AS a youngster Ernesto Antonio often wondered where he’d be spending New Year’s Eve on the night of the millennium, but in his wildest dreams he could never have imagined what the answer would be.

On December 31, 1999 while most of the country was out partying, Ernesto was the Mater Hospital, recovering from the life-saving heart transplant he had received the previous October.

Until he was in his mid-30s, Ernesto, who was born in Bushypark in Galway City, was a fit and healthy man. His mother who was from Louth had met his Hong Kong-born father, a Portuguese Malaysian while she was working as a nurse in China. Their first child Juliana was born in Hong Kong, Ernesto and his brother José were born here after the Antonios settled in Galway in 1963 where his father, an engineer, worked with Hibernian as an assessor.

Ernesto followed his mother into the nursing profession, training at the city’s then Regional Hospital in the early 1980s before emigrating to England for work in 1987. There he met and married his English-born wife Kate.

He’d always been very fit, cycling and walking everywhere, and in 1998 he took part in a charity ride across the Middle East in memory of a friend who had died of leukaemia. The following April he developed a bad chest infection, which didn’t clear up. His specialist kept treating him for asthma, despite Ernesto’s protestations that asthma wasn’t the problem, it was his heart. He was ignored.

That August, he made his annual pilgrimage home on holidays with Kate and their five-year old daughter, Isabella. He was progressively getting more exhausted and was no longer able to exercise.

This formerly fit 36-year old spent the day of his niece’s birthday party, August 9, 1999 in bed and the following day, went to his own doctor, who diagnosed heart failure and said he needed to go to hospital urgently.

But, when he arrived at A&E the following morning he was told there was nothing wrong with his heart and was sent to Merlin Park. The registrar there “took one look at me, uttered a few expletives and ordered an ambulance to send me to coronary care”.

Things went from bad to worse, as he went into renal and liver failure. He was put on dialysis until his kidney function began to return. His liver also recovered, but his heart did not.

Blood tests diagnosed Q Fever and another virus which was never diagnosed. Humans generally get Q Fever as a result of breathing in contaminated droplets released by infected animals. One effect of the infection is inflammation of the heart wall which can lead to heart failure. There was a theory that Ernesto might have contracted it in the Middle East, but not necessarily, he says. It had also been found in deer at the local park in Essex where he cycled.

On September 11, 1999, his cardiologist in Galway told him that he needed a heart transplant and sent him to the Mater for assessment. Ernesto’s condition was so serious that he was sent immediately to Intensive Care, where a balloon pump was utilised to circulate the blood around his body, as his heart was no longer capable of doing so.

Kate was with him at all stages, while Isabella had stayed in Galway with his sister Juliana. Shortly after he was admitted, a heart became available and he was prepared for an operation. But it turned out the heart was too small.

“I felt then, and I said it to Kate that it would be the third heart before the right one came along,” he recalls. He was right.

He’d been hoping against hope to have his transplant by October 20, 1999 as that was Isabella’s sixth birthday. But it didn’t happen. The family celebrated her birthday in Ernesto’s cubicle in Intensive Care, with Ernesto on an oxygen mask and six candles on her cake, despite the oxygen. She still says it was her best ever.

Kate, Isabella and Ernesto’s family did not give up hope, he recalls.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.

For more on Organ Donation see www.ika.ie or www.strangeboat.org