In just a few weeks, Freddie Burden could get the news that he and his family have been waiting and praying months to hear: Their patriarch, Willie Sr., is cleared to receive a new heart as soon as one is available.
Willie, 64, has been on the transplant list since he arrived at Piedmont Hospital in February. He is completing the last steps involving exercise and diet that son Willie Jr. described as the first steps in the rehab process once he receives the most extraordinary gift.
So, every day Freddie, the starting center on Georgia Tech’s football team, and Willie Jr., an academic coordinator at Tech, will make the 10-minute drive from campus to Piedmont Hospital to check on their father. Willie usually goes in the afternoon, bringing food. Freddie gets there around 8 p.m. and doesn’t leave until 11. He checks to make sure his father is eating. Did he complete his therapy? Is he ready for bed?
“He’s been fighting hard,” Freddie said.
Because Willie Sr. has spent so much time in a bed for the past nine months, he doesn’t look the same as he once did: a 240-pound bear of a man who was the ACC player of the year in 1973 as a running back at N.C. State.
But mentally and spiritually he is as strong as ever. He is the big-picture provider, the one to listen and advise the boys on how to achieve their goals. Each of the sons said his father is his best friend, the person who knows them better than anyone else. Their mother, Velma, reminds her sons to take care of the daily things, such as Freddie’s homework, which he usually does when he gets home from the hospital.
Willie Sr. has had lot of time to think about the boys’ futures. Willie Jr. wants to become a college administrator. Freddie is enduring a nightmare of a season as the starting center at Tech, which was picked to win the ACC’s Coastal division but instead won’t go to a bowl for the first time in 18 years.
“He’s fighting,” Freddie said. “I’m fighting here. That’s what we have between each other. He’s fighting, I’m fighting.”
Willie Sr. is in the hospital because of a protein buildup in his heart and congestive heart failure. Two devices, one on the left side of his heart and one on the right, help his heart continue to beat.
“It would be very hard to live any type of normal life without those,” Willie Jr. said.
But Willie Sr. is getting stronger. He got to go outside recently for the first time in a long time, which was huge for a man who loves fishing and getting out and moving. That may be why Willie Jr. said he expects his dad is going to take his mom on a trip across the country when he receives his new heart and is cleared by the doctors.
The whole family is expected to come to the hospital for a Thanksgiving feast, the first time they won’t celebrate the holiday in Willie’s home state of North Carolina. Because the doctors don’t care too much about what Willie Sr. eats, Freddie expects that he will polish off a pan of his sister’s banana pudding before the day is over.
Once cleared by the doctors, Willie Sr. could receive the heart at any moment. That’s one of the reasons he hasn’t left the hospital. It’s also one of the reasons that excitement about what’s next hasn’t fully replaced worrying for Fred, as his dad calls him.
Freddie Burden thinks about his dad all the time. Sometimes he will think of his dad during tests. Other times, it will happen during a game.
“It’s been a long process, a long journey,” Freddie Burden said. “All we can do is keep praying, and it will happen one day.”
