SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO — Konrad Reuland spent the last day of his life in a coma as his mother, resigned to her son’s fate, curled up close, rested her head on his broad chest and listened to his heartbeat for as long as she could.
Reuland’s heart, strengthened by his days as a football player at Stanford and in the NFL, sounded as mighty as ever. And Mary lay there from sunrise to sundown savoring the pulsing rhythm. Occasionally, someone would gently nudge her and tell her it was time to go.
“No,” Mary told them. “This is the thing I have to do today.”
Reuland died of a brain aneurysm Dec. 12 and his organs were donated, as per his wishes. The family knew only that Konrad’s kidney went to a Southern California woman in her 60s, his liver went to a male in his 50s and, most notably, his heart and other kidney went to a 71-year-old man in south Orange County.
By the time of the funeral, friends who had read about Rod Carew’s recent heart transplant in Los Angeles were putting two and two together. They pulled Mary aside and asked if it was possible: Do you think Konrad saved Carew? Did the heart of an NFL player wind up in the chest of a baseball Hall of Famer?
Mary hadn’t considered that prospect before, but she was instantly overcome with the feeling it had to be true. So after a flurry of back-channel texts and e-mails, she wrangled a phone number for Carew’s wife, Rhonda, and left an improbable message:
“This is Mary Reuland,” she said. “And I think your husband may have my son’s heart and kidney. Give me a call back.”
So began the journey of two Orange County families now intertwined as one. The Reulands and the Carews, bound by a single heart, have joined forces to fight cardiovascular disease and to promote organ donation. Both families spoke to the Bay Area News Group this week.
They are going public, both families said, because they believe Konrad has deemed it so. Sometimes Carew sits at Reuland’s gravesite and talks it out.
“I just thank him for saving my life and putting a roaring heart inside my body,” the 18-time All-Star said. “We have a long way to go together.”
Carew already had a partnership with the American Heart Association, a campaign launched a year ago and named after his uniform number with the Minnesota Twins and California Angels. It’s called “The Heart of 29.”
Konrad Reuland was 29 when he died.
When the families met in person for the first time, in a visit coordinated by the AHA on March 2, one of the first things Mary did was lean her head against Carew’s chest. Using a stethoscope to eavesdrop on a miracle, she listened hard as Carew took deep and purposeful breaths.
Five seconds went by as Mary tried to find her son. Ten … 15 … 16 …
“There it is,” Mary said.
Her face turned crimson and, reflexively, she wrapped her arms around Carew’s neck. She was hugging a stranger. She was hugging her son.
“Does it sound the same?” Rhonda asked, quietly.
Mary nodded through the tears.
“I’ve got it memorized,” she replied.
# # #
Carew likes coffee now, which is weird. He couldn’t stand the stuff for his first seven decades on earth, but now he’s constantly asking Rhonda to make him a cup. He likes it with cream, no sugar, just the way Konrad did. The heart wants what it wants.
There’s something else new since the operation: hope. Carew, so serene as a ballplayer over a career that yielded 3,053 hits, concedes he lost his cool while languishing on the heart transplant list.
“Every day I would cry,” the 1977 American League MVP said. “As soon as Rhonda left the hospital, I started crying. And then I started screaming. And when I got up in the morning and looked at the clock, it’d be 5 or 6 o’clock and I would start crying and I just couldn’t stop.”
His downward slide began Sept. 20, 2015 at the Cresta Verde Golf Course in Corona. Carew stepped up to the first tee, smacked a shot down the middle and instantly felt as if his chest was burning.
He was having a massive heart attack, the type they call the widow-maker.
Carew backed his cart up to the clubhouse and yelled for help. He doesn’t remember much after that, aside from a paramedic hovering over him with paddles.
“He had a glow around him,” Carew said, his eyes occasionally reddening. “All of a sudden I heard him say, ‘Let’s go, dammit! We’re losing him! And I was gone.”
He said he flat-lined once more at Riverside Community Hospital and vaguely remembers more paddles, more panic.
“My only thought was my wife,” Carew said, turning again to look at Rhonda. “What’s going to happen to her? That’s all I thought about. Nothing else but: Who’s going to take care of her?”
As it turned out, Rhonda could take care of things just fine. Nicknamed the “Pitbull,” a moniker she embraces, Rhonda is such a formidable presence that when it’s time to buy a new car, Rod takes a stroll outside and sics Rhonda on the salesman.
Rhonda became Rod’s caretaker, chauffeur and medical advocate. She learned so much about the transplant process that surgeons joked about giving her an honorary degree.
Carew survived with the help of a Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD), which was implanted during a six-hour surgery at Scripps La Jolla Hospital. The mechanical heart pumped the blood, but also required bulky battery packs and had to be plugged in at night.
Carew was put on the heart transplant list Nov. 18, at which point Rod and Rhonda began sleeping with their cell phones nestled between them, convinced the call would come in the middle of the night. After three days, Carew was already losing hope.
“I think they forgot me,” he said.
The Pitbull, meanwhile, joined forces with Carew’s doctors and kept pushing for him to be bumped up on the priority list. They argued that a subdural hematoma in July had meant Rod could no longer take blood thinners, putting him at increased risk. Rhonda also worried that her husband’s age — Rod turned 71 on Oct. 1 — was becoming a factor.
Carew got bumped up to 1-AE status, the second highest rung, on Dec. 9. Five days later, on Dec. 14, the Carews got a call that a heart and kidney match were waiting for him.
