At the time of his Argentina trip, Montgomery was leading one of America\u2019s premier organ transplant centres, at Johns Hopkins Medicine.<\/p>\n
As a child, Montgomery wanted to be a veterinarian. It was only when, at age 14, his father developed symptoms of dilated cardiomyopathy that he reconsidered. The rare disease causes the heart\u2019s chambers to stretch and enlarge and can lead to heart failure, irregular heart beats or arrhythmias, cardiac arrest and sudden death. His father became increasingly debilitated and eventually needed a feeding tube after suffering brain damage from a cardiac arrest.<\/p>\n
[\u00a0 People \u2018My youngest child will probably be bearded before the national children\u2019s hospital opens\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n By the time his father died in 1976, Montgomery, then 16, had decided to become a doctor. Eleven years later, he had just started a surgical residency at Johns Hopkins Medicine when he got the worst phone call of his life. His brother Rich, a 35-year-old father of two, had died that morning.<\/p>\n Pathologists discovered that Rich also had dilated cardiomyopathy, likely caused by a genetic mutation. Robert was evaluated and learned he had the condition too.<\/p>\n Suddenly, his career was in doubt. Surgical training was gruelling, and a cardiac arrest or fainting episode could endanger patients.<\/p>\n When medication failed to keep his arrhythmia in check, Montgomery opted for a new medical device called an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, or ICD, that could shock the heart back into a normal rhythm.<\/p>\n Unsure if he could complete his residency, Montgomery and his wife at the time moved to England so he could study immunology. He decided to pursue a doctorate, just in case surgery didn\u2019t work out.<\/p>\n Montgomery returned to Johns Hopkins in 1992. He wanted to specialise in transplant surgery. His own illness was a motivator. \u201cI didn\u2019t think I would live a normal lifespan \u2013 I knew I would need a heart transplant or I would die \u2013 so I was in a hurry, and I was hyperfocused.\u201d<\/p>\n [\u00a0Irish Guide Dogs at 50: \u2018He made the difference of being able to leave the house or not\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n So few heart transplants were done in the early 1990s that becoming a full-time heart transplant surgeon wasn\u2019t an option. Montgomery focused on kidneys, the most commonly transplanted organ. At Hopkins, he helped develop a minimally invasive surgical technique for retrieving kidneys from healthy living donors, which doctors hoped would lead more people to donate a kidney. It did. Over the next few years, \u201cwe transplanted all the kids on our paediatric list\u201d, Montgomery said.<\/p>\n In 2001, realising he could increase the number of patients who got an organ if kidneys were swapped between incompatible, donor-recipient pairs, Montgomery started a programme to do just that. Soon, he and his team were doing domino donations. An altruistic donor gave a kidney to a stranger, whose nonmatching donor gave a kidney to a second recipient and so on. \u201cHe was seen as a bit of a cowboy,\u201d said Brigitte Sullivan, the transplant administrator who Montgomery described as his \u201cfellow visionary\u201d.<\/p>\n In 2016, NYU Langone Health recruited Montgomery to build an organ transplant programme, and he moved to Manhattan with his wife, opera singer Denyce Graves, and their daughter (Montgomery also has three children from previous relationships; his first marriage ended in divorce). He had met Graves on a flight to Paris. By the time the plane landed, she had invited him to hear her sing and he had invited her to watch him operate.<\/p>\n Despite his earlier near-death experience in Patagonia, Montgomery returned to the same spot in 2017. He wanted to spend time with his sons John and Max, but he went into cardiac arrest again. The closest hospital was nearly an hour away and John did chest compressions on him in a Jeep as they raced to it.<\/p>\n When he emerged from a medically induced coma more than a month later in New York, where he had been flown, Montgomery had to learn to walk, talk and eat again. \u201cAs I was having more of these near-death experiences, it became really clear to me that the likelihood of me getting a heart transplant was less than of me dying before I got on the list,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n A few months later, his heart stopped in the middle of the Broadway show, School of Rock. He received CPR in the aisle. At a medical conference in Italy, in September 2018, he experienced four cardiac arrests, one after another.<\/p>\n The upside, he realised, was that he was now so sick he could finally join the waiting list for a heart.<\/p>\n![\"Dr](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/34F3FZVM3VFARGD4TL274K735M.jpg\")
Dr Robert Montgomery at NYU Langone Health. Photograph: Angelina Katsanis\/The New York Times <\/p>\n![\"Dr](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/3QCQCDCOYNBQHB5MB7ZJ2D7NRY.jpg\")
Dr Robert Montgomery’s experience of waiting for his own heart transplant laid bare the challenges of a system he had tried to fix. Photograph: Angelina Katsanis\/The New York Times <\/p>\n