After NC pastor’s heart failed, he walked — in extraordinary ways — to a new one
Kelvis Reid — the rather-unlikely leader of one of the smallest churches in Gastonia — completely understands there are plenty of people who would argue that God had nothing to do with him still being alive today.
People who would argue that God didn’t help him survive the rare disorder that caused abnormal proteins to build up in his organs. Or argue that God didn’t help him survive multiple cardiac arrests, or the 44 days he spent on life support afterward. Or that God didn’t help him survive a dual heart and kidney transplant.
So how, then, did he not only survive but also make a full recovery over the past year and a half, at the age now of 66?
Reid shrugs, as he sits on the far-right edge of a pew inside his Partakers of Christ Church, flanked by his wife Samantha, his daughter Alexis, his son Angelo, and Angelo’s girlfriend Katrena O’Connor.
“You can choose ‘luck,’” Kelvis Reid says, “or you can choose ‘blessed.’ But it’s the same thing. And then you can say ‘coincidence.’ What I say about coincidence is: God created coincidence, too. So any word you come up with, or you try to put on top of it, God did it.”
What God has done in this case, he contends, is brought him back from the brink of death multiple times, simply because his purpose is not complete.
Whether you believe that notion or not is up to you, Reid says.
But the fact of the matter — as far as his doctors are concerned — is that this man defied medical odds stacked in death’s favor over and over and over again two winters ago.
“It’s an unbelievable story,” says Amar Parikh, Reid’s cardio-oncologist at Atrium Health’s Sanger Heart & Vascular Institute. “When you think about watching TV medical dramas and you’re like, ‘Ha! That would never happen in real life’ ... no, what happened with him, I don’t think a TV storyline could capture how dramatic this was.
“I couldn’t believe this actually happened the way it did.”
He’s introverted, but likes a challenge
It’s been more than 20 years since Reid — who always hated public speaking and never thought he would be a pastor but felt a relentless call out of the blue in his mid-40s — started his church in a friend’s garage.
About 25 people gathered.
Reid and his wife were offered a deal on the current building on Gastonia’s Morehead Street, near downtown, in 2004; and three years ago, they were gifted the property outright by the woman who had co-owned it with her brother, following his death.
Today, there’s a cross painted high on the front of Partakers of Christ’s nondescript cinder-block facade. A sign bolted into the concrete hangs beneath it, bearing the name of the church in calligraphy, with another smaller cross subbed in for the “t” in “Partakers.” Otherwise, this rundown place, in this rundown part of Gastonia, looks far less like a church than it does a machine shop (which is what it used to be).
But they stay, Reid says, because “we like the challenge. You can’t change somebody who’s already changed, so we looking for those who haven’t. The homeless people —“ who the congregation routinely bands together to feed “— really need us, as well as if you’re not homeless, you still need the Lord. So I kind of like it here.”
The church hasn’t grown much since he first brought it together. On a good Sunday, the 1,000-square-foot sanctuary welcomes maybe 50 people for worship. More commonly, there are about 30.
Reid doesn’t mind. He still, at his core, is an introvert.
As for the general thrust of his sermons? “They’re mainly about living,” Reid says. “I can spout scriptures at you all day long, but people, they say, ‘Hey, what about living day to day? How am I to get through this? What about my emotional feelings when it comes to this, and to that?’”
And then one day last October, Reid suddenly found himself in front of a larger-than-usual audience — about 60 in-person and 75 watching online, as part of a cardio-oncology symposium at the Sanger Heart & Vascular Institute — having been asked specifically to talk about how he was living day to day. How he got through what he got through during his medical ordeal. How he was feeling about all this.
He took a deep breath. The memories, still fresh, both woeful and wonderful, came rushing back.
‘Your heart could stop at any moment’
Reid had never been a smoker, never been a drinker, had no major previous health problems and no family history of heart disease, exercised regularly, ate well, all that.
But he went into a medical tailspin in the spring of 2021.
That June, he became concerned enough about the funny feeling in his chest to first see a doctor, touching off a frustrating 2-1/2-year period of trying unsuccessfully to pinpoint exactly what was causing mounting health problems seemingly centered around his heart.
Clarity came, finally, in December 2023. And it came in the form of a jarring series of shocks to the system, literally and figuratively.
On Dec. 9, after self-referring to the Sanger clinic in Charlotte, Reid underwent a cardiac MRI. Just a few days later, while awaiting the results, Reid fell into cardiac arrest while by himself at home during lunchtime, fortunately at the moment his wife Samantha was making a spur-of-the-moment drop-in during a break from work. He was in the hospital in Gastonia for a couple of days but out in time to see Dr. Parikh on Dec. 20 for the MRI results.
Parikh had found the culprit: AL amyloidosis, which is caused by bone marrow disease and can result in abnormal proteins accumulating in the heart muscle. It’s considered a rare disorder — although Parikh says part of what makes it so is the fact that it can be exceedingly difficult to diagnose, and therefore often goes undetected.
In this case, Parikh identified clues in Reid’s MRI that not only indicated AL amyloidosis, but end-stage AL amyloidosis.
“Pastor Reid, I want to admit you to the hospital now,” Parikh said. “I’m that worried about you. I think your heart could stop again at any moment.”
