Gift of Life: Heart transplant enables Lehigh Valley doctor to reach new heights

ALLENTOWN, Pa. (WPVI) -- Register as a Gift of Life donor HERE.

Organ donation transforms lives, and one local recipient is reaching new heights with his second chance.

Every day, Dr. Neal Stansbury is repairing others at Lehigh Valley Health Network, part of Jefferson Health.

When he was 40 years old, this sports medicine orthopedic surgeon became the patient himself when the lower chambers of his heart went out of sync.

"Your heart just basically doesn't function, and I kind of almost passed out and hit the ground," he recalls. "The very first one was when I was training on a trainer indoors. And it just happened and I was like, holy smokes, what was that!"

The lifelong cyclist thought it was a fluke and tried to ignore it, but couldn't.

"It just kept coming back and becoming more problematic," Dr. Stansbury says.

Neither Dr. Stansbury nor his doctors realized he had a rare heart condition.

"Your heart muscles die off and turn into scar tissue," he explains.

"I had seven ablations and a variety of medications over time," he says. "It would be okay for a while after the ablation, then after a few months, I would start to get them again."

Nothing was a permanent fix, so he continued to decline over the years.

"I had gone from winning the National Championship one year and winning races right and left to basically having trouble climbing up a flight of stairs," he says.

Dr. Stansbury went on the transplant list, with a body so fragile that too little sleep or too much salt sent him into organ failure.

One Easter dinner put his kidney and liver into such straits that he was taken off the transplant list.

"I was able to get it back under control, but that took eight weeks to happen from just one dinner," he says.

Dr. Stansbury didn't think he'd make it.

"I basically said goodbye to my wife and made sure all my affairs were in order," he says.

Finally, seven years ago, just weeks from death, he got a new heart.

"They told me I probably had two weeks left," he says.

The doctor rebounded fast.

"I started walking right away and by 10 weeks was able to walk, jog a half-marathon in two and a half hours," Dr. Stansbury says.

He was also working full-time.

"Healing lives every day because he got that second chance. And he actually uses donated tissues in his clinical practice," says Gift of Life CEO Rick Hasz.

Dr. Stansbury has seen his daughters grow up, with two of them going into medicine. And he returned to cycling in a big way, although one of his doctors "guaranteed" he'd never be able to race again.

"This year at National Championships in America, I took fifth place," he says proudly.

But Dr. Stansbury isn't done. He still wants to win that championship.

Gift of Life CEO Rick Hasz says anyone can register as a donor, though parental consent is needed for those under 18.

And there is no upper age limit. The oldest American donor was in his 90s.

Register as a Gift of Life donor HERE.