In the image that El Caso published on the cover, the boy Juan Carlos appears lying in a hospital bed with a pair of tubes coming out of his abdomen and under an alarming headline printed in letters larger than his little body: "We must save him!" The heart of David, a 12-year-old Catalan boy who died in a traffic accident, was already beating in his chest, and in eight days they were going to transplant the liver of little Mari Carmen, also a victim of the road.
What could happen to Juan Carlos Delgado Delgado, 12 years old and originally from Riolobos (Cáceres), all of Spain and also the international scientific community was waiting. Until then - March 1986 - only three double transplants had been performed in the world - all in the US - and only one of them, that of a nine-year-old girl from Pittsburgh, had succeeded.
These three precursors, however, had received their organs from a single donor while Juan Carlos's came from two different people. This had never been done before and it was not known if it would work. As an example of how novel this type of surgery was at the time, there is the fact that Juan Carlos's heart transplant was the 23rd that was performed in Spain.
To quickly clear up for the reader the question of whether the name of our protagonist was inscribed in the annals of Medicine as a milestone or not, we tell you that to prepare this report we have traveled to Riolobos and that there his widow, Mercedes Arroyo, has opened the doors of her house to us.
Juan Carlos overcame both interventions and returned victorious to the town in an ambulance loaded with gifts: a computer, a television, the shirt signed by all the Real Madrid players that Juanito and Santillana brought him to the hospital...
Then she married, had two children and on April 19, 2014, at the age of 40 and surprisingly, she died. "They have told us that it was due to a virus that first affected one leg and then the rest of the body, a virus that ate everything it found," his father, Julio Delgado, explained to the media shortly after his death, still bewildered.
"It was a bacteria," Mercedes explains to us 40 years later, sitting on the living room sofa, between two cushions: the one on her left has a printed image of her and Juan Carlos kissing and on the one on the right, the two children they had, Carlos and Mercedes, smile. "He hit his leg and got a wound that took time to heal, and it could be that he caught the bacteria, but we don't know for sure. They told us that the outcome would have been the same in a person who had not had transplants, but that perhaps he would have lasted longer. We took him on a Holy Thursday afternoon to the Emergency Room and on Saturday he died."
Mercedes was nine years old when, in February 1984, TVE broadcast those images of Juan Carlos that left viewers quite touched. The boy said that his life depended on getting a new heart and liver and appealed for the solidarity of those who were willing to donate them to him.
Mercedes then lived in Lasarte (Guipúzcoa), where her parents had emigrated from Riolobos, and she went to the Extremaduran town on vacation. What a paradox that two years later his mother died after the kidney transplant they had performed failed. Mercedes was 12 years old. Five later, at 17, on one of the summers in Riolobos, she began dating Juan Carlos.
-With your mother's background and knowing Juan Carlos's history, did you have no doubts when starting a relationship with him?
-Yes of course. Having lived it at home more. My father, when he found out that I was with him, which he found out almost three years later, didn't want to. Because he had experienced the loss of my mother and he didn't want me to have to go through the same thing.
Juan Carlos received David's heart and Mari Carmen's liver. The Law on Organ Extraction and Transplantation of 1979 only stated that the anonymity of the recipient had to be guaranteed and there were still three years left before the National Transplant Organization (ONT) was created, born in 1989. Everything was so incipient that the identities of donors and recipients were known and published.
Thus, in the newspapers one could read that David, aged 12, had been left in a coma after suffering a traffic accident in which his father and his sister, aged 10, had also died, while his mother had been seriously injured. "On Saturday, in the program Informe Semanal, on TVE, more or less at the same time that such a great misfortune befell the family that was traveling near Monistrol de Montserrat [in the province of Barcelona], one of the grandmothers of the two little brothers saw, full of compassion, the emaciated face of a poor child who, doomed to die at any moment, asked that they do him the charity of giving him a new heart to replace his own destroyed by the disease," El said. Case how Juan Carlos's appearance on television had prompted the donation.
A few pages later, next to the headline "Thank you David!", the images of the other children he had saved were reproduced: Óscar, 10, who had just had David's liver transplanted, and Míriam, 14, who had received one of his kidneys. "They have told me a lot about David. His aunt said that the poor little boy always wanted to be the first in everything, full of health, strength and joy. It is true that he is the first. Now he is the first for me," said little Óscar's father.
In Volver a Vivir, the little book signed by Juan Carlos Delgado that was published in 1992 - he was 18 years old - there are also words for David and Mari Carmen. "David died, but his heart continues to live with me, just like Mari Carmen's liver. That's why I keep a photograph of them in my room, dedicating a prayer to them every night," he says in one passage. "The relatives of the girl Mari Carmen have even come to see me in Riolobos, so that they can see a detail. This family does not want anonymity. I think that this is how we have to go through life, assuming what they have done, which is also a magnificent humanitarian work and so, why should they hide it?", he argues in another.
