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The Landau Luck
All day, Sandra Landau felt uneasy as she went about her job selling fine jewelry in an Orange County, California, department store. She was worried about her husband Mark's doctor's appointment that afternoon. After work that evening, she entered their bedroom and found him sitting mutely in a rocking chair, his eyes welling up with tears. "Well, what?" she shouted, panicked. "What did the doctor say?""I need a heart transplant." Without it, he added bluntly, he would die. He was 45 years old.
Sandra, normally shy and composed, burst into tears and crumpled on the bed. Mark joined her, holding her in his arms. A transplant? Even the word was traumatic. "It was like being stabbed with a knife," Sandra says now.
Mark, a self-described pessimist, expected the worst. "All I could see was everything ending," he says.
Later that evening, the Landaus shared the news with their 21-year-old daughter Sarah, their 19-year-old son Larry, and Mark's elderly mother. Larry was the first to unravel emotionally, which set off everyone else. The group came to the conclusion that it was just more of what they called the Landau luck.
"Throughout our lives, it sometimes seemed like everything we touched fell apart," explains Mark. Like most families, the Landaus had had their ups and downs, but, at least for a period, it did seem that they took more than their share of hits.
Mark's dream since boyhood had been to operate his own business. But when he met Sandra at a Memorial Day singles weekend in the Catskills in 1972, he was a recently certified 22-year-old health inspector for New York State. Sandra, a secretary for a precious metals firm, was six years older. She says that she knew instantly that she'd found the man she wanted to spend her life with. She loved everything about him -- his personality, his humor, the way he dressed. It took Mark a little longer -- six weeks -- to make up his mind.
They were married the following January, on a day that started out sunny, turned to rain by afternoon and ended in a snowstorm, providing a sort of meteorological metaphor for the years ahead. The two New Yorkers settled in an apartment in suburban White Plains. Sarah was born the next year, and Larry, 15 months later.
In 1976 Mark, partnering with his dad, took over a variety store in nearby Ardsley. Named The Big Top, the shop catered to commuters riding in and out of Manhattan. The days at the store were long, but Mark was a born workaholic, and everyone pitched in, including Sandra, who often waited on customers at night and monitored the greeting card inventory. For fun, the Landaus bought shares in two horses, Windsong and Bad Baby, and took the kids to the harness races in Monticello, packing pajamas for the late-night ride home. Life was good.
It all collapsed without warning in the torrential spring floods that hit Ardsley in 1984. The Landaus watched in horror as the Saw Mill River, 20 feet behind The Big Top, rose ominously in the drenching rains. "Suddenly," says Mark, "my store was a river with seven feet of water ruining everything, destroying $250,000 worth of merchandise." Insurance covered only half the loss.
Determined to reopen, Mark borrowed $40,000, and his dad mortgaged the family home. Then, six months later, the unthinkable happened. The Saw Mill flooded its banks again, this time wiping out the Landaus for good.
The couple reluctantly declared bankruptcy and, for a time, were forced to go on welfare, even to accept food stamps, a humiliation that still rankles. "That is just not us," says Sandra, "but we had two young children who had to eat."
Mark found employment with a friend in retail, but money was still a worry -- and not their only one. After the first flood, Mark, who says he had always been "healthy as a horse," was hospitalized with a severe respiratory virus initially diagnosed as legionnaires' disease. He believes the cause was river bacteria that had lodged in his store's air ducts and surfaces. The virus triggered myocarditis, a serious inflammation of the heart muscle.
In the raw winter months, Mark began suffering increasingly severe bouts of bronchitis, and each illness triggered episodes of heart failure. Three times, he almost died. A physician told him that he should move to a warmer climate. So in 1988, when a friend offered a three-bedroom condo in Irvine at a modest rent, the Landaus migrated to California.
"The weather was phenomenal, and it kept me alive," says Mark, who landed a position managing a large paint store. He lost weight, went to the pool and even flirted briefly with golf. Sandra took a job at a nearby department store, and while money remained tight, both kids eventually graduated from high school and entered community college.
Then, in late 1995, Mark was hit with a bad case of the flu. His cardiologist offered a grim diagnosis. Mark's enlarged heart was failing to pump blood adequately. His condition -- idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy -- had reached a point where he needed a new heart to survive. Without it, he would live only 15 months.
Mark was stunned. Referred to the heart transplant program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, he underwent a battery of medical and psychological tests and, on October 3, 1996, went on the transplant list. Having had five uncles who had all died in their 40s or 50s from heart disease, he says, "I never thought it would work out."
The toughest part was the waiting. In 1996 more than 23,000 heart transplants had been performed in the United States since Dr. Christiaan Barnard pioneered the surgery 29 years earlier, but only about half of those waiting for a donor heart received one within a year. "That means many people passed away," notes Mark, who fully expected to be one of them. His greatest worries were for Sandra. He was the man of the family, the decision maker, the leader. How would she possibly survive -- financially or emotionally?
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