The Survivor's Story: Robert Tools had a foot in the grave when he volunteered to receive the world's first fully implantable artificial heart. Now he's talking about fishing again.(MEDICINE)(Society)

Not many people achieve fame and anonymity at the same time, but Robert Tools managed it for nearly two months. Until last week he was simply "the patient"--the man who let surgeons place a plastic-and- titanium heart in his dying body to see if the device might someday help people in less desperate condition. The pioneering operation took place July 2, and for seven weeks people around the world followed his progress without hearing his name or glimpsing his face. The immediate goal of the experiment was simply to keep the man alive for 60 days. But by the time he came forward to greet the press last Tuesday, something more had happened. Though still housed in the intensive-care unit at the Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Ky., the 59-year-old was sporting a shirt and a tie, getting around on his own strength and fully expecting to leave the hospital alive.

Tools made only a brief public appearance. But in a series of interviews with NEWSWEEK, the patient, his wife and nine members of his medical team offered a vivid account of medical history in the making. Highlights:

EARLY JUNE: After a decade of progressive heart failure, Tools saw his luck run out. He had left his job as a Denver technical librarian five years earlier and moved to Franklin, Ky., to await a donor organ. Now he was too sick to qualify for one. After a rough month in Nashville's St. Thomas Hospital, he was sent home to spend his last weeks with his family. Until the age of 50, Tools had been an avid bass fisherman who stood 6 feet 3 inches and weighed 200 pounds. He now weighed 140, according to his wife, Carol, and "lived in a recliner." He rarely ate, and he communicated largely by nodding yes or no.

MID-JUNE: Dr. Joseph Fredi, Tools's Nashville cardiologist, was seeing him during weekly visits to Franklin and trying to prepare Carol for his death. During one of these visits, Fredi handed the couple a copy of the June 25 NEWSWEEK. The cover story described a new mechanical heart--a device called the AbioCor--that had recently been cleared for initial human trials. Unlike earlier devices, which left patients tethered to large machines, the AbioCor would run off a portable battery. Fredi also produced a letter from Laman Gray Jr. and Robert Dowling, surgeons at the University of Louisville, saying they were ready to try the new heart on a patient. As Tools read the article and the letter, his eyes lit up for the first time in months. Did he want to pursue this? The nod was decisive.

JUNE 26: For once, Tools's desperate condition worked to his advantage. The AbioCor study was restricted to patients who had exhausted all other medical options and who stood at least an 80 percent chance of dying within a month. By these standards, Tools was a shoo-in. "He didn't have the strength to lift his head when I came into the room," Dowling recalls. His heart was pumping only two liters of blood each minute, instead of the usual seven. His blood pressure had dropped to 72/58 (120/80 is normal), and fluid was pooling in his lungs, leaving him starved for air. "He had no personality," nurse Cindy Reeve recalls. "He just slept all the time."

JULY 1: While Tools had an abscessed tooth extracted, Gray and Dowling made final preparations to replace his heart. They had implanted AbioCor hearts in 40 calves during pre-clinical testing. And as a dress rehearsal for the first human procedure, their 14-member surgical team had performed the operation on three pigs. Now, as showtime approached, physicians and family members resorted to sports metaphors to voice their confidence. Tools's son likened the ...