Matt Bradley lost his heart between Reno and Midway.

In October 2022, then 52-year-old Bradley was driving his 18-wheeler home across Nevada. He couldn’t have known this trip would take a lot longer than the eight hours between here and there.

“It is an older truck. It’s the style I’ve always liked,” Bradley said. “Old hot rod with a new motor.”

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Two hours on the road, around Winnemucca, he wasn’t feeling right. Speaking with him on the phone, his wife, Emily Brandt, knew something was wrong. She called an ambulance, which took him to a clinic.

“They did some tests on me, drew some blood, but they had to send it to who knows where to get the results back from it,” he remembered. “They thought I was dehydrated, so they pumped me up with a couple IVs and sent me on my way.”

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He lasted an hour this time. Feeling sick and assuming he was still dehydrated, he stopped and slept a few hours in the truck, figuring this might give the IV’s time to work their magic.

They hadn’t by the time he woke up. Still, he drove on through the night, loading up Gatorade at a gas station and feeling progressively worse.

“I’m just glad I didn’t kill somebody else or get into an accident,” he said. 

He was hallucinating around 3 a.m. as he came down the hill past Wendover. Time for another nap.

From there he managed to get all the way home to Midway.

Days later, seeing he wasn’t getting better, his wife took him to the emergency room at Intermountain Health Heber Valley Hospital, where he received an electrocardiogram.

The doctors didn’t take long with the test results.

“They threw me in an ambulance,” he said. He was rushed to the Utah Valley Hospital.

He learned later a blown exhaust clamp had caused a carbon monoxide leak into the cab of his big rig, and the sightless, scentless and deadly gas poisoned him.

That drive from Reno had destroyed his heart.

A ski bum’s life

Bradley discovered Park City during college at the University of Utah. He was smitten.

The Park City he found in the 1980s and ’90s was wilder and more affordable then, and he took readily to the ski bum life, which included riding with buddies down Main Street on bar stools.  

He quickly learned he could wake up in his van, spend the day skiing, and check out the community’s wide selection of bars at night before retiring back to his van.

“It’s what had to be done to get over 100 days a year of skiing,” he said.

He attended class three days a week in Salt Lake City and entered what he called a six-year ski bum program while pursuing a four-year business degree. But really, he became a Park City local in all but address, at least at first.

Jesse Shetler, the principal owner today of the Boneyard Saloon, met Bradley in 1990.

“I was the operating partner at a bar called Pop Jenks, which is where Flanagan’s currently is,” Shetler remembered. “Matt Bradley kept coming around, kept showing up. He wanted a job, he wanted a job, he wanted a job.”

When Bradley sets a goal, Shetler said, he accomplishes it.

“Finally, we gave him a job and honestly it was one of the best things I did,” Shetler said. “He turned out to be a great employee. But more and better than that, he became one of my very closest friends, and still is.”

In those years in Park City, Bradley won’t say he bar tended or mixed drinks or poured rounds. He slung booze.

His body was never aching or worn out or exhausted from living van to ski hill to bar and back to van. He simply wasn’t a  “clean one owner” in those years.

“It was some of the best times of my life, man,” he said. “It was fun as shit.”

To this day, anyone who engages in a conversation with him temporarily forgoes their name to become “man,” and whether he’s known them for five minutes or 30 years, they become one of his best friends.

His once-dark goatee has lasted longer than his original heart, and dark-tinted glasses are as much a part of him as the goatee.

Eventually, he left the University of Utah with only a ski-bum degree, something he doesn’t regret, and found success running a construction and property management business.

Soon after the 2002 Olympics, he left Park City for Midway.

It was getting too expensive to be a ski bum, he said.

“It was a dying trade when I went through it,” he said. But he loved it with all his heart.

True love

He was at The Other End Grill, now known as Back 40 Ranch House Grill, about 15 years ago when he noticed Emily Brandt. 

“I was doing the snow removal over there, and that was the first time I crossed paths with her,” Bradley said. “I was like, ‘Wow, she’s a looker. Better go see what that one’s all about.'”

The pair started dating, attending local band Block and Tackle concerts, and seeing each other more and more.

