He, his wife Michele, and their daughters Gillian and Sara credit medical team and their Catholic faith
JOHNSTON — Michele and Tim Austin met in 1986, when she was 18 and he was 20. Soon, they were going steady.
Eventually, they married and went into business together with Nails in Detail & Eclect-Hip Salon, an expansion of the nail salon Michele had opened in 1991. Their two daughters, Gillian and Sara, were born.
Several years ago, Tim said in an Ocean State Stories interview, “I went to a new doctor for a checkup and they found abnormalities in my EKG. I went to a cardiologist and went through all kinds of testing.
“What they diagnosed was exercise-induced high blood pressure. I didn’t have high blood pressure normally, but when I exercised or ran, it would get dangerously high.
“They put me on blood pressure medication of course, and I kept seeing my doctor annually. After three years, I ended up with a very high heart rate. They call it tachycardia. And it was dangerously high to the point where my primary care physician had me rushed to a hospital to have further tests done.”
This was in 2019, a year before the COVID pandemic began.
Watch a video of Michele and Tim Austin. Click here.
Tim stayed a month at Rhode Island Hospital, where he became a patient of cardiologist Dr. Daniel J. Levine, director of the hospital’s Advanced Heart Failure Program and a professor at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.
Guided by Levine, a diagnosis was made: sarcoidosis, “ a rare disease,” according to the Cleveland Clinic. “There are usually fewer than 200,000 cases of sarcoidosis at any given time in the U.S.”
The heart is not affected in the majority of people living with the disorder — but according to a study posted two years ago on the National Library of Medicine’s National Center for Biotechnology Information site, “approximately 25% of patients with systemic evidence of sarcoidosis have cardiac disease involvement. Patients frequently present with symptoms of heart failure, conduction abnormalities, ventricular arrhythmias, or sudden cardiac death.”
While at Rhode Island Hospital, Tim’s medical team implanted a defibrillator “to protect myself from a dangerous rhythm, which could cause me to go into heart failure,” he recounted. After discharge, “I was getting shocked [repeatedly] to bring my heart rate down because I was having these high heart rates that would come out of nowhere.”
In 2021, the second year of the COVID pandemic, his heart began racing again after Tim received a dose of a COVID vaccine.
“I ended up very sick with a chronic cough I couldn’t control,” he recalled, “and then it became extreme exhaustion. I couldn’t sleep anymore. I was rushed back into the hospital and they saw how my heart was at five to 10 percent capacity. It was actually giving out on me.”
A transplant was all that could save him.
Heart transplants are not performed in Rhode Island and Tim was sent to Tufts Medical Center in Boston. He was following in the steps of Tommy Hardiman, another Rhode Islander who received a new heart there three years ago.
At this point, Tim’s wife, Michele, and their now-grown daughters — Gillian, a nurse and graduate of Regis College, a Catholic University in Weston, Mass.; and Sara, a student at Loyola University, a Catholic school in Maryland — became patient advocates.
“Gillian, Sara and myself had many conversations with the doctors at Tufts advocating for Tim,” Michele said. “We advocated, especially myself, for many things, including Tim’s lifestyle, where we lived, and if we thought he would be compliant with a new heart.
“Tim beat the odds and we stood by with love, perseverance, support, and lots and lots of prayers. Also, Dr. Levine’s guidance and that of the fabulous Dr. Gregory Couper at Tufts Medical Center and the rest of the medical team.”
Everyone prayed, their Catholic faith helping to uphold them.
Less than a week after Tim was admitted, a donor was found.
“They called my wife and said a heart was available that was a match, which was pretty amazing,” Tim said. “I didn’t know I was getting it ‘til the day of my transplant, when they woke me up out of my medical induced coma. That was Jan. 31, 2022.”
Per transplant protocol, the donor’s name was not released. The Austins learned only that “he was a young male, in his twenties,” Michele said.
“They don’t give out any other information about the person,” Tim said.
“Tim could advocate or send a letter, but he hasn’t,” Michele said.
“I haven’t reached out to the family, but that’s probably something I have in mind this year: finally send a letter to the family and let them know how my experience was,” said Tim.
“You send it to the hospital and then [the hospital] sends it out. If they want to reach him, they can.”
A passionate runner before his heart failure, Tim returned to the sport after the transplant, competing in races and marathons.
“At home, we have a wall [labeled] ‘I’ve crossed the line’ and he has about 40 medals on it” Michele said. “He’s done marathons in New York, Boston, Disney World, Philadelphia, Canada and other places.”
“Now we have a deeper sense of our faith, just because of all that we’ve been through,” Tim said.
“It’s a sense of just how important it is for all of us to have that peace in our lives and that spirituality, which really keeps us grounded and gives us the ability to do the things that we do. It’s all for the grace of God, the things that we do and the things we have in our lives.”
