LDS musician waits for heart transplant

Editor's note: This is the fifth story in an occasional series

Paul Cardall has been waiting for the phone to ring for an entire year.

Not that the LDS musician doesn't take calls from family and friends on a daily basis, but those calls are different. They keep his emotions and his spirit healthy.

The one call he's waiting for will say it's time to replace his own failing heart with that of another, whose family will then be broken-hearted.

There will be gratitude and silent rejoicing on one end of the line, with sadness and mourning on the other. As much as he prays for that family, he can't change the reality that his chance for a future with his wife and 3-year-old daughter will come because someone else dies.

Born with congenital heart disease, Cardall, 36, was first listed for a heart transplant last August after years of surgeries.

Speaking with the Deseret News at Primary Children's Medical Center, where his transplant will take place, he reflected on a year of knowing that his future depends largely on factors he has no control over. Pediatric heart surgeons will replace his diseased heart when the time comes, because they've been treating his disease since childhood.

In a place focused on "the child, first and always," Cardall has learned lessons in child-like faith and honed an unwavering conviction that God still has things for him to do.

"I'm in here for a tuneup," he says, smiling despite the oxygen tube running into his nose and an array of nutrition and medication bags hanging from the IV pole that has become his constant companion.

Though he is smiling and pleasant, Cardall is visibly tired.

"My organs are overworked right now; my heart is enlarged, and so is my liver and everything else. This is like getting an oil change before you take out the old engine to put in a new engine. I just have a rusty engine and rusty parts to go with it.

"This whole year has been up and down, up and down. They tell me I'm worse, but I think I feel about the same." Mentally, "I'm in a different place" than a year ago, due in no small part to the fact that his brother, Brian Cardall, died suddenly earlier this summer after police in southern Utah Tazered him. The incident became front-page news across the state.

"We've always prayed for the family whose loss would be our future. So when Brian died, it just put us in their shoes. He wasn't able to be an organ donor because they couldn't harvest any of his organs," based on the nature of Brian's death and the lack of medical supervision.

But after the family requested it, doctors "were able to harvest some bone and tissue and our family went through the process of having to answer all those questions to Intermountain Donor Services."