Brandt liked to dance, and Bradley said he was known to scoot some boots back in the day.

“The rest is history,” he said. 

They dated through the years, and got married in 2023, the year Brandt thought she’d watch Bradley die. 

During Bradley’s drive home from Reno, Brandt could tell something wasn’t right. 

She had scheduled family pictures, and she and their son, Kristopher, kept calling him to make sure he would be back in time for the appointment.

He’d tell her where he was, and later tell her another place that didn’t make sense.

She grew more and more worried before finally making the call that landed him in the Winnemucca clinic.

When he finally got home, she said, he looked terrible but he said he was fine. It was fall break, and she took Kristopher to Salmon to visit Bradley’s mom, JoAnn Bradley. 

“Matt does his own thing and doesn’t listen,” Brandt said with a chuckle. “So I did my thing.”

Still, when she spoke to him over the phone, something continued to feel off, and she and his mom decided she should cut the visit short and return home after a few days.

When she got back, she took him straight to the emergency room. 

“That’s where they figured out that it was heart failure,” Brandt said. “It was pretty devastating.” 

The family had just started a trucking company, and had just bought a ranch in Idaho with some friends. The future looked bright, and they’d been excited.

Now it looked like her husband probably wouldn’t survive the year.

Bradley stayed at the Utah Valley Hospital for a week. During that time, his mom died. His wife told her in their last conversation that she didn’t think Bradley would make it.

She didn’t think the doctors believed he would survive, either.

But she wasn’t ready to let him go even as she saw him linger closer and closer to the edge while 2022 drew to a close.

Around that time, he underwent a sleep study.

“I read the report,” she said. “It said Cheyne-Stokes breathing. And I asked the doctor what that was, and they said basically that’s like the death rattle.”

That’s when it hit her. Bradley really was on his way out. This looked like his last Christmas.

New year, new hope

She was at perhaps her lowest point by New Year’s. She had to prepare for a future without Bradley while fighting to keep him around. She had to accept he would die and hope he wouldn’t. She had to become a single parent.

How do you tell your young son his father might die soon?

“I really believe that in life you kind of create your own reality in some kind of ways,” she said. “I didn’t want to accept that reality that he was going to die, but I also wanted to be honest.”

In January 2023, she got Bradley an appointment at the Intermountain Heart Institute in Murray, one of the country’s top heart hospitals. 

“It was kind of a miracle when they called,” she said. “The doctor said, ‘As soon as we have an opening we need to see this guy.'”

Meanwhile, the doctors switched his meds around, altered his treatment, and told him he could go home, although they recommended staying in the hospital.

He stayed, which was providential, as three days later he went into congestive heart failure, which he said was “the start of the whole process.”

On Jan. 10, Dr. Bruce B. Reid cut a vacation short to install a left ventricle assist device into Bradley’s chest.

He went on a waiting list for a donated heart transplant and for the next year, Bradley endured myriad exploratory procedures and on his failing heart.

He was in the hospital for months before his doctors let him go home with had two high-end lithium batteries spinning the pump of his heart device, which kept him alive but didn’t allow him to do a lot of living.

“Well, you’re not dead,” he recalled with a chuckle. “It’s amazing what the human body can endure and go through, but mentally that was probably one of the toughest tests I ever had to endure.”

The avid skier watched one of the biggest winters Utah has had in recent memory unable to stray more than 30 feet from his charger at night. While he was somewhat more mobile during the day with a battery bag, he was just as frail.

“You’re definitely limited, man,” he said. “You set up your world at home.”

It was a limited life, but it was a life, and Bradley was thankful, though he realized he was far from safe.

“After the LVAD, one doctor pulled me aside and said, ‘You know, he’s probably not going to make it a year,” Brandt remembered. “Never has anyone given me any hope, but I have desperately tried to maintain hope, and that’s been my place. If there is hope, then we should.”

Eventually, the device started sucking on the right side of Bradley’s heart. He’d lift his arms, and an alarm would ring.

Bradley laughed remembering the strange cause and effect. Brandt did not. 

In late August, he checked into the Murray hospital, where he would wait for a transplant.

His new lease on life was expiring.

