Artificial Heart Patient Speaks for First Time to Media

Sporting a blue shirt and red tie, the man with a self-contained artificial heart beating in his chest stepped into the public eye Tuesday, saying “I knew I had no more chances.”

More than six weeks after he received the experimental device, Robert Tools, 59, was introduced to the news media via closed circuit television at Jewish Hospital in Louisville.

“I had a choice to stay home and die or come here and take a chance,” said Robert Tools of Franklin, Ky. “I decided to come here and take a chance.”

“I asked for it because I knew I had no more chances to survive,” said Tools, who appeared frail and spoke with an airy voice while holding his throat because of a tracheotomy.

Tools, a former telephone company employee and teacher, had the titanium-and-plastic pump implanted in his chest July 2, but his name and face were unknown to the public until this week.

Tools smiled as he said the whirring sound of the device took some getting used to, but he liked it because he knew he was alive.

Before his appearance, the hospital showed a video of Tools opening cards and gifts at a recent birthday party in the hospital.

Tools, a diabetic with a history of heart problems, was deemed too ill to receive a heart transplant. Before the surgery, he was so weak he could take only a few steps at a time and couldn’t raise his head to talk to his doctors. Tools was given only a slight chance of surviving 30 days.

Tools moved to Kentucky from Colorado five years ago hoping to receive a transplant, but he grew so weak he could barely cross the street, neighbors said.

Asked if was having second thoughts because of the media attention, he said: My second thoughts were about, `Am I going to make it?”’

“I realize that death is inevitable, but I also realize that if there’s an opportunity to extend it, you take it.”

But he also praised journalists for the way they have handled his story. “I want to thank all of you for not invading my privacy or the privacy of my family and waiting until the last minute to release my name,” he said.

Jewish Hospital and Abiomed Inc., maker of the artificial heart, had not identified Tools, saying only that the patient was a diabetic man in his 50s with a history of heart problems.

The public appearance comes nearly two weeks after Tools was put back on a ventilator to assist his breathing. He also had developed an infection and was running a fever, but the mechanical heart continued to pump without problems.

Tools’ name had been so closely guarded that even the family’s pastor and people who live on the same street in Franklin, 140 miles south of Louisville, said they didn’t know Tools had received the heart. He had hoped to get a heart transplant but was too ill to undergo one and was given only about a month to live when the artificial heart was implanted.

Melony Scott, 34, a friend and neighbor, said Tools and his wife, Carol, moved into the neighborhood about the same time she did in 1996. “He’d walk over four or five times a day,” she said in an interview at her home last week.

Scott said Tools would keep her company while she tended her outdoor plants. The last time he visited her, the walk across the residential street was excruciatingly slow.

She has not talked to Tools since he went to Louisville and did not specifically talk with him about the artificial heart. Nodding toward her front lawn, she said: “I’m sure I’ll sit right out there and talk to him again.”

A former neighbor, Joanne Hartmeister, who lives near Tools’ former home in Morrison, Colo., said Tools is a talented musician and cook and liked to go fishing.

Hartmeister said Tools had a bass boat that he kept parked on his property in Colorado so he could go fishing. “But he didn’t get to much, nothing like he’d like to do,” she said.

Tools had a computer-related job with the telephone company in Colorado but left for health reasons, Hartmeister said. Scott said Tools had earlier been a special education teacher in Chicago.

The AbioCor artificial heart is self-contained, with internal and external batteries. Earlier mechanical hearts had wires and tubes that stuck out of the chest and connected to a power source.