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Trainer proud of her battle scar
Photo
ASSOCIATED PRESS
In this photo taken April 24, 2011, trainer Kathy Ritvo reacts to a question about her Kentucky Derby hopeful Mucho Macho Man after the colt worked over a muddy track at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky.
Associated Press
LOUISVILLE, Ky.
Kathy Ritvo runs a finger over the five-inch scar in the center of her chest and leans forward.
She wants you to see it.
She needs you to see it.
The spot where doctors went in three years ago and took out her heart and replaced it with one given by an unknown donor is nearly imperceptible, almost remarkably so.
Yet it is there, the ridge now as familiar to the trainer of Kentucky Derby hopeful Mucho Macho Man as the faces of her two children.
It is a very tangible symbol of just how fragile life can be. The mark that gave her a second chance at life three years ago also gave her perspective on how to live it.
“It’s a battle scar,” she said. “I’m proud of it.”
And only when she learned to love it did she learn to let go.
Horse racing can be an equally addictive and cruel business for those closest to it. Long hours. Little pay. Almost no glory. Fortunes and careers can rise and fall on a head bob here, a bad step there.
Ritvo sweated every detail for years as she and husband Tim Ritvo carved out a niche training horses in South Florida.
Her family and friends learned to avoid her on race days, knowing she’d lose it when she saw one of her horses at the quarter pole.
Afterward she’d spend hours breaking down every last stride trying to figure out what went wrong or what went right.
Not anymore. Oh, don’t get her wrong. The 42-year-old Ritvo remains as hands-on as ever even though doctors advised her to stay away from the track at all costs following the November 2008 transplant that replaced her diseased heart with a new one.
She just doesn’t pore over every detail. It took eight years battling a degenerative heart disease and a 17-hour surgery for her to realize attempts at omnipotence are futile.
“If something happens and we don’t have control over it then try not to obsess over it,” Ritvo said. “Things are going to happen and you have to accept it.”
Oh, there were nights when she would cry and scream “why me?”
Who could blame her? Tim Ritvo, who ceded his half of the business to his wife last winter to oversee racing at Gulfstream, Pimlico and Laurel Park, didn’t get it.
“Kathy never drank, never smoked, never did a drug,” he said. “You see other people try to kill themselves and she never did a thing wrong.”
Genetic testing revealed Ritvo suffered from cardiomyopathy, the same disease that killed her brother Louis, a former jockey, at age 38 in 1996.
She spent months shuttling in and out of Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami taking intravenous drugs to keep her heart pumping. There were days she felt so sluggish it was all she could do to lift her head off her pillow. There were nights when she wasn’t sure she would wake up in the morning.
Ritvo spent months awaiting a transplant. When the call finally came, she didn’t even pack a bag on her way out the door. She didn’t plan on staying in the hospital that long.
A week after the surgery, she was back home. Three years later, she’s as healthy as she’s ever been in her life, though there are daily reminders of how close she came to not being here at all.
Besides the scar there is the daily 30-pill regimen — a handful anti-rejection drugs at 7:30 in the morning, another handful 12 hours later, then 15 vitamins at lunch. There’s the occasional cold that takes a little longer to clear up than it probably should.
That’s pretty much it, though. A small list of complaints that pales in comparison to the good fortune that’s come her way since she walked out of the hospital just before Thanksgiving 21/2 years ago.