Gift of life

Bradley wasn’t initially told much about the 25- to 35-year-old man whose heart saved his life. 

He collected bits and pieces about the death of the man who would save his life. Something about fentanyl, something about a motorcycle, and the rest writes itself.

On Sept. 14, 2023, Bradley received the man’s heart.

Cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. William T. Caine, who performed the transplant, is one of four heart surgeons at the Murray Hospital. When a heart becomes available, one of the surgeons prepares the patient for what will likely be a lifesaving operation, while another picks up the heart, which they examine to make sure is in condition to be transplanted.

“If they do a kidney transplant and the kidney doesn’t work, then the patient can go back on dialysis,” Caine explained. “If the heart doesn’t work, that’s a much more difficult problem.”

Oftentimes, surgery on the recipient will begin before the donor organ arrives.

“Taking out one of these pumps that’s been in there for a while, there’s a lot of scar tissue,” Caine said. “It takes a couple hours, sometimes two to three.”

Caine has always been fascinated with the heart. His father was a cardiologist, and he gravitated to cardiac surgery in medical school at Utah State University.

In the more than 20 years since he graduated, he’s seen advancements in transplant technology that make the difference between life and death for people like Bradley. 

“When I was in training it was not uncommon for people to die while they were waiting for a heart transplant,” Caine explained. “Now we have pumps, and we have devices we can use to keep people alive while they’re waiting for a donor heart so that it’s much less common these days for people to die while they’re waiting.”

He used Bradley’s LVAD as an example of this kind of device. Rather than clinging to life in the hospital for the entire time he waited for a heart, he was able to go home.

Had Bradley’s ill-fated drive from Reno happened 15 years ago, he probably would have died without a donor readily available, the surgeon said. 

But while a failing heart isn’t an immediate death sentence,  candidates still face myriad professionals and qualification steps before they are approved for a new heart. The supply of organs doesn’t come close to meeting the demand, and Caine said they want to be sure new hearts go to the best candidates. Social workers, critical care doctors and cardiologists all evaluate the patient to determine their physical and mental status.

“We do a multidisciplinary evaluation. There are lots of steps to go through,” Caine explained. “This is an extremely precious resource. … We have to be very good stewards of this precious resource and take care of it and make sure that they only go to people who will take care of them and will derive the most benefit from that blessing.”

Bradley was a great candidate. He has a stable family, and Caine said he was very engaged in his health. He showed the heart for life.

That September day, the old chassis got a new motor, as Bradley put it.

Birdies for Bradley

Shetler didn’t know the details of Bradley’s situation until it was apparent his friend would soon find a place on a transplant list.

“Of course it was a phone call that you don’t want, that you weren’t expecting,” Shetler said. “It’s fear. … That’s nothing to go to the store and buy.”

It was a lot for him to process. He knew donor organs don’t fall from the sky, and he began thinking about how many factors would need to line up to save his friend’s life. Then he started to think about how one of those factors is someone else having to die.

“Somebody’s going to lose a son or a daughter or a husband or a wife,” he said. “That’s a lot to digest. But at the same time, God willing, you want that to happen. You want your friend to have a heart so you can keep your friend here.”

Shetler and a few other friends — Frankie Dwyer, Ronnie Weddig and Joe Butterfield — wanted to do something for Bradley. And Shetler saw an opportunity.

“It’s the No Name Saloon annual golf tournament, and I’ve been doing that ever since I opened the No Name Saloon in the year 2000,” he said. “The golf tournament has always historically been for my patrons, friends.”

Typically, it’s a day of fun to give back to his patrons. It’s not necessarily super profitable, but a way to say thank you and get everyone on the green. Though it didn’t bring in much of a profit, it had never been a charitable event.

Shetler was going to change that.

Without insurance, the cost of Bradley’s operations and transplant would have been astronomical. Even with his and Brandt’s insurance, the costs were still staggering. They had slowly been selling off plots of land they owned in Idaho and portions of his construction business to stay afloat.

Shetler said the fundraiser took place three weeks after Bradley received his heart. They named it Birdies for Bradley.

