Puna pastor thanks medical team a year after life-saving heart transplant

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - A Hawaii Island man is grateful to be alive after struggling with heart failure.

A year after receiving a life-saving transplant, Puna pastor Alan Tamashiro, 67, thanked those who made it possible in a moment that was heartfelt, in every sense of the word.

On Tuesday at Hilo Benioff Medical Center, Tamashiro, now with a new heart, reunited with the multi-island medical team who fought to keep him alive.

“This is kind of like a storybook ending because one of my bucket list is to tell all of you thank you for saving my life,” Tamashiro told the group.

Tamashiro says he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure last year. Doctors implanted devices to keep his heart going but said he needed a transplant to live.

Last September, Tamashiro collapsed and was rushed to the Hilo ER, where doctors installed a heart pump. But he needed a bigger one so he was medevaced to Maui Memorial for that surgery. He was stabilized and flown to California for an emergency transplant at USC.

“This is the reason we do what we do, this is the reason why my team wakes up in the middle of the night, to, to see you here a year later,” said Dr. Jane Luu, Chief of Cardiology at Hilo Benioff Medical Center.

“It really does take not just a village, but an entire island and series of islands in a state to really work together to just kind of accomplish and do what needs to be done when the time comes,” said Dr. Michael Firstenberg, cardiothoracic surgeon at Maui Memorial Medical Center.

“They never gave up and they, you can tell when a team really, really puts everything they have into it,” said Tamashiro’s wife Marlene.

Firstenberg gifted Tamashiro the heart pump that helped him survive.

“Heart attacks are still a pretty major cause of what we say morbidity and mortality,” Firstenberg said. “A lot of times when somebody has a heart attack, it’s because an artery shuts down completely, and the sooner that you can get that open and restore blood flow to the heart, the better off that patient does in the long run and the less damage there is to the heart.”

“What they do is really important. It makes a big difference, a significant difference, a matter of life and death to a person,” said Tamashiro, who credits his faith and God for getting him through.

Tamashiro says his family has a history of heart problems and remembers having poor blood circulation and fainting spells when he was younger.

While he’s glad to be alive, he says there are still tough days, though nothing like what he lived through before.

“There’s issues with my kidneys. There’s issues with my red blood cells. They’re low. So it’s an ongoing process,” he said. “But looking back and looking today as I talk to you, those are really small issues.”

Now the family is focused on making up for time lost to a debilitating condition.

“We missed out a whole year of Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, everything,” Marlene Tamashiro said.

“Yeah, so we have a lot of living to do now,” added Alan Tamashiro.