Damon Daniel Weber, born 8/8/88 with congenital heart disease, had two successful surgical repairs by the age of four, and thrived into his teen years. A top student at one of the nation’s leading magnet schools, he was a theater director and actor who made his national television debut on the HBO series, Deadwood. He also skied, sailed, and rode wild horses with a world-champion bull rider.
After developing complications related to his original repair, Damon underwent a heart transplant in January of 2005, at age sixteen-and-a-half. The transplant was successful, and worked even better than expected. Damon returned home after 30 days with an excellent prognosis. There was jubilation in the family and among his friends.
But unbeknownst to Damon or his family—though his cardiologists knew—Damon’s heart donor had tested positive for Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), known as “the bugaboo of heart transplants.” But no treatment was given to Damon, appropriate preventive measures were not taken, nor were any warnings provided to Damon or his family. When Damon started reporting flu-like symptoms and other signs of EBV infection several weeks after returning home—cough, fatigue, fever, loss of weight, mental confusion—his cardiologists dismissed them, and said there was nothing to worry about. When the symptoms worsened and his family brought him in to the emergency room, the cardiologists still insisted on treating him for a full course of rejection, despite the fact that he tested negative for rejection and had every symptom of infection.
It was like stepping on the accelerator instead of the brake.
The treatment for rejection—suppressing the immune system to stop the patient from rejecting the heart—is the opposite of the treatment for infection. With infection, the treatment is to reduce the immune suppression so the patient can fend off the infection with natural defenses. Damon’s head cardiologist, the unit’s medical director, knew what the right treatment was: a year earlier she had co-authored a book chapter which stated that reduction or temporary cessation of the immunosuppression is the proper standard of care for a patient in Damon’s condition.
So not only did his cardiologists fail to help Damon, they actually hindered him from fighting back with his own strength by not following their own protocol. By the time his cardiologists had correctly identified EBV as the cause of his illness, it was too late. Damon’s unchecked infection had turned into a full-blown case of post-transplant lympho-proliferative disease (PTLD), and he died a terrible death, his organs ravaged from within.
Following his death, Damon’s family brought a lawsuit against the hospital and the cardiologists. After failing to produce his relevant medical records for three years, Damon’s chief cardiologist testified at her deposition that his records had been shipped to an off-site storage and “could not be located despite all best efforts.”
In 2012, Damon’s father, Doron Weber, published a critically acclaimed memoir about his son’s life, Immortal Bird: A Family Memoir (Simon & Schuster) but to date the lawsuit remains unresolved and Damon remains gone.
