Man in need of transplant hospitalized

BOSTON – Brenda Gay-Barker says the best Mother’s Day gift she could receive would be for her son to get a heart.

“That would be awesome. Awesome,” she said Friday.

Bangor Daily News readers have been following the story of Joshua Barker and his quest for a heart transplant for five months as he underwent test after test to determine his suitability for transplant surgery.

On Friday morning, Gay-Barker was driving from her home in Whiting to Boston where her son had been placed in the critical care unit of Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

“He is in heart failure,” she said. “His heart has gotten larger, but he is in stable condition. We will be having transplant discussions this weekend.”

Barker, 24, was introduced in the BDN in January as the Spin Skater of Pinpoint Pond, the man originally from Trescott who prompted a children’s story about perseverance and courage.

Barker once dreamed of being an Olympic skater but was diagnosed at age 19 with cardiomyopathy, an enlargement of the heart. He was forced to stop skating and leave college. For several years, Barker managed his illness with medication, but his condition has worsened in the past year and his family has said his only hope is a heart transplant.

Barker has been back and forth to Boston, tested, retested and evaluated as he attempts to convince doctors to put him on the heart transplant list. He recently was placed on a new medication that allowed him to lose more than 40 pounds, a prerequisite to a transplant.

Barker’s mother said the heart failure was a complication that could have a good result, if her son’s condition convinces the transplant team at the Boston hospital to act.

In the same hospital, one floor from Barker, a man from Robbinston is recovering from his own transplant surgery.

Matthew Durand, 22, underwent a double lung transplant two weeks ago and is recovering well, according to his mother, Valerie Kilby of Dennysville. He suffered from cystic fibrosis.

Durand and Barker are members of the same church, the Dennysville-Edmunds Congregational Church.

Kilby said that before his surgery, her son had been in Maine Medical Center in Portland for six months on a ventilator. “At this point, we knew a transplant was his only opportunity,” Kilby said.

On April 27, Kilby and her husband, Bill, were awakened at 2 a.m. by the call that there was a potential donor for Matthew.

“We were on the road to Boston by 2:15,” she said. “We got there at 9:30 [a.m.] and at that point they weren’t sure if it was a go because the donated lungs hadn’t been harvested.”

The decision was made by late morning and the nine-hour surgery process began by 1 p.m.

“They wheeled him on the floor about 10:30 [p.m.] and my first thought was he looked so healthy,” Valerie Kilby said.

Durand was walking the day after the transplant and is recovering well, his mother said from his hospital room Friday. Kilby said she was aware that Joshua’s condition had worsened and was planning to meet Gay-Barker at the hospital.

The Dennysville-Edmunds Congregational Church is planning a benefit supper for the two men on June 9 at the Edmunds Consolidated School on Harrison Road in Dennysville. Donations are being accepted for a raffle to be held the same night.