Miracle at Fenway.

• Author: Oristano, Mark
• Position: Medicine & Health - Andrew Madden's love for baseball and heart transplant - Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts

"... Which is the better memory [for Andrew Madden]: the fact that he has a new heart, or that he threw out the first pitch at a World Series game? 'The first pitch at the World Series wouldn't have been possible without the new heart, but the first pitch holds a special place in the heart I have now.'"

ANDREW MADDEN was focused. This was his comeback. He held the baseball in his right hand and kicked at the Fenway Park pitchers mound. Manicured base paths formed a perfect diamond surrounded by the brilliant Irish tint of the grass running out to the towering left field wall, the famous Green Monster. There was a packed house for Game 2 of the 2007 World Series between the Colorado Rockies and the Boston Red Sox.

He adjusted his baseball cap, the famous blue one with the red "B" on it. Some may have worried that Madden was trying to pitch again too soon. No hurler ever had come back from the surgery he had undergone and taken the mound again. Madden wound up and let loose with a fastball, but there was no one in the batter's box, and the ball bounced harmlessly in the dirt in front of the catcher, who scooped it into his mitt with practiced ease, trotted out toward the smiling pitcher, and handed Madden the ball; 36,370 throats broke into a single roar. Madden never had heard such a sound. He never imagined hearing it--not on this field, not in this way.

Twenty-one days earlier, the 13-year-old lay on the operating table in OR-5 at Children's Medical Center, Dallas, Texas. His diseased heart was enlarged to more than twice its normal size. His heart was cut out and replaced with a healthy one from a 24-year old woman who had died of a brain aneurysm 10 days after giving birth to her first child. She was twice Andrew's age but, because she was slender and had the same blood type, her heart was perfect for him. Even as her family grieved, she was giving birth again.

Three weeks later, Madden began his comeback, the completion of a heart journey from Children's Medical Center to Fenway Park. His surgeon, Dr. Kristine Guleserian, was Madden's friend and a fellow Red Sox fanatic. Dr. G, as she is known, took the journey in reverse, from Boston to Dallas, where her path intersected with Madden's on Aug. 14,2007.

Guleserian is one of fewer than a dozen women in the U.S. practicing congenital cardiothoracic surgery, operating on the tiny hearts of newborns only days old, as well as the more mature hearts of youngsters and teens. Guleserian first "met" Madden when she saw his latest echocardiogram. Guleserian took one glance at the echo and saw what most people would call an enlarged heart. Guleserian called it by its medical name--idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy.

When you grow up in Odessa, Texas, a good part of life is as it used to be decades ago. Kids play baseball all day, and they add 'Sir' or 'Ma'am' to the end of a sentence when speaking to a grownup. Madden was a normal Odessa kid: Little League baseball, basketball, school. It was on the local par-three golf course where Madden's life all but hooked into the woods for good.

"It was mid August," his mother Laurie Wemmer told MLB.com, "and he was trying out a new set of golf clubs. All of a sudden he fell to his knees and began gasping for air. He was showing all the signs of heart failure. He had reached the point where his heart was...