‘I feel like a young man now’
Published 9:00 am Monday, February 28, 2022
- Tony Fraley
Since the mid-1990s, the Rev. Tony Fraley knew he had heart problems. He just didn’t realize how serious or worse his medical condition would get until years later.
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His doctor diagnosed him with congestive heart failure.
The disease robbed him of his 20-year career with Rheem manufacturing, forcing him into early retirement and leaving the company where he worked as an appliance repairman, a forklift operator and a quality assurance inspector.
“I could repair any unit on any line there,” recalled Fraley in a recent interview with The Union-Recorder. “I had one of the highest-paying jobs at Rheem.”
Fraley also had to relinquish his position as president of the local union organization that represented all of the local workers at the company.
Reflecting on his past with the company and his 16 years as union president, Fraley said he did a lot of things that perhaps led to the congestive heart failure.
“Because of my medical condition, I had to leave a job that I loved very much,” he said. “But I didn’t tell anyone about the extent of my health problems. They just knew that I had health problems.”
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A few months earlier, Fraley had just purchased his first rental property in Milledgeville.
“That was when I first became an entrepreneur,” he said. “I was really starting to enjoy running my own business.”
He became the owner of two mobile home parks and a landlord.
In 2009, Fraley saw the need to establish a local transportation business.
His brothers, Calvin and Alex, both of whom are now deceased, worked with him.
“Buster died Dec. 2, 2020,” Fraley said. “And Calvin died March 3, 2021 — just a few months apart. Calvin would call me every morning and say, ‘What you doing boy, I called to see whether your heart was still working.’”
Tony was the youngest of the four Fraley brothers. His other brother, Marvin, died in 1996.
In 1997, Fraley, who also serves as pastor of Vaughn Chapel Missionary Church in Milledgeville, was admitted as a patient at the Milledgeville hospital.
“I was in the middle of negotiating a new contract at Rheem at the time,” Fraley said. “Before being admitted to the hospital, I had gone to my doctor because I couldn’t sleep laying down and the next thing I knew he put me in the hospital.”
He thought he would be leaving after a few days.
But such wasn’t the case.
He learned that he had several other medical conditions in additional heart issues.
“They kept me in the hospital for five days and then sent me to Emory under the care of Dr. Paul Waters, who is known to be one of the best heart doctors in the nation,” Fraley said.
As doctors had always warned him, his body could reject the drugs used in his treatment at any time. And such a time had arrived.
“When doctors wanted to first put me on the heart transplant list, it was 2016,” Fraley said. “I was knocked off my feet and again I didn’t tell anyone.”
For the next four years, Fraley’s health continued declining.
“I got to where I couldn’t walk around my house,” Fraley said. “And when I tried to do yard work, I couldn’t finish.”
In early 2020, Fraley, now 62, said he began losing a lot of what he described as his steam.
He had been on medication since 1996 for problems associated with congestive heart failure.
“When the pandemic hit is when it seemed like I started losing motivation and steam,” Fraley said.
In September 2020, Fraley made another trip to Emory in Atlanta.
One of his doctors told him then that his main artery in the right side of his neck was filling with fluid.
“The doctors became concerned about that, and they told me they were going to keep me until they could find me a new heart,” Fraley said. “So, I was admitted into the hospital again on Nov. 11, 2020.”
He was allowed to return home to Milledgeville for the holidays.
“I spent Thanksgiving and Christmas at home with an IV bag,” Fraley said. “And no one knew it.”
When he went back to Emory, he was placed in the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit.
“I stayed there until June 2021,” Fraley said. “While I was there, I had a mechanical heart pumping the blood through my body.”
He had experienced a couple of heart attacks and flatlined in December 2020 and again on March 11, 2021.
The second time came while he was in the hospital at Emory.
“I got so cold,” Fraley said. “A lady came in my room to clean up every Saturday by the name of Lou. “All of a sudden, I felt like a block of ice.”
A team of doctors soon came to his room.
“The next week, they told me they all had thought they had lost me,” Fraley lamented.
He nearly died again when he began losing blood.
“Every so often, blood would just spew out of my body,” Fraley said. “When the blood was spewing out, it looked like it was a pint at the time. It happened three times and the fourth time, they took me in for surgery.”
His mechanical heart had been moved to one of his shoulders at that time.
“They found out that I had a ruptured artery,” Fraley said. “And if the blood had gone to the inside, I would have drowned in my own blood.”
He later had a pacemaker put in.
Fraley started feeling better and said he started drawing and reading again.
“My favorite passage in the Bible was the 9th and 10th chapters of Daniel,” the longtime pastor said. “I read those chapters about every day. It kept me going.”
Eventually, Fraley was told he was going to receive a heart transplant on May 4, 2021.
Fraley still doesn’t know, by name, the person who gave him another chance at life.
“It’s kinda emotional when I talk about that,” Fraley said. “I realize that I’m living because somebody else donated their heart to me. It reminds me of what Jesus did on the cross for all of us. He gave up His life so that we might live. That donor did the same thing for me.”
Fraley said he could never repay that person for the gift he provided him.
After his heart transplant and a new kidney, Fraley had lost a lot of weight, dropping down to 187 pounds.
Today, he is doing exceptionally well and has regained his weight back to 230 pounds.
Fraley said he would like to meet someday the family of the person who donated their organs so that people like him could live.
“I’m a truly blessed man, and I thank God every day for my life,” said Fraley, who now has a new heart and three kidneys. “I feel like a young man now.”