Gary Onufer

PHILADELPHIA — A 46-year-old man whose body was powered by three separate hearts in the span of a month walked out of the hospital Thursday and said he felt like competing in a triathlon.

"I feel like a million dollars, actually," said patient Gary Onufer. "I feel like a whole new person."

Accompanied by his wife and hospital staff, Onufer took slow steps out of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania as a donor heart beat in his thin frame. The organ replaced a temporary "Total Artificial Heart," a mechanical device that doctors said Onufer was the first person to receive in the Northeast.

Onufer was "deathly ill" when he arrived at the hospital in early February, said Dr. Michael Acker, one of his surgeons. Though doctors still aren't sure why, the seemingly healthy and active man was suffering from congestive heart failure.

Most patients in that situation would have a device implanted in their ailing hearts to keep them alive until a donor can be found, health officials said. But doctors thought Onufer's heart, even with artificial help, was too weak to last the two months Acker said is normally needed to find a donor.

So they asked Onufer if he wanted to be a pioneer of sorts by undergoing the region's first implant of the Total Artificial Heart, made by SynCardia Systems. Onufer said yes.

The apparatus, approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration in October 2004, is a modern version of the one invented by Dr. Robert Jarvik and first implanted in a patient 25 years ago.

On Feb. 12, doctors removed Onufer's failing heart in a six-hour procedure and replaced it with a Total Artificial Heart. Although it still required Onufer to stay at the hospital, the "bridge to transplant" allowed him to exercise and, essentially, heal the damage caused by his old heart while he awaited a donor.