Jim Midock is hoping for a heart transplant.
He and his wife, Jennifer, are waiting by the phone. Bags packed. Midock is being kept alive by a mechanical heart pump with a power cord coming out of his abdomen that attaches to two large batteries and a controller, which he plugs into the wall each night to charge.
“If this stops,” he said, “I stop.”
The former news director at WNIR (100.1-FM) has spent 18 years wrestling with his heart condition. After multiple medications, operations, tests, transfusions, protracted procedures and extended hospital stays, he knows about death.
He’s already died. Twice.
In 2011, in the Intensive Care Unit at the Cleveland Clinic, Midock flatlined. Doctors revived him with defibrillator paddles, only to have him flatline again.
“I came to the first time and saw my wife crumpled in the corner crying hysterically,” he said. “There’s this team of people around me, and they’re all yelling, ‘Stay awake! Stay awake!’ I said, ‘I just want to go back to sleep.’ It was the most peaceful thing I’ve ever experienced. I was in a dark, black space. I had no sense of fear, no anxiety. It was just euphoric.”
The second time they brought him back, he said, “it felt like a sledgehammer hitting my chest.” Later, doctors surgically inserted a pacemaker and an ICD (Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator), a device that acts like a mini-defibrillator, minus the paddles.
“Before I got sick I was a happy-go-lucky kind of guy,” he said. “But when I flatlined, that changed me forever. It restored my faith. It made me step back and examine my life.”
Pump for heart
By last summer, he was feeling sick again, struggling to walk just a few feet. He returned to the Cleveland Clinic and learned that his heart was pumping at 8 percent capacity. “They tried everything, more drugs, nothing worked. That’s when they told me, ‘We want to implant you with an LVAD.’ ” (A Left Ventricular Assist Device is a mechanical heart pump. The device made headlines in 2010 when former Vice President Dick Cheney received one.)
There were complications after the surgery.
Midock had internal bleeding, so they wheeled him back into the OR. Ultimately, he said he was given 18 pints of blood. At one point, his left arm became bizarrely bloated, like a bulging Incredible Hulk arm, except instead of green it was purple.
He stayed in the hospital for two months.
Jennifer slept on a pull-out in his room, heading home once a week to pick up clean clothes. She has been able to work remotely in her job as a senior systems analyst for Key Bank. Her health insurance covers her husband to some extent. The bill, she said, for the LVAD surgery and stay was just under $1 million.
“When he was flatlining, that was very traumatizing. That was the worst,” said Jennifer of their medical odyssey. “I just try to be there for him.”
Familiar voice
Midock, 53, was an Akron radio staple for 20 years, from 1991 until his health forced him to step down in 2011. He covered the news for WNIR, working with local legends Howie Chizek and Joe Finan, and enjoyed a long run as part of Stan Piatt’s morning-drive crew with Maggie Fuller and Steve French.
Piatt and some friends, including local comedian Mike Conley (who also works at the Beacon Journal), recently held a fundraiser for Midock at the Funny Stop Comedy Club in Cuyahoga Falls. The ICU nurses from the Cleveland Clinic came to the show.
“That really meant so much,” said Midock.
“One of the things we’ve learned is how many incredible people are out there — friends, family and people we don’t even know who are praying for us,” said Jennifer.
She met Midock in 2002 at a WNIR patio party at Roses Run in Stow and they married in 2004. She knew about his heart situation and signed on anyway, knowing what might lie ahead. They now live in Ellet in a house across the street from the church they were married in. (Midock has a grown son from his previous marriage.)
These days, Midock does some freelance voice work, but it’s sporadic, and nothing like his old radio schedule when he got up at 3:30 a.m. six days a week. He has also appeared in TV commercials, corporate videos and had small roles in a few feature films, including the horror-comedy Scorned.
Looks deceiving
Seeing Midock, you wouldn’t immediately know he is sick. He looks fit and muscular and his living room rumbles with that booming broadcast voice.
But when he lifts up his T-shirt to explain the workings of his LVAD, his reality is revealed, the years charted by a trail of scars.
“When I was 35 I had this cough I just couldn’t shake, and shortness of breath,” he said. “I went to see a doctor and he said, ‘You’re in heart failure. You need to go to the hospital. Right now!’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about? I just wanted to get a pill.’ ”
Eighteen years later, he is waiting for the call that could extend his life. He is on the transplant list at both the Cleveland Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic Florida in Weston, near Fort Lauderdale. He was told he might have a better chance of getting a heart in Florida.
“When you get an LVAD and you’re in this condition, you are eligible to be listed as 1A, which is the most critical, for 30 days. Within that time if you don’t get a heart, you go back to 1B.
“If it’s Florida, we will get a one- or two-day heads-up. We’ll get in the car and drive down there and stay for 30 days. If I don’t get a heart, we drive back home and wait again.”
If a heart arrives in Florida after they return to Ohio, the Clinic will arrange for a jet to fly them from Burke Lakefront Airport because they will have to act quickly. (The Midocks would need to pay for that flight, estimated at between $10,000 and $15,000.) If he receives a heart in Florida, they would also need to find an apartment there for a few months. The post-transplant drugs, before insurance, will cost about $4,500 a month.
To help with expenses, the couple started a GoFundMe (gofundme.com/lvad-and-heart-transplant-expenses?r=27385). So far, they have raised $3,605 toward a goal of $20,000.
“I hate having to do that,” said Midock. “So much of this has been humbling and embarrassing.”
For now, it’s a waiting game. “Every time the phone rings, you’re on edge,” said Jennifer.
“It’s faith and hope that keep you going. It’s really one day at a time and you’re just happy to breathe the air,” said Midock. “Yet, some days, you feel like you’re playing Russian roulette.”
Clint O’Connor can be reached at 330-996-3582 or coconnor@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @ClintOMovies .