My kid brother, Bobby, will hopefully turn 39 next week. We’ll celebrate his birthday at John Hopkins’ specialty cardiac care unit where he is recovering from a likely heart infection. Bobby arrived at the emergency room a few days before, barely able to move or breathe, with an intensity of pain he had never experienced before. His attending doctor explained that if he hadn’t gone to the ER he would have died within 48 hours. A few days ago we learned he is being fast-tracked for an emergency heart transplant. The transplant team will be reviewing his case–and hopefully making a decision–this week.

The full story is below but you can read a summary video here (see mentioned links near the end).

Bobby’s Health Journey

Some of you are familiar with Bobby as a disability advocate living with a Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD). His health journey to receiving a LVAD was long. Three years ago, while managing a benign brain tumor, he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, just a few months after our father received the same diagnosis. (Dad died a little over a year later).

A year and a half ago, during a routine heart exam, Bobby learned his heart was actively failing and he was immediately admitted to the hospital. Diagnosed with advanced heart failure, he was kept alive by IV medication for a couple of weeks, then underwent surgery to implant his LVAD, a life-saving device that has been keeping his heart beating ever since. I sat beside him in the ICU for a week during a grueling recovery process. At one point, he demanded I leave the room because he didn’t want me to see him die. He fought hard to recover, not knowing that his survival battle had only begun.

Since then, Bobby has navigated a painful LVAD calibration process, bariatric surgery to become heart transplant-eligible, as well as the life-altering changes that come with living with a LVAD. He often jokes that he’s become a “robot” or a “battery-powered human” (Bobby hasn’t let this process take his sense of humor.) The reality though, is that he lives with a driveline that must always connect the LVAD inside his chest to an external power source. Most challenging for Bobby and true for some people living with LVADs is that drivelines are prone to infection, which can be fatal if infections travel further into his body and ultimately, to his heart.

Where We Are Now

Frighteningly, Bobby’s worst case scenario is here–he’s dealt with a constant cycle of infections since his LVAD surgery, and this week, it seems like an infection has found its way to Bobby’s heart. Bobby is at a critical life/death moment, a point at which he has never been. The odds of survival are not on his side. His heart is weak and compromised, and the infection puts him at high risk for sepsis. A transplant is now his only hope of survival. If he is denied a heart, we’ll enter end-of-life planning. We desperately hope that he is approved, prioritized on the list, and he receives a transplant soon.

The Moment Is Now

Bobby is calling on his community and the thousands of folks he’s inspired with his story, to support him. All these years, he’s avoided launching a Go Fund Me, relying on a close circle of friends and family to meet his extensive needs. Despite generating income as a musician and consultant, he’s been unable to maintain work because he is so often hospitalized and incapacitated for long stretches of time. Here, at this moment, in the battle for his life, he recognizes that he needs support more than ever.

Bobby is asking for donations to ensure he has supplies for his indefinite, long-term hospital stay. If you have your material needs met, please consider a donation as a birthday, holiday and/or new year’s gift.

If you don’t have much to spare, Bobby has an Amazon Wish List with lower cost items that will support his recovery. You can view the list here.

And if what you have is time, and you’re in the Baltimore-DC area, he is expanding his caretaking team. Please reach out to me via GoFundMe if you’d like to visit him or if you have skills to support us with caretaking during the early part of 2026.

We are asking you to help Bobby see his 40th birthday. Just before he was hospitalized, he achieved a wish of playing a live show with tracks from his recently released album, in which every song features his LVAD heartbeat. Two years ago, just after his 38th birthday, he experienced cardiac arrest, after he was hospitalized for a severe case of pneumonia on Christmas Day. Bobby has met death’s door and turned away. We are hopeful he’s able to turn around this time, too.

Thank you, from all of us, for helping make this wish possible.

Video/photo captions: The first four photos are from mid-December as we wait for the heart transplant committee to make its decision. The other included photo is Bobby at the ICU after his LVAD surgery when he was in a medically induced coma for a week.