Both families are sensitive to the possible perception that this was preferential treatment. They know people will roll their eyes that somehow the mint-condition NFL heart wound up with the seven-time batting champion.
But the process is blind, and strictly regulated by the United Network of Organ Sharing (UNOS), which guarantees fairness in the allocation of organs for transplant.
Reuland was a Type-O donor. Carew is a B-Positive blood type but was the first on the list to also match as a Hepatitis-B immune recipient.
Now, at long last, Carew’s outlook is the same as his blood: Be-Positive.
“I can’t tell you how much of a difference having a heart has made,” said his son, Devon. “His stamina is up. Psychologically, he feels like he can do more.
“And knowing all the coincidences — my mom calls them ‘God winks’ — that led up to him getting Konrad’s heart just makes it all the more special.”
# # #
Konrad Reuland was working out on the treadmill at the time of his fatal brain aneurysm. Of course he was. Konrad was a perpetual motion machine from the time he was born and was so unstoppable as a toddler that his mother took to tying bells to his shoes.
“I needed to know where that little stinker was,” Mary explained.
Konrad excelled in every sport he tried and declared at a young age he would be a professional athlete one day. So it was understandably thrilling for the 6th grader when he had a chance encounter with a retired ballplayer at St. John’s Episcopal School in Santa Margarita. One of his schoolmates there was Cheyenne Carew.
“I picked him up from school and the first thing he said when he got in the car was, ‘Mom, I met Rod Carew today!” Mary recalled.
That was the first time Konrad gave his heart to Rod Carew.
On the day Reuland died, Mary left the hospital only after giving one last instruction to the doctors. “Whoever gets this heart better deserve it,” she warned, “because this is a good one.”
Her message had a double-meaning. The heart was good because it was strong. It belonged to a 6-foot-6, 270-pound tight end who played two seasons at Stanford under coach Jim Harbaugh, then followed him to the 49ers, where he spent 2011 on the practice squad.
Reuland also played 30 career NFL games for the New York Jets (2012-13) and Baltimore Ravens (2015). At the time of his aneurysm, Reuland was working out on the treadmill, burning off Thanksgiving dinner calories in case an NFL team needed his services.
“In terms of health, his heart was a Ferrari,” Mary said.
But the good heart was also kind. Over the final five years of his life, Reuland sometimes made a 70-mile drive to San Diego to visit Kimi, the young niece of a family friend. At the age of 4, she was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a nerve tumor of the spinal cord and brain.
There’s a video of the hulking football player sitting next to the sick girl on a hospital bed as they sing Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” together. Reuland knows every word.
Reuland returned from those trips with sparkling nails so often that he no longer had to ask Mary where her nail-polish remover was.
Mary remarked once about how sweet it was that Konrad took the time to go see her. “What are you talking about, mom?” he replied. “She’s my inspiration.”
Reuland’s heart wound up going to someone who spent much of his life steeling his own. Carew knew cruelty growing up in Panama, where his father beat him as a matter of routine. He says now that the reason he was never nervous on the baseball field was because he’d long ago declared the diamond to be his sanctuary.
“I made the baseball field the area where there was nothing anybody could do to take me away from the job I was there to do,” Carew said.
But at age 50, he softened. His daughter, Michelle, died of leukemia at age 18 and while she languished on the bone-marrow transplant list, she urged her father to use the power of his baseball stardom to generate more donors.
“She had said to me, ‘Daddy, people are going to listen to you because of who you are,” Carew said. “And at that time, I wasn’t really close with the press.
“But I said, ‘OK, if you say that, I will do all I can until I’m no longer alive. That’s a promise that I made to her.”
# # #
Carew likes to say now that he has two birthdays, his own and Konrad Reuland’s. While the rest of him reached AARP age long ago, his heart turned 30 on April 4.
The Carews commemorated his heart’s big 3-0 by visiting Konrad’s gravesite with balloons and a gift: a signed baseball with an inscription that opened: “Happy birthday, Konrad. I promise to always take care of your very priceless gifts.”
Upon pulling into the cemetery, they saw that Mary and her youngest son, Austin, were already there. It was an impromptu reunion for a group that now calls each other family. They spent two hours together, listening to music and reflecting on their journey.
“It was just kind of crazy being with Konrad’s heart on his birthday,” Austin said. “It wasn’t planned. It just kind of happened like that.”
The families talk most about what to do next. Carew and Rhonda work with the American Heart Association to encourage people to get screened for warning signs and to take steps toward better heart health. Last year, the AHA set up a station at the players’ hotel in Cooperstown, where the Carews persuaded dozens of fellow Hall of Famers and their significant others to get screened at no charge.
A former Angels pitcher, Clyde Wright, heard of Carew’s tale and went to the doctors to get checked out. Wright had a 90 percent blockage in four places and promptly had a quadruple bypass. “He called me and said, ‘Thanks for allowing me to have another birthday and to be with my grandchildren,”’ Carew said.
Ralf and Mary Reuland, meanwhile, as well as brothers Austin and Warren, are using Konrad’s story to promote Big Brothers Big Sisters. They created a scholarship in his honor. “Because that’s the kind of life he lived,” Mary said.
They know first-hand how a small step can make a big difference. Just last April, Konrad Reuland was sitting in the kitchen filling out his driver’s license renewal form. He casually asked his mom if he should be an organ donor.
“That’s a totally personal decision, sweetie,” Mary told him. “You have to do what feels right.”
He checked the box.
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