Wrestling and life-saving transplant bond father, son for life

For (from left) Jimmy Jr., Jim and Chris, wrestling has helped the Lombard familty get through trying times. Courtesy of the Lombard Family

By Pablo S. Torre

They sit inside the Saint Mary High gym, a musty brick building in Rutherford, N.J. The previous Friday, it was a similar edifice in nearby Clifton; the Thursday before that, St. Joe's in Montvale. After nearly two years of waiting for these February mornings -- all three of them here, alive, together -- Jim Lombard, 45, can't help but look at his two sons and exhale.

Which is saying something. Once, Jim's own parents had to beg him to quiet down as grandsons Chris, a 17-year old junior, and Jimmy Jr., an 18-year-old senior, wrestled at a dual meet just like this one. Her boy's idea of cooperation, Jim's mother recalls, was moving from the first row of bleachers to the second.

"But I've only totally embarrassed my sons one time," Jim says from his usual seat. His shoes tip-tap on the parquet. "It was when Jimmy lost to a kid he should've beat."

There is no embarrassment on this early winter morning. The former coach is a salesman for a mailing service company, with short black hair and a slim build, but amid a staccato chorus of grunts and monosyllables -- Laces up! Squeeze! Drive the knee! -- Jim's Jersey baritone descends into hushed tones.

He recalls how Chris (135 pounds) and Jimmy (140) started out as "absolute gym rats" during his coaching days in Belleville; how here on the blue mats on Chestnut Street, they had both been varsity from Day One. While Jim and his wife, Diane, would divorce, their sons were mirror images: same high cheekbones, same mop of brown hair, same introverted personality, same friends, same word ("Lombard") inked in cursive on their left shoulders ...

Same everything, that is, but the scar currently heaving beneath Chris' singlet, running down his chest and branching around his sides. Doctors said that due to its shape, the mark's hypertrophic tendrils resemble a Mercedes-Benz logo.

Chris's father has another idea. "It looks like an autopsy," Jim says, eyes now glassy. "Or a shotgun blast."

*****

It hit him in Atlantic City. Having missed qualifying for the 2006 state tournament by two matches -- just two matches! -- Chris, then a freshman, and Jimmy, then a sophomore, watched the elimination rounds with some 11,000 crazed New Jerseyans in Boardwalk Hall.

But then something strange happened. After a quick bite at Burger King, Chris threw up. He returned home, queasy and lethargic. At first, his mom guessed it was a bad Whopper or the flu; Jimmy, after all, had actually tossed his hamburger in a the trash because, as he put it, "it tasted real bad."

One week later, however, while Diane cooked Chris and his friend breakfast at her house in Bloomfield, Chris' friend asked a frightening question: "Why are Chris' eyes so yellow?"

Part of the answer was self-evident. A longtime nurse like Diane -- or anyone who remembers their high school French class, maybe -- immediately knew that the color yellow translates to jaune, as in jaundice. Yet as she looked into her son's eyes, Diane also recalled that such discoloration was merely a symptom, and not an actual disease itself.

Trips to the emergency room, the pediatrician and a liver specialist all suggested Hepatitis A, while a battery of CAT scans and ultrasounds came back negative, thankfully eliminating the possibility of a tumor. But within two days, Chris' nose began bleeding, his liver enzymes surged and his platelet count plunged. At various hospitals, Jim and Diane received a crash-course in hepatology, from erythrocytes (red blood cells) to bilirubins (the yellowing stuff created by dying erythrocytes).

At age 15, Chris' liver had telegraphed a message in plain English: it was failing, and he was dying. On March 25, 2006, at 7 p.m on a cool Saturday night, Chris was rushed to a hospital in New York City. It was serious. Doctors had a term for this type of situation: a time bomb.

*****