Boy’s medical bills near $2 million

Monday, Sept. 27, 1999 | 9:05 a.m.

But the 2 1/2 hours he spent last February watching two doctors take turns keeping his 11-year-old son's heart beating was as intense as it gets.

"At one point, a doctor came over to me as I was watching them work on my son and said, 'Are you OK with this?' and I said, 'There is nowhere else I could be at this moment.' "

It began in May 1998 with a relatively routine hernia operation for Stephen.

Following the surgery, doctors discovered that the membrane around his heart was diseased. On Nov. 13 - three days shy of his 11th birthday - Stevie had open heart surgery.

His heart failed the next day.

That is when John Price, 41, a volunteer Douglas County firefighter and EMT since 1988, watched his only son's life held in the hands of the two doctors who massaged his heart.

Finally, a physician laid out the choices. They could give up or Stevie could be hooked up to a bypass machine.

"I told him I had to give my son every chance he could get," John said.

Once on bypass, there was no going back. The next step was a heart transplant. That came on Feb. 5.

"I liked it," Stevie recalled. "I didn't like all those tubes."

While in California with Stevie in the hospitals, John stayed with Barb, who was pregnant, and Katie, their 9-year-old daughter, at the Family House in San Francisco and the Ronald McDonald House in Palo Alto.

The monthly mortgage bills on their Nevada home still came in while John kept up a grueling commute between the hospitals and his job in Sparks. Barb stayed in California to take care of the kids.

The bills have surpassed $1.7 million. The insurance from John's job has paid all but about $26,000. But the family lost their house.

They were in a 10-foot-by-10-foot trailer when Sonja Donaldson, who worked with Barbara Price at Sharkey's Nugget, stepped in.

"I think sometimes we need to be reminded just how fragile life is, and I am not ashamed to ask for help for them. It could happen to anybody," she told The (Gardnerville, Nev.) Record-Courier.

Donaldson took their plight to St. Gall Catholic Church, where parishioners took up a collection to get them out of the trailer and into a rented duplex. More donations will whittle away at the remaining bills.

Stevie's future involves lots of pills each day, biopsies to check his heart and guarding against infections. Other than that, his heart should grow with him and may never need replacing, John said.

Because both kids lost so much school time, they are catching up. Katie is in the 4th grade and Stevie, who should be in 6th grade, will be home-schooled.

He would like to write children's books to help other kids with transplants.