The New York Giants did the unthinkable six years ago and staged a small miracle by defeating then-unbeaten New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII. Big Blue superfans and West Windsor residents Mark and Terry Meade watched from Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in New Brunswick.
After years of heart problems, Mark was seriously ill. Four months after the big game, though, the Meades experienced a miracle of their own: Mark received a heart transplant after several months on the waiting list.
The two, who have been married 49 years, decided to celebrate both Mark’s health and their love of football by volunteering at this year’s Super Bowl, held at MetLife Stadium. They worked greeting guests at Newark Liberty International Airport.
“We’re lucky to be doing this considering where we were, how far we’ve come,” Terry said. “We watched that Super Bowl in his room with his cardiologist on the phone checking to make sure his heart wasn’t going to explode that day. It was very exciting. Without the gift that we received from the anonymous donor and family, we certainly wouldn’t be doing this. He was in end-stage congestive heart failure. There was nothing that would save him except a transplant. We’re very lucky.”
Mark and Terry, who met when they were 16, moved from Brooklyn to East Windsor in 1971. Mark is the son of a nursing home food services director and an administrator at Maimonides Hospital. Terry’s father, was a stockbroker and financial planner. Her mother was a millinery model.
They came to West Windsor in 2000.
Mark, now 70, had his first heart attack in 1987, at age 43. He had three subsequent attacks, but he was at his low point in June, 2005. He and Terry traveled to a conference in California with his cardiologist’s approval. Their first night, though, Mark suffered a massive heart attack and went into cardiac arrest. He underwent bypass surgery almost immediately after arriving at Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City and was on life support for six days. They were finally able to fly home in July, a month later.
Despite the surgery, though, Mark was still suffering. Through the next three years, he and Terry were in and out of the hospital, finally ending up at Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia, where they were told a transplant was Mark’s only option.
On June 4, 2008, he received one.
Terry said Mark looked better minutes after the surgery than he had in years.
“I remember as I approached the bedside and I looked down at him, he was pink,” she said. “He hadn’t been pink in four or five years. He was white. I touched his face and he was warm immediately after surgery because the blood was circulating again and it hadn’t been in so long. The recovery was nothing short of miraculous.”
Mark is still in disbelief.
“The whole thing is hard to believe,” Mark said. “It has become, I won’t say commonplace for us, but it is our lives. It’s what we do. We talk about it. We encourage other people. We were asked by friends in Indiana to talk to a gentleman’s mother who is 68 years old. She needs a heart transplant and she’s not considering it. That is beyond imagination. You’re 68 years old. How could you not consider it? We belong to so many different groups and we’ve met people who are 20 and 25 years out of the surgery. How could you not take that chance? How could you just give up?”
Giving up wasn’t an option for the Meades. Mark still had family to spend time with (their children Cindy and Scott and grandchildren Brandon, Jared and Andrew), a business to run (Meade & Associates Promotional Consulting, through which he, Terry, and Scott provide businesses with promotional products) and, of course, Giants games to attend, as he has been a season ticket holder for 49 years.
Mark and Terry now work with organizations like Donors Are Heroes, Gift of Life, and the New Jersey Sharing Network. They have
done everything from personally consulting with transplant patients to speaking to classes at Rowan University’s Cooper Medical School about transplants and the importance of caregivers.
“We find that we can’t do enough,” Mark said. “Now you go to the other part of the story, being the recipient was the easy part. All I had to do was lie there and say ‘Yes.’ The caregiver goes through hell. I had people around me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Terry was with me during the day, and then she’s home alone.”
Now that the two aren’t constantly “schlepping” back and forth from the hospital, Terry said, they get out as much as possible. They jumped on the Super Bowl volunteer opportunity immediately.
“About a year ago when the Super Bowl host committee put a feeler out,” Terry said, “they needed 15,000 volunteers. I went online, followed up with it thinking that it would be an amazing experience for him having had season tickets to the Giants for 49 years. We went through the process. We had a background check. They’re very serious about this.”
They attended a three-hour orientation at the airport last month. They greeted guests during two sessions: one before the game and one after.
“It’s an experience that the New York/New Jersey area has never had, at least this way, anyway,” Mark said. “We’ve had championship games, but back in the ’50s and ’60s. We like to do things that are fun. Whenever we can, we do.”
Terry called their first shift “long but fantastic.” They handed out maps, hand warmers, and Super Bowl buttons to fans arriving at Newark airport — all while the PR staff from the New Jersey Sharing Network filmed and interviewed them.
“Bottom line is we did it, we enjoyed it, Mark did great and loved every minute of it, and we used it as another way to share our story and get the word out about organ donation,” Terry said. “My final thoughts on this experience include the joy of seeing Mark being able to be a part of it and the happiness and gratitude we feel for our being given the gift of life.”