“Every golf tournament is always exciting and fun. Every golf tournament is always filled with faces from the past,” Shetler said. “This golf tournament was really about family, friends and love.”

And to their astonishment, Bradley himself showed up, just three weeks off the operating table.

“I’ll be damned,” Shetler recalled.

He could attend, but he needed a wheelchair. He could talk to people, but only for a short time in a designated space at a designated hole. He could thank his supporters, but only through a mask.

“Matt is very persistent,” Shetler said, remembering that stubborn kid from Main Street years ago. “Matt does not give up.”

Giving back

Six months after his transplant, Bradley sat in a room in the Intermountain Heart Institute on a floor filled with cardiac patients close in line for a transplant. A couple of them were in rougher condition and had to stay close to the doctor’s knife in case a heart became available within 1,000 miles. Others attended to share their story from the other side of that journey.

Bradley comes to this support group often, hoping he can inspire hope and nurture a sense of comradery with the others seated around several tables set in a larger rectangle. 

On this day, he was one of the first to arrive, and he and a few others chatted with the social worker running the show as others emerged in the doorway. 

Brent Haupt said he had a transplant eight and a half years ago. He waited eight months for a transplant with only an artificial heart. Not long after the meeting, he and his wife toured through the southwest part of the country by train. He does everything he should with a new chance at life, and some he shouldn’t, he joked.

Brent Kemp got his new heart three years ago.

“We’re able to do things we couldn’t do prior to our transplants. It’s a blessing to be able to do that,” he said. “Brent (Haupt) says he does things he shouldn’t, but we realize now that we can, and we’re going to do them anyway.”

Larry Christensen hadn’t gotten a heart yet. He’d been living in the hospital for about two weeks and came to the meeting toting an IV bag and a bulk of worn medical equipment tucked under his shirt. He took a place at the table close to the door, and studied his peers with new hearts. 

When he checked into the hospital — when he was told he should plan to stay — he wasn’t sure what to tell people when they asked him what they could do for him.

“I go, ‘Pray for me,'” he said. “How do I say it to them?”

He said a friend gave him a blessing, a common practice in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for divine guidance and inspiration, and helped him find the answer to his question. He started praying for his donor, and for their family. 

He himself is an organ donor, he said, and no one knows when it’s their time.

“It’s a course of events that will happen anyway,” Haupt reminded him. 

Christensen said the meeting filled him with a new pep born from hearing the stories of Haupt’s planned train adventure and Bradley talking about going skiing again, at least three times a week, as soon as doctors give him the go-ahead. 

“This group did wonders for me, too,” Bradley told him. 

The regular gatherings are far from the only way Bradley is trying to give back. He’s starting a nonprofit to raise awareness about organ donation, cut through legislative red tape that might unnecessarily restrict the process, and to help others pay for the expensive ordeal. His friends’ fundraiser helped with his bills, but he well knows the financial hurt, too.

Every chance he gets, he talks about his doctors, nurses and family like superheroes. Reid and Caine may have been the surgeons, but he said he understands how Dr. Ross A. Butscheck, Dr. Rami Alharethi and Dr. Abdallah G. Kfoury were vital parts of the team that kept him alive, as were countless nurses, social workers, technicians and other employees at the Intermountain Heart Institute. To name them all would take a whole ‘nother article, he said.

He said his family physician, Dr. Erick Christensen, also played a vital role.

He’s heard from the family of his donor, and he’s hoping to establish a relationship with them.

He recently finished his cardio rehabilitation in the Intermountain Health Park City Hospital, frequently mentioning the gratitude he feels for the donation from Jerry and Kathleen Grundhofer that funded the facility.

Only days ago, while fishing and hiking and loving life in southern Utah with Brandt and Kristopher, he was struck again with the magnitude of what he’s received, the heart that pumps his blood and keeps him around for his loved ones.

“It’s the ultimate gift, man,” he said.

The man who refused to accept Shetler’s “no” back in the day, and refused death’s call while making sure he didn’t miss a second winter on the ski hill, refuses to slow down in the future.

At 54 years old, he’s got a new lease on life, a new motor, and he doesn’t intend to waste it.

“You either get busy freaking living, or you get busy dying,” he said.