-Juan Carlos tells in the book that he met the donors' family -we commented with Mercedes during our talk.
"Yes, they saw each other," she confirms. We have had contact with the girl Carmen's family. In fact, his relatives were at our wedding and when they found out that Juan Carlos had died they also came.
-Who came?
-An aunt.
"I wish there were many relatives like these in the world. We, in view of this whole situation, will do the same one day." With these words, Daría Delgado, Juan Carlos's mother, thanked David's family for donating the heart.
We read them without giving them more significance until we come across the only interview that Juan Carlos gave as an adult. It was published by the Extremaduran regional newspaper Hoy on February 20, 2009. "I have experienced both sides," he said, "because my brother, the year after my transplant, died in a traffic accident. It is hard, but you have to consider donation, because organs are of no use to a dead person."
In Riolobos everyone remembers perfectly the accident that took away Genaro Delgado, who was three/four years older than Juan Carlos. "It was a very big tragedy. A boy who lived in Switzerland came to town with a new Opel Kadett. 'Let's try it.'
"We will do the same one day," said Genaro's mother, which makes us wonder if his death served to save other people. The Riolobeños do not believe that it was like that. For the organs to be viable, they must arrive alive at a hospital and the memory they have is that the three young people died instantly. Mercedes thinks the same.
In the chronicles about the transplant to Juan Carlos, which was carried out at the Puerta del Hierro hospital in Madrid, it is read that to collect the heart, extracted in the Vall D'Hebron, in Barcelona, an Army Mystère plane was sent because the organ, transported in a refrigerator and immersed in a special liquid to preserve it, would not last more than five hours.
One week after the heart transplant, on Sunday, March 10, 1986, as a show of support for Juan Carlos, a silent demonstration was held in Riolobos. At its end, the Association to Fight Kidney Diseases (Alcer) - it has already been said that the ONT did not exist then - placed some tables in the Plaza Mayor to recruit organ donors. Moved by the situation of their countryman, about 600 people signed the consent. Taking into account that the town had 1,900 inhabitants then - 1,163 today - and that minors cannot be donors, the response was impressive.
Before the meeting with Mercedes, we spent the morning looking for some of those 600 pioneer donors, with the idea of photographing them with the card that attests to this. With a shopping cart and in a certain hurry, Celia and José, both 67 years old, are on their way to the only grocery store in the town. She did become a donor at that time - "No, José, he's scared" - but she doesn't have the card nor does she remember having one.
"When they did the transplant on Juan Carlos, we were in Madrid in a boarding house because I had a consultation at the Ramón y Cajal. And, when we found out, we went to the hospital where Juan Carlos was, and the mother and I went to the chapel to pray. The doctor who did the transplant asked for blood and they took José out to see if he could give it, but it was not worth it. And then the whole town brought money to Caja de Extremadura to help them," Celia recalls.
Neither Lorenzo, 63, nor Caridad, 62, the owners of the rural house where we stayed, have a document certifying that they became donors that day of the demonstration. "We don't know if that continued because we haven't heard anything again, but my wife knows that if anything happens to me, the first thing is to donate to save whoever it is," he says.
"I often ask myself: what would become of that donation I made? Will it still be valid? If something happens to me, will they pull me?" she doubts. "At the explanatory tables they told you that they were not going to kill you to take whatever it was, because many people said: 'What if I am yes, yes, no, and they kill me to take my organs?'"
Also Mercedes, who became a donor for her mother as soon as she turned 18 and collaborates with the Extremadura Association of Transplant Patients (Asextras), remembers how delicate the topic was then, the fabulations and reluctance that it generated and that, although less, still generates. "In one of the association's meetings they showed us a video of a father whose son died and they asked him to donate the organs and he refused. Over time the father needed an organ. He arrived and didn't want it to be given, he said he didn't deserve it," he says, without knowing if it was a real case or a simulation like those in traffic accident advertisements.
"What is real is what the doctors said when it was 25 years since Juan Carlos's transplant [in 2011] and the association paid tribute to him in Cáceres. A lady who was a donor died and her husband wanted to donate the organs because it was her wish, but the mother-in-law said no, that if she did, she would tell the children what she had done. And the doctors said no, that they preferred to lose the organs rather than there being a mess in the family."
We have not yet told why Juan Carlos needed a double heart and liver transplant. He suffered from hypercholesterolemia, a genetic disease that caused him to have exorbitant cholesterol levels: "1,200 milligrams, when the normal values for a child of his age are 150 to 200," explained the media of the time. By the time he was diagnosed, his organs were already very deteriorated.
"Among the tests they did on me, which I called dog-eating, there was a catheterization, where they discovered that my heart was very bad: I think it was like the heart of a 70-year-old person, and my liver was bad. So the doctors agreed that it had to be a double transplant," says Juan Carlos in his book.
