Paul Cardall recovery a 'miracle'

As pink and red heart-shaped balloons bob in the breeze outside their home, Paul and Lynnette Cardall are examining prescription bottles inside.

There's a new heart beating in Paul's chest. Lynnette's heart, for the first time in more than a year, is finally beginning to rest easy.

The LDS musician and his wife came home from the hospital on Wednesday, weeks before anyone had believed would be possible after Paul's heart transplant two weeks ago at Primary Children's Medical Center.

Doctors had told them it would be five to six weeks before he would be strong enough to unplug all the oxygen and IV lines so he could walk away a free man, but as he has done so many times before, Cardall surprised them all.

Before his recent surgery, the 36-year-old husband and father was the oldest Utah patient with his specific type of congenital heart disease to have survived to his age without a transplant. To have him home so soon, and without experiencing any major complications, "is a dream come true. It's just a miracle," Lynnette Cardall said.

Before leaving the hospital, the couple was shown Cardall's old heart, "a football-sized" organ he said he had been lucky to live so long with, considering it was only about half-functional. He said that as he held a portion of it in his hands, turning it over and over and examining the stitches from past surgeries, that was the moment when he "truly understood that somebody else is clearly in charge of our lives."

Future medical students at the University of Utah will hold his old heart in their hands also as a learning tool to help understand congenital heart disease, even as Cardall continues on a series of anti-rejection drugs to keep his body from rejecting the new organ.

Surgeons removed most of his old heart, but the left ventricle and the left atrium remain in his chest because they were in such good shape after doing all the work his full heart should have been doing.

When the new heart was placed inside his chest on the operating table, the surgeon turned around for a moment to grab the paddles that would send an electric current through the heart so it would start beating again.

"He looked back and the heart had started beating on its own, just like it was meant to be there," Cardall said. His year-long journey to a transplant, after he was listed for a heart in August 2008 through the surgery and recovery itself, has been "sobering, miraculous and divinely orchestrated," he said Wednesday, standing in his kitchen next to a cache of pill bottles as if he were just preparing to fix dinner.