A grateful heart: One patient's story of survival and generosity

While connected to an electrocardiogram in a clinic’s exam room, John King was calmly watching TV and looking forward to dinner out with his wife when the medical team sprinted in with a crash cart. They were reacting to a heart rhythm so dangerous they could hardly believe he was conscious.

It was November 2019, and John had gone to the clinic for a quick check-up because he wasn’t feeling well. He was so sure it was only a minor inconvenience that he had told his wife to come join him so they could then go out to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary.

Instead, he was taken to Memorial Hermann Convenient Care Center in Kingwood and eventually put under the care of Biswajit Kar, MD, who diagnosed him with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a genetic condition in which the heart muscle becomes abnormally thick in places and obstructs blood flow.

“The risk with this condition isn’t a heart attack—it’s sudden death,” John says. “It’s usually not diagnosed until it’s too late. I’ve obviously had it my whole life and didn’t know.”

John knows how fortunate the timing was: A packed work schedule kept him traveling most of that month, and the episode occurred on one of the rare days he was home in Houston. Within two days of his first appointment with Kar, John had a defibrillator implanted and was on his way to a full recovery.

Kar’s calm confidence helped John navigate those overwhelming early days.

“I remember sitting in his office, feeling absolutely walloped by the whole thing. Dr. Kar told me I was going to be OK, that this is what we’re going to do, and in a short time, I would be fine,” John says. “You never forget people like that.”

That experience left John with a deep sense of gratitude—and a desire to give back.

John King turned a life-saving diagnosis into a commitment to advancing cardiac research at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, helping drive innovations that can detect and prevent sudden cardiac arrest.

“I know what a helpless feeling it was when I was first diagnosed,” he says. “I also know what a hopeful feeling it was to come into Dr. Kar’s care—
and that’s priceless. If I can help more people have that experience, that’s worth a lot to me.”

That gratitude soon grew into action. John has been supporting Kar’s cardiac research at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, propelling discoveries that can save and improve lives.

John’s dedication to philanthropy is also rooted in personal history. A former scholarship recipient himself at the University of Houston, John grew up with parents who taught him that if someone has the opportunity to help others, they should.

“I think about the technology that Dr. Kar and others use to help patients like me, and I know those developments don’t just happen organically,” John says. “They happen because people have decided to help fund that effort. You can have great researchers with great minds, but you have to have the capital to do the work.”

Thanks to John’s generosity, Kar’s team has been advancing a project aimed at the early detection of sudden cardiac arrest. The research focuses on developing a mobile application compatible with smartwatches that integrates multiple physiological signals to predict and detect the condition in real time. Leveraging data from 300 patients and advanced machine learning models, the tool has the potential to vastly accelerate emergency response.

“John’s generosity means so much, not only to our team but also to the patients and families who will ultimately benefit from the advances this research makes possible,” Kar says. “Support like his helps us translate discoveries into better treatments and bring new hope to people living with this condition.”