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BOUNTIFUL -- Mary Rizzuto put her red dress on over her exercise clothes Friday morning to make a statement about heart health.
Her energy and smiles are legendary at Lakeview Rehab Center in Bountiful where she works out three days a week. She credits a gift she received 20 years ago: a heart transplant.
Mary is one of the longest-surviving heart transplant recipients in Utah.
Only 16 percent of heart transplant patients survive 20 years. Mary is part of that group.
"That means taking your medicines, it means eating right, it means respecting the fact that you have a gift...that you have to take care of it," she said.
Rheumatic fever damaged her heart when she was 8 years old. Now, at age 23, she had a valve replacement. At 34, she had another.
A year later, after lung surgery in Chicago, cardiac arrest put her on the transplant list.
"It was either a heart transplant or it was living out what time I had left in the hospital," Mary said. "At that time they said I probably had a three-month life expectancy."
That's when she and her family moved from Wyoming to Utah for surgery at University Medical Center.
"Hard part was, is that in order for me to live, somebody had to die," she said.
It was a man in Fresno, Calif., who had a brain aneurism. His wife donated his organs.
"I received his heart," she said.
Mary says the best part of that gift was that she was able to watch her children grow up.
Dan and Mary's daughters, Angie and Adrianna, were only 3 and 8 years old when she had her transplant. Her desire for a new heart was driven by how much of their lives she might miss.
"They've grown up to be wonderful girls, and that's kind of what I wanted," Mary said.
Only 16 percent of heart transplant patients survive 20 years. Often, transplant patients face other problems as well. In 2006, after life-long heart problems damaged her kidneys, Mary had a kidney transplant from her older daughter.
"We're working on our fifth year," Mary said. "She's doing great and I'm very grateful to her gift, too, because her gift has enabled my original gift to work better."
Mary pushes herself to be well.
Tawnya Zeidler, the cardiac rehab specialist at Lakeview Hospital, said, "Heart transplants are hard to come by to begin with, so for her to have had one for such a long time I think speaks volumes about her and her attitude toward living life to its absolute fullest."
Mary, Tawnya says, is not shy about introducing herself and telling her story.
"She has such a great attitude and she spreads that to everybody here in the clinic," she said. "Heart transplant patients are harder to work with because they are a lot more intense, there's a lot more care involved, there are things we watch for a lot more closely than we do with maybe some of the other heart patients, but Mary takes all that in stride. She doesn't want us to take care of her, basically. She's just a lot of fun and she's done miraculous things in her life."
"They didn't just teach me how to exercise," Mary said, "they taught me why they exercise and how important it is to exercise, and they care if I'm here."
Mary's attitude has become infectious. If you are at Lakeview Rehab Center, you are her friend.
Terry Tate is one of those friends. "When she comes here, she's just full of life with everybody," Terry said. "She's probably an inspiration to all of us here, to see what she's gone through, and everybody looks up to Mary and respects her."
"I'm just lucky. I mean, how lucky can you be that I'm even here talking to you," Mary said, "Realistically, 20 years after heart transplant surgery, there aren't a lot of people who get a chance to do this."
As she pumps away on the elliptical machine, Mary Rizzuto says she simply wants to be around for awhile.
E-mail: cmikita@ksl.com
