Transplant Recipient Full of Heart for French Lick Resort's 5K

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.”

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."
David’s outlook was urgent enough that doctors fast-tracked him to be able to jump the line, so to speak, on the priority list for a heart transplant. Twelve times, a potential heart became available for Dave. All 12 times, the doctors turned it down. They insisted waiting it out to locate that perfect heart.

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.”

 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.