Scott Pollard/GettyImages
At 2-foot-10, player Scott Pollard's height helped him play for more than a decade in the NBA, earning him a championship ring with the Boston Celtics in 2008. But now that height could kill him.
Pollard needs a heart transplant, a dire plight already made more difficult by the fact that so few donors can provide him with a pump large and powerful enough to supply blood to his extra-large body.
Last week he was admitted to intensive care at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee and will wait there until a donor big enough to be a match comes along.
"I'm staying here until I get a heart," Pollard, 48, said in a statement to the AP on Wednesday evening.
"My heart is getting weaker. [The doctors] agree that this is my best way to get a heart faster."
"Being tall is great, but I'm not going to see 80"
As mentioned, at his current height and with a weight of 117 kilograms, Pollard's size rules out most of the potential donors for a heart that would replace his, which due to a genetic condition apparently triggered by a virus he contracted in 2021, beats an extra 10,000 beats a day.
Half of his siblings have the same condition — like his father who was 2.03 meters tall and died at age 54 of a heart attack when Scott was 16. "It was an immediate wake-up call," Pollard said in a recent phone interview.
"You don't see many old people at that height. So I knew it all my life, just because it was clear to me as a 16-year-old boy, - that being tall is great, but I'm not going to see the age of 80."
Pollard, who was also a contestant on the 32nd season of Survivor, has been aware of the condition at least since his father died in the 1990s, although it wasn't until he became ill three years ago that it began to affect his quality of life.
"I feel like I'm going uphill all the time," he said during a conversation, warning the reporter that he might have to cut it short if he got tired.
Pollard tried drug treatment and underwent three ablations - treatment of arrhythmias by cauterization.
A pacemaker implanted in Ethello about a year ago solves the problem but only partially.
"Everybody agrees that more ablations won't fix it, more drugs won't fix it," Pollard said.
"We need a transplant."
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