An ultimate absurdity exists in saying that anybody deserves to live. Who can say that? Who can possibly know? Relative to whom? Who has the right to judge?
But I’m saying it anyway, based on what I do know: If there’s anyone who deserves to live longer, it’s Matt Millen.
The former Penn State, Raiders, 49ers and Redskins defensive lineman and linebacker, Lions president and FOX, ESPN and Big Ten Network analyst is so much more than what he’s accomplished within the realm of football. He’s a memorable human being,
Rarely will you meet anyone so interesting and interested in a wide range of subjects, able to converse with such ease and good humor about any and all. He has both a natural social gift and knowledge from a life well lived.
On Sunday, ESPN and its best documentarian reporter Jeremy Schaap debuted an episode of their E:60 series entitled “All Heart". It includes a nearly half-hour segment on the Christmas Eve heart transplant that extended Millen’s life. It will be rerun at various times this week on the ESPN cluster of channels.
Producer Pia Malbran and editor Jeredy Cruchaga have created an Emmy-level 26-minute piece that shows intimately who Millen is and illustrates why the world is better off having him around. As well as the miraculous surgical process that has retrieved him from the edge of death.
I spoke with Millen on Sunday evening on one of those socked-in, late-winter days that less appreciative souls might term gloomy. He knows better. It’s a pretty good bet he will turn 61 a week from tomorrow. Until very recently, that was no tap-in:
“I feel stronger every week. I can tell a difference in my endurance and in my strength.
“There are 16 steps up from the bottom of my shop. Then, I have to walk up another 20 steps to get up to the house.”
It seems like every video story ever done on Millen has at some point used the basem*nt-level wood shop in his 18th Century Lehigh Valley home as both a stage and a metaphor for his Bob the Builder tendencies. Beginning a few years ago, he became especially aware of exactly how many stairsteps there were to climb from it. Because he couldn’t get up them as easily as he once did:
“I used to have to stop every four steps.”
It took years for a correct diagnosis to be reached but it finally was – the rare heart ailment Amyloidosis. The condition attacks only a few thousand people in the world each year. It creates an abnormal protein that can collect in organs and makes them less elastic to the point of dysfunction.
So, heart valves do not work correctly. By last fall, Millen was unable to climb those steps at all. His heart was functioning at 30 percent of capacity. He had been hanging on for the prospect of a donor for nearly a year. He started in line behind many others and simply had to wait.
In October, he was admitted into the intensive care unit of Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.
And there he stayed, mostly in bed, for 81 days, waiting some more. Does he consider himself an intrinsically patient man?
“No. I’m not. But I was for that.
“The people at Beth Israel are phenomenal. I did feel like I was part of a family there. The nurses, I got along great with all of them. Everyone there. I did not get bored. I did a lot of reading. But different nurses came in every day.”
Millen laughed about thinking that surgeons ran hospitals before he had such a lengthy stay in one. He emerged knowing that nurses are the real bosses:
“And that place is so diverse. You had Filipino, African American, Polish immigrants, Russians. I called my Russian nurse ‘KGB.’ And she was old enough to have seen the old Soviet regime, then the new stuff, then she came over here.
“There were so many different people there and their stories were so fascinating. I really enjoyed it, to be honest.”
If you’re getting the feeling Millen likes people, well, you have the idea.
What about the miraculous process itself? He’s old enough to remember when South African surgeon Dr. Christian Barnard performed the first successful heart transplant. I told him about my woodworking dad, a “tinkerer” who sought to understand how things worked, how the components of any machine functioned and fit together, and how he was always a frustrated surgeon. Millen, too?
“You know what’s funny? Paul Suhey, one of my best friends, is a surgeon. He came down here into the shop and he said to me, ‘You missed your calling. You would’ve been a great surgeon.’”
Because, when you get right down to it, surgeons are simply mechanics for people. They’ve learned how to build and fix things, only for the human body.
Was Millen as fascinated with the remarkable surgical process itself as that it would save his life?
“I talked to the surgeon. I asked her, ‘How do you do this? How do you do that?’ And she started naming these [body] parts and I’m like, ‘I don’t know what that is.’ But once she explained what she did, there’s a lot of similarities. I mean she’s sewing and I’d be gluing or using a joiner. But it’s essentially the same thing.
“You might do creative things when you’re building a piece of furniture because you want it to look right. With something inside of you, it has to be done right.”
From all indications, it has been. The E:60 episode delves right into the OR and gets astounding video of the donor heart arriving in a wailing ambulance, being lifted out of its container and placed into Millen’s chest cavity. The surgeon pronounces it a perfect fit, beating right away when hooked up to its new recipient without a hint of rejection.
Millen has felt better every day since. He must take about 60 pills per day, many of them anti-rejection meds. Now a little more than two months beyond his surgery, he’s walking three miles with wife Pat when the weather permits, cranking along like the champion athlete he is on his elliptical machine.
Schaap and his crew diligently interviewed and got heartfelt responses not only from Matt and Pat Millen but all four of their kids. Included is the moment when Pat says goodbye, hands folded with her husband’s, as he’s wheeled into the operating room and he says, “See you on the other side.”
It must be something special to see one’s spouse speak of what she thought at that moment. But for his kids to open up about the feelings they had before and after his surgery was remarkable. All of Millen’s grown children, two sons and two daughters, did that during the film.
What did Millen see in his kids’ faces when they spoke to him in November and December, when the clock was clearly ticking?
“I think as it went on, they all handled it pretty well, because they felt pretty good about where I was. In terms of how I was mentally. And I had not lost much of my condition.”
Millen’s decades of athlete’s conditioning served him well during the long wait for a heart. And now that he has a new one, he’s gaining back his tone and cardiovascular zest. During an initial post-op therapy session in at Beth Israel in Newark in January, he was being administered rudimentary exercises he’d long since surpassed from working out at home.
When he mocked the tiny calisthenics to an outpatient staffer, a doctor came to check his strength:
“He said, ‘You don’t need to be here.’”
And those 36 steps he must climb from the shop to the house?
“Now, I just come straight up; it doesn’t even bother me.”
He and Pat walk a hill behind their house when the weather’s decent. The entire loop is five miles. The final mile is a steep incline. Last time he tried before the weather turned ugly, he got about halfway up before turning back.
It was a little too tough, even for an old man with a young man’s heart. You might say, Matt Millen’s living to fight another day.
“But, I think I’m gonna take that hill shortly.”
EMAIL/TWITTERDAVID JONES: djones@pennlive.com
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