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| David Foster (center, with red hat) gathered with family for photos after Saturday's French Lick Family Classic 5K race. Foster participated in the race as a walker almost four months to the day after undergoing a heart transplant. |
During one of the 84 days that David Foster spent in the
hospital earlier this year, this is what he envisioned.
Lined up by the starting chute; flanked by friends and
family; ready to race; smile on his face.
There were runners and walkers who navigated the course
quicker than David did during the French Lick Family Classic 5K race on
Saturday morning, but if you ask anyone who donned one of the blue “Racing for
Daddy Dave” T-shirts with the prominent Superman logo surrounding a heart, they’ll
agree that no one had a better race than David did.
“He won this year,” said his sister, Angela Parker.
Rewind exactly four months to January 21, and David was
being wheeled into the operating room to get a new heart and a second chance that
his family wasn’t sure was going to come in time.
Back on Christmas Eve, David was scheduled to be out of the
hospital after some maintenance on his heart condition, but he instead took a
turn. “He was supposed to be released from hospital that day, Angela said, “and
he almost ended up dying.”
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| Four generations of David's family turned out to support him in the race, and they all wore shirts with a heart and the words "Daddy Dave." |
Less than a month later, they found it.
The ideal match suddenly became available, and after an
eight-hour surgery, David’s new heart hummed without missing a beat: “His
doctor said he put it in and it just took right off,” Angela recalled with a
smile. David still had some work ahead of him. Being hospitalized for almost
three months, his legs had completely atrophied. At one point, he was unable to
sit up or stand on his own.
Yet all the while, David dangled a goal out in front of his
face. He knew French Lick Resort’s 5K was a few months away, and just a few
miles down the road from where he lives in Paoli. So he made it a mission to complete
it, just like he did in 2017 while pushing one of his grandkids in a stroller
(following a five-bypass heart surgery the year before that, no less).
“It more ambitious than I thought at the time,” David said
of the goal to finish. And maybe he would have given it a shot, but when he got
a ways into the race and his wife Karen noticed his heart rate was starting to
climb, she urged him to stop.
Still, when David was able to pause for some perspective, a
partial race still seemed pretty darn good.
“I really had high hopes I could have finished this today.
The doctors, they tell you it’s going to be six months to a year after your
transplant (being able to do something like this), and as a guy you say, ‘Oh,
that’s not going to happen; I’ll be ready to go,’” David said. “It’s taken
time, but when I consider where I was four months ago, this is quite an accomplishment,
I think, when I couldn’t even walk when I got out of the hospital. I’m very
thankful, that’s for sure. For all the support that I have here, all the
support of the doctors of course mainly the donor family. That’s huge.”
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| Blue shirts were the order of the day for racers who showed up to support Dave, as well as each other. |
As David’s sister emphasized, part of the day was to
celebrate his exponential recovery process from transplant recipient to 5K participant.
Part of Saturday was raising awareness for folks to make the choice to be
organ donors to give others like David a new shot at life.
That was the inspiration behind the blue “Daddy Dave” shirts
that about 30 people in David’s support crew were wearing, as part of a fundraiser to benefit the United Network for Organ Sharing which manages the nation's transplant system. There were four
generations sporting the blue shirts, from David's grandkids to his 83-year-old mother. There were scores
more who also bought shirts and wore them Saturday, even if they weren’t at the
race. It even became a global affair since David’s son-in-law Anthony Bradley
(one of French Lick Resort’s golf pros) had some of his family wearing the
T-shirts back in his native England. The plan is to collect all the photos of
David’s supporters wearing their T-shirts, then send them to the family of
David’s heart donor as a reminder that their loss supplied new life for another
family.
“Couldn’t be a more amazing place than this to celebrate our
family, my brother, because he’s still here,” Angela beamed. “We’re incredibly
grateful for that.”
For that, and the ambitious plan that started with David
himself. “He is very competitive, and we kind of had to talk him down and say, ‘If
you can’t even do a mile, you are here, you’re present, that is all we ask,’”
said Megan Bradley, David’s daughter and Anthony’s wife. “He set out there and
he got a little bit of it done, so I think that he was proud that so many of
his friends and family could be here, and we pulled it through for him. Just
for him to be able to be here and see it was just a big goal in itself.”
“Yep. And on to next year, we start training,” Anthony added
with a laugh.
That’s all good by Dave, who’s already thinking about tackling
all 3.1 miles of French Lick’s 2019 race with his new ticker and usual
tenacity.
“I’ll finish it,” David pledged, breaking into a smile.