Dick Cheney recuperating after transplant

Former Vice President Dick Cheney was recuperating Sunday in a Virginia hospital after undergoing heart transplant surgery Saturday, a spokeswoman said.

Cheney, 71, was in the intensive care unit of Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Va., a Washington suburb, his spokeswoman, Kara Ahern, said in a statement.

He had been on a heart transplant list for more than 20 months, according to Ahern's statement.

Two years ago, Cheney had a small pump called a left ventricular assist device implanted for treatment of severe congestive heart failure. He suffered a heart attack in 2010, his fifth since the age of 37. He underwent bypass surgery in 1988, and has had two angioplasties to clear narrowed coronary arteries.

Doctors implanted a special pacemaker in his chest in 2001, and in 2008 they restored a normal heartbeat rhythm with electrical shock. He previously has been treated for an atrial fibrillation, an abnormal rhythm involving the upper chambers of the heart.

Doctors say it is unlikely that Cheney got special treatment when he was given a new heart that thousands of younger people also were in line to receive.

More than 3,100 Americans are waiting now for a new heart, and about 330 die each year before one becomes available. When one does, doctors check to see who is a good match and in highest medical need. The heart is offered locally, then regionally and finally nationally until a match is made.

"You can't leapfrog the system," Dr. Allen Taylor, cardiology chief at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, said Sunday. "It's a very regimented and fair process and heavily policed."

Cheney will have to take daily medicines to prevent rejection of his new heart and go through rehabilitation to return to normal living. He was former President George W. Bush's vice president for eight years, from 2001 to 2009.

With AP