TURNERS FALLS — Ryan Interlande is confident the music isn’t ending for him any time soon.
The popular party and event DJ doesn’t sound like someone on the mend. Cracking jokes and watching ESPN in the quaint Turners Falls house he shares with his wife, Pam, he hardly looks like a man who survived a harrowing experience. But he is.
Interlande had a heart transplant on May 19, after six years battling an irregular heartbeat and cardiomyopathy.
“I’m feeling much better. It’s been a long time since I actually felt a pulse or I felt blood running through my body. … It’s really bizarre to feel that. At first you’re like, ‘Is this supposed to happen?’” he said on Tuesday. “Of course, it is. I’ve got a real healthy heart pumping right now.”
He says the part of his chest surgeons cut open will be tender for about another month and a half and he can’t drive or even sit in the front seat of a moving vehicle, because an airbag in the chest could prove devastating. Nevertheless, the 40-year-old Interlande says he is stronger than he has been in years.
“I’m able to walk and do stairs a heck of a lot easier than I once was, especially when I first got home from the hospital,” he says. “I’ll have my morning cup of coffee and I’ll hold the cup and I can actually feel the blood circulating in my fingertips on the coffee mug and it’s just so impressive. It puts tears in your eyes because these are things you kind of take for granted. I definitely did in my younger days.”
Interlande, who hopes to return to his part-time DJ’ing by next summer, is also anxious to get back to his job as a salesman at Channing L. Bete Co. in Deerfield, where he ironically has worked on American Heart Association materials. He aims to get back to work within six months. His four-member rock band, The Cold Harvest Band, which played a small gig less than two weeks before his transplant surgery, is taking a break for the summer.
The group traditionally practices in the Interlandes’ basement. Ryan’s downstairs man cave sports his DJ lights and a drum set, as well a treadmill and weights he will be using to keep his new ticker in shape. A New England Patriots calendar on the wall seemed frozen in time — still pinned to May, when he got his new heart. The month features a photograph of cornerback Malcolm Butler. Interlande says he can now focus on relatively unimportant tasks like making sure the calendar is up to date, though he seemed to think there are worse sights than that of the hero of Super Bowl XLIX and the month he received a new lease on life.
Interlande says he was working as the service manager at Brown Motors in Greenfield and having his morning coffee six years ago when he knew something was wrong. He had chest pains, his leg swelled up and he couldn’t stand up straight. He visited his local physician, who sent him to the hospital, where test results forced doctors to have him LifeFlighted to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Interlande explains his heart was “out of sync” because it couldn’t work correctly. It would pump erratically, causing blood to flow “in the wrong places at the wrong times,” meaning other organs began to function incorrectly due to improper blood flow.
He eventually had a defibrillator implanted in his chest to keep his heart in normal rhythm and provide a shock if it went into a serious arrhythmia called ventricular fibrillation. Interlande said it went into use one time, while he was on a treadmill.
“You feel it throughout your whole body. But it doesn’t linger,” he recalls. “It’s not like getting punched in the face, where you feel it for awhile. This was an intense, ‘Pew,’ and you feel it throughout your entire being and it goes away. And it did work.”
In January 2015, it came time to attach a left ventricle assist device, known as an LVAD, to his heart.
“I felt death. I knew I was dying. There was no doubt about it. I was hospitalized for three weeks during the December month, leading into the LVAD surgery,” he recalls, adding that he had gone home for the holiday and gained 22 pounds in fluid in six days. “That was when I knew I was dying and needed the LVAD. I had no choice.”
Interlande explains the LVAD was a pump placed in his heart with an external drive line that went into a battery pack he carried wherever he went. He says the devices, which have both been removed, made showering a tricky endeavor, because they could not get wet.
Interlande says he was home around 3:15 p.m., when he got “the call.”
He says a nurse named Frank, whom he knew through previous clinic visits, called and asked he if had a travel bag packed. He then asked how soon Interlande and his wife could safely get to Boston.
“When you’re waiting for an organ, that means someone else’s life has been taken, so it’s hard to really wish for that. On the other end of it, you’re like, ‘I’m living with this battery-operated device attached to my body,’” Interlande recalls. “As soon as I hung up the phone I had every type of emotion that there is, to the extreme. I was excited, but I was petrified, terrified. It’s major surgery and I was like, ‘Part of me is going to be removed. My heart was going to be taken out.’”
Pam Interlande works in Amherst, but got home in 10 minutes. The two spent the three-hour drive talking mostly about their new-found excitement and all that they can do following the transplant, and Ryan was checked into his hospital room by 6 p.m.
He said he knows nothing about the heart donor except that the organ is young and healthy. He explained he wrote a letter last week to the donor’s family and mailed it to the New England Organ Bank, where it will be reviewed before being sent to the family. Interlande said he expressed his gratitude to the anonymous family and explained how the heart has improved his life.
He told The Recorder he would love to know more about the donor, information like his or her favorite music, food and place to visit. After all, instead of a battery pack, he is now carrying a piece of that individual wherever he goes.