 I'm presently celebrating the 29th anniversary of my heart transplant in 1983. I had a massive heart attack. One of the things that we cared about now is the fact that when I did some stupid things when the heart attack was actually happening. When I felt the pain in the chest, I went outside and did some exercise. That didn't stop it, so there's a little upgrade in front of my house at home. So I ran up that and back, and it was killing me. After I came back, I couldn't make it any further, so I fell down on the grass. When they came in with the stretcher, I was going to get up by... She said, get back in this debate. Don't you know you're having a heart attack? But, you know, it seemed like it was taking them a long time to get the stretcher here. So the least I could do is go ahead and meet them halfway. My young son who passed himself with a heart attack about ten years ago said that, you know, we better start looking for some way for a transplant because, you know, from what the doctors are saying, you don't have that much heart. That's a lie. But they were convinced that I was too far gone for any kind of hep, so they brought me upstairs and for the next nineteen and a half days I was oscillating between life and death. Everyone, the residents and Dr. Cooley and Dr. Frazier, they did a spectacular job. Took me to the surgery room and as they were loading me up one of the physicians said, Washington, do you know you're going to get a nineteen-year-old heart? What are you going to do with a nineteen-year-old heart? I said, I'm going to chase my wife around in the room. And instead of trying to draw the heart electrically such that it would start they say it started beating when they had all of the things hooked up it began beating automatically and it hasn't stopped. And that for the first oh five to ten years, you still wonder and you think about where the heart came from because somebody had to die. I've seen all of my children grow up and become adults. I've seen my grandchildren be born and some of them are married. And I've seen some of my great-grandchildren grow up and become contributing members of society. All of this I'm indebted to the St. Luke's Hospital and the Texas Institute because without them none of that would be possible. The reason I'm grateful for the Texas Institute is the fact that they were doing cutting-edge medicine where the risks were very high and somehow they managed to do it well and we always will be indebted to the Texas Institute. We are a part of it and it is a part of us.