‘I will give you a new heart’ of flesh, not stone

    The 10-inch incision that tells part of Lafayette seminarian Joel Faulk’s story extends from the middle of his breastbone to just above his belly button.
    One of the amazing things about medical science – a footnote on the “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” scale compared to transplanting a donor heart from a 32-year-old man into the body of a 39-year-old future priest – is that, with time, the high-tech glue stitches will dissolve and fade, leaving little evidence of the cardiovascular miracle, now considered almost routine, that occurred a few inches deeper.
    Faulk’s new heart is beating rhythmically and showing encouraging signs of harmony with his body, allowing the former religion teacher at Archbishop Rummel High School to scale the stairs at Notre Dame Seminary with the childlike reverie of someone born again.
    Actually, Faulk’s second “birthday” occurred on Jan. 6 – the Feast of the Epiphany – at Ochsner Hospital. The magi brought gold, frankincense and myrrh. Faulk’s team of magical doctors offered new life.
    Last semester, Faulk was researching a paper on the prophets, and every time he flipped through the Book of Ezekiel, his eyes happened to land upon references to the heart that he had underlined or highlighted years ago in his Bible studies.
    “I remember doing it three times in a row,” Faulk said. “The passages said something about ‘changing the heart’ or ‘transforming the heart’ or putting on ‘a new heart.’ I jokingly say, ‘I prayed to the Lord to change my heart – to create in me a new heart – but I didn’t mean it quite so literally.”
    Faulk, a native of Abbeville, La., and the youngest of six children, started feeling a vocational tug while studying at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He entered St. Joseph Seminary College in 1997 and after graduation was sent to the Pontifical North American College in Rome for theology studies.
    In his second semester, Faulk had just finished playing an intramural doubleheader – a flag football and a baseball game on a Sunday afternoon – when he looked down at his left leg. The regular “Mr. Fitness Guy” – he loved to run and lift weights – noticed something not quite right. A small bruise had expanded to a purple and blue mess on the outside of his leg from his knee to his ankle.
    “I knew something was going wrong with the bleeding,” Faulk said.
    Faulk went to a Rome hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with leukemia.
    “But they told me there was an 85-plus percent chance that, once I made it through the chemo treatments, I would get back to normal,” Faulk said. “I didn’t see it as, ‘You’ve got leukemia; you might want to start making a will out.’ I didn’t see it as a probable death sentence.”
    Faulk spent a month in the hospital taking treatments and being stabilized before he could fly back to the United States to continue his chemo. He did well enough for doctors to declare he was in remission, and in January 2001, he flew back to Rome to resume his theology studies.
    A few weeks later, while setting up the monstrance in the seminary chapel for eucharistic adoration, Faulk felt an undefined weakness, almost as if he were coming down with a cold or the flu.
    “I went back to my room to lie down and rest, and when I changed into a pair of shorts, I noticed on my leg a huge bruise, probably just from the pressure of the edge of the desk where I was sitting in class that morning,” he said. “But it was big enough for me to say, ‘That’s a relapse.’ I knew what it was.”
    Another round of chemo – this time with a different drug regimen – commenced. By the time Faulk returned to Louisiana, he had lost 30 pounds. “When I arrived at the airport, my family was all in tears, especially my mom,” Faulk said. “She was a mom. She couldn’t help worrying.”
    The second round of treatments knocked down the disease again, and the leukemia has not returned. But the toxic side effects of the drugs Faulk took to beat the cancer had damaged his heart severely. Faulk didn’t know that at the time because he had bounced back to resume all of his running and swimming.
    “I liken it to a tree that starts to rot from the inside,” Faulk said. “It stands tall and firm as it’s slowly rotting, and you don’t realize it until it gets to the point where it starts to fall, and when it starts to fall, it goes quickly.”
    After the second round of chemo, Faulk decided to interrupt his seminary studies for several years. “It was a bit of a tumultuous time, but it wasn’t because of the cancer,” Faulk said. “The cancer just occasioned a lot of things to come up that needed to come up, and that’s one of the blessings God uses as a formative tool to help me see or realize things I wasn’t seeing.
Redemptive suffering
    “Suffering reveals a lot to you about yourself – the good, the bad and the ugly. I felt like I was a man who was enamored with noble ideals, but I was not yet noble. There was a romance with the idea of the cross and the redemptive value of suffering, but I was not truly in love with the cross that I could embrace it with a consistent docility.”
    Faulk taught religion to CCD students at Our Lady of Fatima Parish in Lafayette and pursued a master’s degree in theology from Our Lady of Holy Cross College, commuting to New Orleans for all-day Saturday classes. In 2009, he joined the Rummel faculty to teach religion.
    But his vocational tug always remained, and in August 2013, he entered Notre Dame Seminary to resume his priesthood studies. Everything was going fine until Faulk started to notice a shortness of breath. The young adult who once easily ran three or four miles a day was out of breath climbing 20 steps.
    He set up a doctor’s appointment, but his breathing became so labored he went to the emergency room. It was there that doctors told him his heart was so damaged it was pumping at 20 percent of its normal capacity. The stark diagnosis: Faulk needed a heart pump to carry him over until a donor heart became available.
Moved top of organ list
    Because of Faulk’s condition, he shot to the top of the national organ donor registry. A few hours before doctors were to install the heart pump, word came that a heart had been found.
    “All I know is that it was a 32-year-old male,” Faulk said.
    His new life has begun with prayer and reflection. In the next several days, Faulk will write a letter to the unidentified donor’s family, trying to express the inexpressible. He would love to meet the family some day, if they would like to meet him.
    “I hope the letter gives them closure or at least gives them the knowledge of who I am,” Faulk said. “I will send my prayers and condolences for the loss of their son and loved one. I don’t know if they’re Catholic, Christian or whatever, but I want them to know the heart is going to someone who is looking to use his life in service to the good of others.”
    As Faulk recites the Liturgy of the Hours each day and as he attends Mass, he prays for the souls of the faithful departed, and he especially mentions his donor by name.
    “I owe him that much, at the very least,” he said. “Whether I ever know his name or not, it will be a lifelong gratitude. I’d love to meet his family. Who knows who they are and what kind of fruits could still come from that?”
    Faulk’s former classmates at Vermilion Catholic High School were among the hundreds of people praying for his recovery. They presented him with a special gift, a plaque of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
    “If I can’t take that as a hint to cultivate that devotion a little more than I already have, shame on me,” he said.
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected]