Marc’s Story: 47 Remarkable Years With a Mechanical Heart Valve Replacement

This July, I will return to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York for open-heart surgery. It will not be my first time. It will not even be my first time on that particular operating table's lineage — the surgeons, the institution, the history all trace back to a summer nearly half a century ago, when I was fourteen years old and the biggest concern in my life was whether I'd make it to sleepaway camp.

I did not make it to camp that summer. Instead, I got a mechanical heart valve replacement that, forty-seven years later, is still working.

I may be one of the oldest living recipients of a St. Jude mechanical aortic valve in the country. Possibly in the world. Nobody has told me otherwise, and at this point, I've started to take a certain quiet pride in the distinction. But this isn't really a story about a medical record. It's a story about what a forty-seven-year-old piece of engineering sewn into your chest can give you, if you let it — and what it feels like to face the operating room again, this time as a grown man instead of a frightened kid.

The Diagnosis I Didn't Choose

I was born in New York in 1965 with aortic stenosis. I didn't develop this condition. I arrived with it. From the very beginning, my heart worked harder than it should have had to.

I was fortunate, in a way that I wouldn't come to fully appreciate until decades later, to be cared for by Dr. Leonard Steinfeld, the founder of Pediatric Cardiology at Mount Sinai. Being one of his patients meant being part of the earliest chapter of a field that didn't have much history yet. Pediatric cardiology, as its own discipline, was still young. So was I.

For years, that diagnosis lived quietly in the background of an otherwise ordinary childhood. Then, in May of 1979, it stopped being quiet.

May 1979: The Surprise

I remember being told, matter-of-factly, that I would need open-heart surgery that summer — and that as a result, I would not be going to sleepaway camp. For a fourteen-year-old, I'll be honest: the surgery itself was almost an abstraction. The camp was real. The camp was the thing I could picture losing.

It's strange, looking back, how the mind of a fourteen-year-old works. I understood, in some intellectual sense, that heart surgery was serious. But what actually landed, what I actually felt in the moment, was much smaller and much more human: disappointment. A summer rearranged. Friends I wouldn't see. It was only later that the size of what was actually about to happen caught up with me.

My parents, to their enormous credit, handled it beautifully. They gave me a tremendous amount of support through a period that must have been far more frightening for them than it was for me — I had the luxury, in a sense, of not fully grasping the stakes. They did not have that luxury. I think about that more now than I did then.

July 1979: One of the First

In July of 1979, I underwent open-heart surgery performed by Dr. Robert Litwak at Mount Sinai. I received a St. Jude mechanical valve. The valve had only been introduced a few years earlier. I was one of the earliest patients in the country to receive one.

I don't say this to inflate my own story. I say it because it matters to what comes next: nobody in that operating room in 1979 could have told you, with real confidence, how long a valve like mine would last. The device was new. The long-term data simply didn't exist yet, because not enough time had passed for anyone to have it. In a real sense, my recovery — and everything I did with my life afterward — became part of that data.

Forty-seven years later, I can tell you the answer. It lasts. It lasts remarkably well.

What the Valve Gave Me

Because of the surgery, I didn't go back to camp — not that summer — and the door on that particular chapter of my life closed for good. My mother, sensing that I needed something to fill the space camp had occupied, suggested I take up a hobby: guitar lessons.

I don't think either of us understood, at the time, what that suggestion would turn into.

What started as something to do during recovery became a genuine calling. I studied seriously, eventually training at a music conservatory under classical guitarists of real distinction and reputation. I became, by the standards of the discipline, a classical guitarist of some stature. It is not an exaggeration to say that the surgery — the very thing that took camp away from me — is the reason I found music.

Eventually, I left that path, and college, for the business world. Thirty-some years ago, I founded a telecommunications company, which I have operated for the past twenty-six years. A childhood heart condition, a surgery that reshaped one summer, a valve that was barely a few years old itself — and out of all of that came a full career in music and then a full career in business. Two entire lives, really, that a fourteen-year-old missing camp could never have predicted.

That's what I mean when I say this isn't really a story about a valve. The valve was just the beginning of the sentence. Everything after it is the part that matters.

Living With It: Forty-Seven Quiet Years

For almost forty-seven years now, I've taken the same medication (a blood thinner) every day to keep my blood at the right consistency for a mechanical valve. It becomes, over that much time, less a medication and more a fact of life, the way some people live with daily allergy pills or morning coffee. You get blood work done regularly. You learn your body's rhythms with it. It fades into the background.

And in the background is precisely where I wanted it, because in the foreground, I was living an active, full life. I play tennis three to four times a week — purely recreational, no heavy contact, just the game for the pure enjoyment of it. I've traveled. I've run a company for over two and a half decades. I've had, in every sense that matters, a normal adult life, sustained quietly by a small mechanism that a surgeon placed in my chest before I could vote.

That, to me, is the real headline: not that the valve is old, but that it let forty-seven years of an entirely ordinary, entirely full life happen on top of it.

A Year Ago

About a year ago, a scan revealed something new: an aortic aneurysm that had been slowly developing over the years and had finally reached a point of real concern. It is, in a sense, a problem unrelated to the original valve. But it means I am, once again, headed back to the operating room.

Hearing that news was unsettling, in a way that's hard to fully articulate. There is a particular kind of quiet that comes over you when a doctor tells you something has changed inside your chest. I've always known, somewhere in the back of my mind, that a mechanical valve wouldn't necessarily be a "forever" solution — that someday, something would need attention. I just didn't know when, or what form it would take.

At the same time, I found myself feeling something unexpected alongside the concern: gratitude. I was fortunate to have received one of the very first mechanical valves of its kind, and it lasted forty-seven years. However this next chapter unfolds, that fact doesn't change. It's remarkable. It still amazes me.

Facing surgery as an adult is a genuinely different experience from facing it as a child. As a fourteen-year-old, my fear had a shape I could hold — missing camp. As an adult, the fears are less concrete and, in some ways, larger: you think, quite plainly, about your own mortality. But you also carry something the fourteen-year-old version of me didn't have: forty-seven years of proof that the medicine works, that recovery is possible, that a full life on the other side of a scary surgery is not just possible but likely.

This Time, Different

This coming surgery will take place at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, performed by Dr. Ismail El-Hamamsy, who is regarded as one of the leading aortic surgeons in the world. My relationship with him has been genuinely reassuring — he is a kind, patient man, generous with his time and his explanations, exactly the kind of presence you want across the table from you before something like this.

Dr. Ismail El-Hamamsy

During this procedure, my mechanical valve will be replaced with a bovine tissue valve. The recommendation makes a great deal of sense for where I am in life: it means that after almost forty-seven years, I will finally be able to come off the blood thinner I've depended on since I was fourteen. That, on its own, is a meaningful reason to make this change.

There is something almost symmetrical about it: the boy who got one of the first mechanical valves in 1979 is now, in his own way, part of a new chapter — trading one kind of solution for another, decades later, at a different stage of life.

Looking Ahead

I expect to return to my routine by late August, and to be back on the tennis court — the recreational, no-contact, purely-for-fun version of it — by October. If history is any guide, I have every reason to believe that timeline is realistic. It was realistic once before, at fourteen, with far less known about the very valve keeping me alive. It should be more than realistic now.

I've thought a great deal about why I wanted to share this story, and I keep landing on the same answer: I hope it offers some reassurance to readers who are facing valve surgery themselves, whether for the first time or, like me, for the second. Forty-seven years ago, a surgeon and a still-new piece of medical technology gave a scared fourteen-year-old a chance at an entire life he couldn't yet imagine — music, a career, decades of tennis, decades of simply being an adult in the world. That is not a small thing. That is, in every sense of the word, a testament to what modern medicine can do.

I'm grateful for it. I'm walking into this July with my eyes open, informed in a way I couldn't have been at fourteen, and with a great deal of confidence that this next chapter will be, like the last one, a long and good one.

Related Links:

• Home INR Testing for Mechanical Heart Valve Replacement Patients

• Bioprosthetic or Mechanical Heart Valve Replacements: Which May Be Right For You?

• Mechanical Heart Valve Replacements: 13 Facts to Know

Best regards,
Marc Becker

P.S. My story is shared in memory of Dr. Robert Litwak and Dr. Leonard Steinfeld, Mount Sinai Hospital, New York. And with gratitude to the doctors and nurses of Mount Sinai, then and now.