Monticello Man Runs with Heart

By WADE MARBAUGH

wade.marbaugh@rockdalecitizen.com

(Reprinted With Permission)

Sportscasters like to say, “He has lots of heart,” or, “They played with heart.” The expression goes double for John Braden.

The 5K, 10K and marathon runner has had two hearts — he had a heart transplant in 2009.

Braden, 62, ran in the Fuzz Run last Saturday in Covington and has run the 5K road race numerous times since it began in the 1980s. He’s done every Peachtree Road Race since 1977 — except in 2009.

That means he ran the 2010 Peachtree 10K eight months after he had a heart transplant. That takes heart.

A former Covington resident and former president of the Covington Lions Club, Braden shows heart in many ways. He heads up the organizing for the Lions’ annual Christmas Parade. He teaches Sunday School, cuts grass for elderly neighbors and helps out at his 90-year-old father’s farm.

“He is probably the least selfish person I know,” said Braden’s wife, Missy.

Braden even learned all he could about the Pennsylvania man, Jim Sorber, who donated his heart so that Braden could live. Braden and Missy met Sorber’s wife, Kate, when she came to Georgia in February to receive cancer treatment in Newnan. She donned a stethoscope and listened to her late husband’s heart beating inside Braden. Since that day she also has died.

Braden, who ran in the Boston Marathon and ultra-marathons and regularly finished in the top 100 at Peachtree, was possibly the last person one would think would suffer congestive heart failure and need a transplant.

“I had been running off and on since I was 10,” Braden recalled. “I saw a guy on the Wide World of Sports who could really run, and decided I wanted to be able to do that. At the time I was a fat kid — 4 feet tall and 3 feet wide. But I worked into it a bit and liked it a lot.”

Braden ran cross country at Wheeler High School in Marietta and after obtaining a biology degree at Georgia Tech, he discovered his passion for road races in 1977. He says he averaged running 80 miles a week when he lived in Covington and continued the pace at his current home in Monticello.

Braden was diagnosed with congestive heart failure in 1997. He was having a progressively harder time breathing, especially when running. He had an implantable cardioverter defibrillator put in in 2000, but his health continued on a downhill spiral.

Dr. Mark Hanson of Georgia Heart Specialists in Covington concluded that a transplant was the only remedy.

“We talked about that standing on what used to be railroad tracks going up Conyers Street while we were out running one evening,” Braden said.

Braden and his wife got an apartment near the Duke Medical Center in Durham, N.C., in August 2009 to wait for a heart donor. Weeks of anxiety slipped by — waiting.

“Waiting for a heart was hard in many ways,” Missy Braden said. “Watching John get sicker and weaker was awful. Knowing it might not happen in time was never something we talked about.”

On Nov. 2 of that year, dozens of health care employees swarmed his room and hustled Braden off to the operating table. “The surgeon told Missy that my old heart would not have lasted the week,” he said.

When he regained consciousness three days after the transplant, Braden did well for a day or so and then started to regress.

“I couldn’t get enough oxygen. I was hooked up to an oxygen mask for several days. It was like having a very bad case of pneumonia.”

Whether he would ever run again wasn’t at issue — staying alive was the hurdle. He spent nearly two weeks in the ICU unit before he was released from the hospital.

The recovery after that was slow but routine — first weekly checkups at Duke and now every six months. Braden started walking a day or two after returning home in Monticello. He started running in January after getting the staples out. He went back to work in February.

“I ran my first post-transplant race at the Steeple Chase run for the First Methodist Church with my two-year-old grandson,” he said.

Braden runs almost every day, about 50 miles per week, he estimates. He is an engineer at Beta Production in Tucker, where he runs at the lunch break.

“The lady who owns the company, Silvia Kaiser Block, is just about a saint. She lets me start work at 9 a.m., run at lunch and pretty much make my own hours if I need to,” Braden said.

Braden has run a few other races since that Steeple Chase but says, “I’m very slow and I stop a lot to catch my breath.”

He ran a half marathon in 2013 at Fort Benning in Columbus and, to celebrate the fifth anniversary, returned last fall for a full marathon, the Soldier Run. That’s 26.2 miles.

“That’s just mind-boggling,” said Missy Braden. “I would drive to places along the route so I could see him and cheer him on. So many people quit along the way, but not him.”

As Braden came down the last stretch of the marathon accompanied by two soldiers — as is the custom at the Soldier Run — the announcer explained over the PA system that he had had a heart transplant.

“Every single person in earshot of the speakers turned around or came back to the finish line to cheer him on,” Missy Braden recalled. “I couldn’t cheer because I was trying too hard not to cry.”

“Missy’s role in all of this is too large for me to really explain,” he said. “She never left the hospital while I was at Duke or Emory. We were married about 10 years ago, so she came into this heart thing with her eyes wide open and never batted an eye. Without her I’m not here.”

“I am signed up to be an organ donor myself, and I have always believed that just maybe when I die I will be able to help someone else,” Missy Braden said.