November 15, 2023

Mr. Lange, we found you a heart. Surgery begins in two hours.
A mere five days after being placed on the heart transplant list, a process that usually takes weeks, at exactly 8:43 a.m., Lange seemed to have an answer — an answer to a question he had been wrestling with for days: Am I going to die?
“One of my biggest fears in life is dying in a hospital as a sick person,” Lange said. “And there I was, in a hospital as a sick person. I never thought I’d be 44 years of age dying of heart failure.”
But before the doctors found Lange a matching heart, he had been connected to an external heart pump, otherwise known as balloon pump, which was surgically implanted into his leg.
“That machine was keeping me alive,” Lange said. “It was doing the job my heart couldn’t.”
So after days of feeling cheated by genetics, after feeling the anger and fear that a man who, just nine weeks before, was hiking mountains but is now confined to a bed, relying on a machine to circulate his lifeblood naturally feels, the light finally appeared at the end of the tunnel.
Once the arduous, physically-taxing transplant surgery had been completed, Lange continued to receive loads of love and support from the St. Mark’s community. And although he knew that colleagues, parents, students and friends had been supporting him every step of the way, he was not aware that the power of 10600 was with him in the operating room.
Dr. Dan Meyer, the cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon that serves as the chief of Baylor Scott & White’s Cardiac Transplantation Unit, was in charge of Lange’s transplant and recovery. After working with him for more than a month, he finally unearthed a special connection between the two.
“Well after the transplant and immediate recovery, I was walking into Mr. Lange’s room to check on him as I did almost every day,” Meyer said. “I glanced at him and saw an ‘SM’ on the corner of his blanket. I knew what that logo meant and asked, ‘Did you go to St. Mark’s?’ He said, ‘No, I teach there.’ Then, it clicked.”
Meyer had not connected the dots that the man whose heart he had transplanted, whose life he had saved was a former teacher and advisor of his son Ben Meyer ’21.
“As soon as I put the pieces together, I called my son,” Meyer said. “The more we talked and the more I remembered, I had seen him before. I recalled our parent-teacher conferences with Ben and seeing Mr. Lange on campus on multiple occasions.”
By pure coincidence, the man who helped Lange get a new heart was someone he’d met almost a decade ago — the father of his former student and advisee. That realization gave Lange strength and reminded him of the power of the school’s community.