ministered over by Dr. Robert E. Gross and Dr. Alexander S. Nadas, both pioneers in heart treatment for children, both landmark figures at Boston's Children's Hospital. In a tribute to Dr. Gross after he died in 1988, two prominent surgeon-scientists wrote in a scholarly journal that Dr. Gross "demonstrated to the world that anatomical study and a carefully planned surgical approach ... could result in successful treatment of very ominous and previously forbidding diseases of the heart and of the great vessels." Dr. Nadas, who died in 2000, was presented with the American Heart Association's coveted Paul Dudley White Award in 2000 and was given the first Founder's Award in Pediatric Cardiology by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Deena knew none of this at the time. To her they were her docs, nothing more.

Today Deena Newberg Lane, as she's now known, is the mother of two grown children. She is a breast-cancer survivor. She helps elderly and sick people in their homes on Boston's North Shore. She plays a little tennis. She lives a perfectly normal life, maybe perfect because it is so normal. "I would say that I am healthy," she says. The simplest things are the most remarkable. You learn that after heart surgery.

Hers is a wonderful story, truly a heartfelt story. My bet is that it made you feel pretty good. I can tell you that it sure made me feel better, and that was even before she told me: "You're alive. That's a great thing." So that's Deena's story. It's Deena's lesson, too, for us all.