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Scot Pollard: That’s just not fair in the finals
ON FEBRUARY 6, 2024, Scot Pollard was dying. The day before, he and his wife, Dawn, had arrived at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, for a three-day heart transplant evaluation. Scot had already been registered on transplant lists in Indianapolis and Chicago. He was aiming to get on the list in Nashville -- 300 miles south of the Pollards' Carmel, Indiana, home -- hoping another transplant region meant a greater opportunity for a match. Dr. Jonathan Menachem, a cardiologist at the hospital, placed his hands on Scot's wrist. "Your pulse is slow," he told him. "Is it always pretty slow?"
Scot then laid down on a bed, where Menachem took his stethoscope and placed it on Scot's chest. "Do you get short of breath just laying like this?" he asked him. Scot closed his eyes and nodded. "Seeing someone lay down like that and getting so short of breath that quick is concerning," Menachem said.
Scot was in end-stage heart failure. He was admitted to the intensive care unit, and an emergency search for a transplant began. "He was filled with fluid and didn't have enough blood flow going around his body," Menachem said. "They thought they were going home to Indiana. "We looked at each other," Menachem said of him and his colleague as they reviewed Scot's prognosis. "We were like, 'This guy cannot go home.'" Scot's heart was failing. He'd been suffering from cardiomyopathy, a disease that makes it difficult for the heart muscle to pump. With more strain on the muscle, and more blood required for his large frame, he weakened by the day. "I'm really attached to this heart," he said in the hospital. "I feel like it's the best one. That's the one I was born with. And the biggest fear is that the next one isn't going to be good enough."
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Matt George: This Father's Day, ESPN is airing a special E60 on the story of former Sacramento King Scot Pollard and the heart transplant that changed his life. The special features Scot's former teammate in Sacramento Bobby Jackson, and Kings radio broadcaster Gary Gerould. pic.x.com/vfZqakAX3C
Scot Pollard was standing in Gasoline Alley at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and trying not to cry. The NBA champion and “Survivor” contestant was talking about meeting the family of Casey Angell, whose heart was now beating inside Pollard's chest. Angell's sister brought a stethoscope. “She touched my chest. She listened and she started crying. She said, ‘Hey, Bubba,’ because that’s what she used to call him,” Pollard said. “And we all lost it. And I’m losing it right now.”
Since receiving the life-saving transplant last winter, he has dedicated himself to raising awareness of organ donation, a mission that earned him the honor of serving as the Grand Marshal for the Indy 500 Festival Parade on Saturday. Angell's family rode along on the float with him. “Any time we get to see them and be around them is a great moment,” Pollard said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “But also just to be able to share this experience of being grand marshal with them, and be part of their lives.”
Pollard, who turned 50 in February a few days after celebrating his one-year anniversary with the new heart, said that since receiving the transplant he has suffered from survivor's guilt — the doubt that he was worthy of such a gift: “It’s a challenge, because I’ve got to live right. There’s a face, and I know what he looks like and I know who he was, and the family. And so there's that pressure.”
One of the first things that former NBA player and “Survivor” contestant Scot Pollard made sure to do after receiving a heart transplant was to write down his feelings when they were fresh, in the hopes that he would someday share them with the donor’s family. “We want you to know that your loved one’s heart is going to be loved and cared for and will give love back,” Pollard said in a letter that was sent through the transplant network to the hospital where the heart was harvested. “Your loved one is our hero.”
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Last week, Pollard heard back: The donor’s family is willing to meet. “I read the letter a couple of times and it was hard because tears were in my eyes the whole time,” Pollard told The Associated Press on Monday. “I already knew that somebody’s life was cut short. And so, you know, the feelings are mixed. Just like receiving the heart in the first place: I went through a big round of guilt because I knew somebody had to die for me to live.”
An 11-year NBA veteran and a member of the 2008 champion Boston Celtics, Pollard inherited a condition from his father, who died at 54, when Scot was 16. Scot Pollard had known for a few years that his only solution was a heart transplant, but finding a donated organ big enough to pump blood through the 6-foot-11, 260-pound former NBA center was a challenge. In February, doctors found a match, and the transplant at Vanderbilt University Medical Center was successful. Afterward, Pollard told the AP, he learned his own heart was “a wreck.” “I don’t think I would have made it another couple of weeks,” he said then.
Scot Pollard walked out of a hospital less than two weeks after receiving a heart transplant. The Carmel resident and former Indiana Pacers player declared "Today was a good day" on social media Thursday after reposting his wife's video of him walking down the hall of a Vanderbilt University hospital to ring the bell, signifying successful treatment.
Champion Boston Celtics big man Scot Pollard has undergone a successful heart transplant surgery after a viral infection damaged his heart, putting the former Celtics center’s life at grave risk before the operation. Now recovering after the ordeal of waiting in the intensive care unit for a suitable heart to be found, Pollard is expected to fully recover after a long recuperation. It was, evidently, hard to find a heart big enough for Pollard’s 6-foot-11, 260 lb. body — and hearts are not easy to come by for transplants to begin with. Pollard is thankfully out of those particular metaphorical woods and on the mend, however, thanks to the kindness of another and the skill of his medical team.
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