New London — Waldren "Pokey" Phillips has a new heart beating within his chest, a gift he says will enable him to get back to helping people the way he's done his entire life.

The 62-year-old retired judicial marshal was in end-stage heart disease when he received a transplant on Dec. 5, 2017, at Yale New Haven Hospital. He knows only a few details about the man from Vermont whose death gave him a second chance at life, but he says, as he puts his hand on his heart, that he feels close to him.

"I have to thank God that person was able to help me survive," he said during an interview Saturday at his Jefferson Avenue home. "That's something I'll never forget. That person is in me and always there for me."

A large, sturdy presence for more than two decades at the Broad Street courthouse known as GA10, Phillips confided that he has been "through hell" since collapsing on the job in 2017. He says he always thought things like this happened to other people.

While awaiting his heart transplant, Phillips suffered a stroke that made it difficult to speak, read and write, and sometimes he still struggles to find the right words. He's also lost toes on both feet due to diabetes, and had a seizure earlier this year, according to his oldest daughter, Rasheedah Phillips. He takes about a dozen pills daily and gives himself two injections.

None of his medical issues stop him from taking long walks through his neighborhood twice a day and pestering his doctors about returning to the gym. A boxer in his native Philadelphia when he was in his teens, Phillips has the fighting spirit of that city's famous fictional fighter, Rocky Balboa.

"I'm going to win," he said. "I'm going to win."

Phillips said he worked out daily for most of his life. He said he always ate well and hasn't smoked in decades. He wasn't much of a drinker.

Still, by 2017, his heart was barely functioning, and his family and friends feared he would not survive.

"To be honest, I thought he was going to die," said longtime friend Tamara K. Lanier. She arranged for him to receive a lifetime achievement award from the New London branch of the NAACP, where he had served as president.

"I remember during that time, I was just waiting to get the call," Lanier said by phone Friday. "When I saw him recently, it's like he's been rejuvenated. It's like he's taken 10 or 15 years off his life."

Yale New Haven surgeon Pramod Bonde, interviewed this past week with Phillips' permission, said Phillips' heart was "burnt out" and he needed a pump to give him life while awaiting a transplant.

On July 3, 2017, Bonde performed a "keyhole surgery" on Phillips, making a small incision to fit him with a left ventricle assist device, or LVAD. Patients fare better with the minimally invasive procedure than they would if they had their entire chest cracked open.

They sent Phillips home to wait for a transplant. Organ procurement organizations, known as OPOs, coordinate the process, looking for a donor who matches the potential recipient's size and blood type.

Phillips was suitable for a transplant because there was no other surgical option to repair his heart and he had no conditions that would contribute to the failure of a donated heart. He also had the required support system of family members who would drive him to appointments and help him as he recovered. Phillips has a fiancee, Ada; four children, Rasheedah, Rashaun, Alice and Tiesheedah; six grandchildren, and a network of close friends.

"The heart is a gift from someone, so it's our fiduciary duty as surgeons to make sure that gift is respected within the human body," Bonde said. "You want to make sure they have adequate financial support, family support, no psychological issues that would bring self-harm and no habit of using illicit drugs that have effect on the heart."

The donor is a person who has no chance of survival, who is brain dead and not able to live on their own.

In early December 2017, Phillips received the medical gift he says will enable him to get back in to the swing of things.   

"We got the call that a heart was available and it was a match," Rasheedah Phillips said. "Without a second breath, my father said, 'I'm ready.' I was looking to see if he was scared, but he was just so hopeful."

The Phillips family drove to Yale while teams of surgeons in two places started the work necessary to remove a heart from the donor, transport it to New Haven, place it into Phillips' chest and bring it back to life.

It's a medical miracle taking place with growing frequency at Yale New Haven Hospital, where the transplant team performed a record 30 adult heart transplants last year. Yale recently became the first hospital in Connecticut and Rhode Island to receive certification from the United Network of Organ Sharing to perform pediatric heart transplants.

Once Phillips' new heart was removed from the donor, it was injected with a special solution that allows the heart to stop beating in a relaxed state, Bonde said. There was a four-hour window to transport it and re-establish the blood supply.

"Mr. Phillips had his heart re-animated in his body within that window," he said.

Bonde said the law prohibits him from identifying the donor or the donor hospital. Donated organs arrive at Yale via jet or helicopter and ambulance. If necessary, air traffic control operators open special corridors for planes transporting donor organs.

Phillips was taken to the operating room as soon as the Yale transplant team received the call that the donor surgeon had reached the undisclosed hospital. Once a surgeon started "harvesting" the donor heart, Phillips was put under anesthesia with a breathing tube and monitored. He still had the LVAD pump, which Bonde said made it easy for him to perform the transplant.

More than 100 people are involved in the transplant process, though once the surgery begins, the number of staff in the operating room is limited to six or seven.

"Once I get the word that they landed at Tweed airport safely, I start carefully cutting Mr. Phillips' own heart out and making space for the donor heart," Bonde said. "You have to coordinate this in a matter of 10 to 15 minutes. By the time the donor heart arrives, I would have Mr. Phillips' old heart and valves out."

Once the donor heart arrives in the operating room, the surgeon begins placing it into the body within two minutes.

"The heart is essentially sliced away at five places," Bonde explained. "You need to make sure those five connections are made before you can start the donor heart with the patient's blood. It washes away the solution we had given it to stop."

The surgery can last 10 to 12 hours. The "reanimation" takes 20 to 25 minutes, and when it's complete, there's a sigh of relief and excitement in the operating room, Bonde said.

"All the efforts of all these people who have worked to make this happen have finally paid off, and now you have essentially performed your duty of helping another human being and respecting the donor," he said.

Phillips' daughter said the family was elated when one of the doctors told them the surgery was a success, but when she saw her father laying in the bed still sedated, with "tubes coming from every part of his body," she thought he wasn't going to make it. He'd been calm going into the procedure, but when he woke up and realized he had a breathing tube, he had "terror in his eyes," she said.

The next 36 to 48 hours were critical, as a specialized group of medical staff closely monitored Phillips' heart rate, respiratory rate, fluids and chambers of the new heart. Medications were prescribed to prevent rejection of the organ and infection. He was moved into a critical care stepdown unit and released to a rehab facility once a biopsy indicated his body was not rejecting the heart.

Phillips was in the hospital for about a month, his daughter said. Infection remained a big risk, and he couldn't eat red meat and seafood, she said. He had to wear a mask in grocery stores and family members had to stay away if they had the slightest cough. Eventually the transplant team released him back to his cardiologists, and Bonde said Phillips' prognosis is excellent if he continues to follow up with his doctors.

"We want to try to give the longevity that otherwise would have been allowed to the donor," Bonde said. "We are trying to give that life to that recipient. You have to see it from the prism of how the donor family is going to see it."

 Bonde said transplant patients become like family to the staff.

"He's a wonderful guy," he said of Phillips. "He has a strong desire to live. He has a strong will, which is important."

Phillips said he can't wait to get back into the community and reconnect with friends.

Retired marshal Ron Johnson, his longtime partner, said Phillips looked great when he ran into him recently at The Home Depot.

"He's a lucky guy," Johnson said. "He's been through a lot."

His daughter Rasheedah said she tells him all the time, "You're here for a purpose. God isn't done with you yet."

 k.florin@theday.com