‘HEART WARRIOR’ JACK MIDDLEMISS CELEBRATES FIVE YEARS POST-HEART TRANSPLANT
DRACUT — Jack Middlemiss is your typical third-grader. He likes baseball and watching the Red Sox, he plays Minecraft and Fortnite on his Nintendo Switch and he occasionally wrestles with his younger sister, Grace, at their Dracut home.
But in many ways, Jack is extraordinary. At only 9-and-a-half years old, he recently celebrated the fifth anniversary of his heart transplant.
While he now gets to play in the snow, travel with ease on family vacations — most recently to Lincoln, N.H. — and spend time with friends, it wasn’t always that easy.
“I couldn’t run a lot, I couldn’t play a lot,” Jack said of his pre-transplant life. “I don’t remember a lot before that.”
Jack was born with cardiomyopathy in 2013, just 33 days before his older brother, Joseph, would pass away with the same hereditary condition.
It was then that parents Scott and Kate decided to look into heart transplants.
“As scary as that was for us, we knew that it was a way to give him the life that he deserved,” Kate Middlemiss said, “a different path, a full life.”
Two days after Valentine’s Day, right after Congenital Heart Defect Awareness Week, the timing couldn’t have been better, Kate said, and Jack was “a superhero” through it all.
He continues to be brave — a “heart warrior,” his family calls him — as he takes twice-daily medications, makes a monthly trip to Boston for a four-hour infusion and an annual heart biopsy, all of which have become “second nature” to him, Kate said.
Jack’s courage through it all, and a commitment to stay strong, inspires his dad.
“When I was a kid, just a little finger stick, it would take the whole place to hold me down to just get that,” Scott Middlemiss said. “He (gets) those IVs and all these different things without even batting an eyelash.”
Cancer survivors and other transplant recipients also use that five-year benchmark, Kate explained, as it’s indicative of their continued health and well-being.
Kate recalls how Jack would experience shortness of breath and be unable to run with his peers, and how, on each family trip, she would be “mapping out exactly where the closest hospital is.” Much has changed since then.
“I remember in the spring, actually, we were at one of his baseball games, just a typical spring night,” she said. “He was laughing with his teammates and I looked at my husband, and it was just one of those moments like, ‘Wow, this is just normal for everyone?’”
Over their week-long winter break, Jack and Grace, 7, have pelted each other with snowballs and have slightly dreaded the return of class at Englesby Elementary School. But the kids received a special send-off last week when Dave McGillivray, Boston Marathon race director and friend of the family, delivered a presentation to them and their classmates.
McGillivray has run in the Middlemisses’ annual Superhero/Rock ‘n’ Roll 5K and completes the last few feet of the Boston Marathon with Jack by his side.
Jack’s five-year milestone is also McGillivray’s, as he underwent open heart triple-bypass surgery that same year. Through that shared experience, McGillivray said they’ve formed a tight bond, so much so that Jack makes an appearance in his 2021 book, “Finish Strong.”
As part of his talk on overcoming adversity and setting goals, McGillivray gave out copies of his book to every kid at the school, and because of Jack’s mention in the book, students lined up to have him autograph his page.
Jack Middlemiss, “the hero, the legend,” he said.
“Even though I felt like I went through a somewhat traumatic experience of open heart surgery, knowing what he went through is like child’s play for me, it’s nothing like he went through,” McGillivray said. “We inspire each other. He’s like a beacon of light for me.”
Jack showed off his massive array of medals, displayed in his bedroom, from McGillivray and other races, including those through the Joseph Middlemiss Big Heart Foundation.
And just like any older brother, Jack is no stranger to causing mischief. Grace showed off a mark on her face from Jack throwing ice at her.
“I didn’t mean to hit her in the face,” Jack said, smiling.
Scott, also the assistant principal at Col. John Robinson School in Westford, said it’s all about the “little kid things” — seeing Jack run around with friends and shoot hoops outside means the most.
Their daughter, Grace, also endures a lot as a sibling, Scott said, constantly worrying about her big brother. She is the one that connects the family to Joseph the most.
“We tell her that he picked her out for us and sent her down to us and things like that,” Scott said. “Both of them do a good job of asking about him and keeping his memory alive.”
As he nears his 10th birthday, Jack has now had his new heart longer than his original one, which Kate took time to reflect on.
“He has been rejection-free and really lived his best life for five years,” Kate said. “It’s been an amazing gift to our family, and we know that not all stories are this successful, but he’s done well. His body has accepted the gift.”