Reid was stunned. “This is a lot to take in,” he said. He was thinking of his mortality, but he also was thinking about his Christmas Eve sermon, and his family’s holiday plans — the Christmas Day feast, the exchanging of gifts, the singing of songs, the sharing of the joy of the season. Reid winced, then asked, hopefully, “Do you think this could wait till next week?”
“Personally, I don’t think it can wait,” Parikh replied. He paused before continuing: “At the same time, I respect your wishes to be at home with the family, and to give one last sermon.”
Before letting him go home, Parikh went over how to perform CPR with Reid’s family.
“That,” the doctor recalls, “is how nervous I was that his heart would stop.”
Pastor Reid’s encounter with the Lord
This is how Reid’s family remembers the day — or, more specifically, the Christmas Eve — that he (almost) died:
He and Samantha were upstairs in their bedroom doing some last-minute gift-wrapping when he suddenly collapsed onto the bed. He started turning a ghastly shade of bluish-purple; she immediately started screaming for their adult son Angelo; and then, upon racing upstairs to find his mom fully unhinged and his dad completely unresponsive, Angelo unlocked his iPhone and dialed 9-1-1.
Then, trying as best they could to remember Parikh’s lesson, Samantha administered compressions while sobbing, and Angelo delivered breaths while visions of his father’s funeral flashed before his eyes.
Within minutes, Angelo’s longtime girlfriend Katrena and his older sister Alexis returned from a quick trip to the store to find the household in chaos. Shortly thereafter, first responders arrived, including at least two who had been to the home just a couple of weeks earlier, when Reid had suffered the previous heart attack.
And for the next several minutes the main sound competing with Samantha’s crying was the repeated rising-to-a-high-pitch tone signaling that the defibrillator was being primed. “I kept hearing them shock his chest,” she recalls. “I was just like, Ohhh, my gosh — he’s gone. He is gone.”
This, meanwhile, is how Reid remembers the event:
“I didn’t hover above myself. I didn’t see any bright light that was drawing me to it. But I did have an encounter with the Lord. We were walking down this hallway type thing ... he had a toolbox in his hand, and I noticed that his fingernails were dirty. So I said, ‘Lord, why are your fingernails dirty?’ He said, ‘That’s from dealing with you. Trying to get you straight, and get you done, and everything. And what I remember most —“
Reid falls quiet. It takes him nearly 15 seconds to collect himself enough to finish his sentence. “What I remember most ... was at the end, he turned around, he looked at me, and he said, ‘You can do this.’
“... And that’s the last thing I remember, until January.”
Going for long walks — on life support
He got worse before he got better.
During the multiple cardiac arrests — and Reid suffered others, while in the hospital, in addition to the two at home — his kidneys weren’t getting proper blood flow and sustained irreparable damage; so what was originally a one-organ problem became a two-organ problem.
A dual organ transplant was going to be his only chance. But that’s even more rare than the AL amyloidosis itself, due to the high level of technical complexity and inter-team coordination required. Sanger had never been involved with one before.
Meanwhile, at the time, Reid was in no condition to undergo such a procedure. His body and those organs needed time to build back strength first.
The best way to do that was to put him on a type of life-support system known as ECMO (formally known as Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation), which essentially oxygenates and removes carbon dioxide from blood so that the heart doesn’t have to, relieving stress on the organ and allowing it to heal.
It’s not exactly how you might imagine what being on life-support is like, however. Someone on ECMO — under the right supervision, and always masked-up — can get up and walk around. And in Reid’s case, walking around was critical.
“They said, ‘Mr. Reid, if you don’t get up and walk with the ECMO, you can’t get a heart,’” he recalls. They expected him, he says, to do one lap at a time around the entire ICU. “So I’d go seven times ... and the doctors would come in and they would be all excited.”
Eventually, he had a full-on cheering section of nurses, doctors and family members for his walks.
In fact, over the course of his several-weeks-long stay in the ICU, he indelibly endeared himself to the staff to the point where — well, we’ll let his daughter Alexis explain: On the night a doctor came to tell him they’d found a heart and he was strong enough to have it, “he was on the phone. They talked forever. But the nurses were piled outside waiting for him to get off the phone, crying, and clapping.”
And then on Feb. 10, 2024, as he was being prepped for surgery, nurses who just that morning had walked or run the local Cupid’s Cup 5K in support of Atrium Health’s cardiac rehabilitation programs streamed into his room to wish him well, with yet more tears in their eyes.
A few asked Reid if he’d be willing to do the race the following year. He said, “I’ll do it.”
‘Y’all played some really good music’
By the end of that Saturday, he had his new heart. The next day, he got his new kidney.
Nine days later, he walked out of the hospital, “an unheard of recovery time for someone who’s his age at the time of transplant,” Parikh says.
He certainly wasn’t fully recovered overnight. He had to ease back into things, slowly. It took seven months to return to the pulpit, which he did, on Sept. 29, as he dabbed his eyes with tissue and his parishioners applauded.
Just two weeks later, he was up in front of all those doctors as a part of that cardio-oncology symposium at Sanger — and for a moment, those old anxieties about public speaking came flooding back into his bloodstream. But then he took a deep breath, and he took those doctors to church.
At the end of an impassioned re-telling of his dramatic story, Reid pointed his finger around the room as he spoke.
“I look at y’all as an orchestra. And you got the violin players, and you got the oboes, and you got the timpani section, and y’all playing this music. And God is the conductor, and he’s looking over everything, and he’s handling it with you. And me, and your patients, we’re the music you make.”
Then he dropped his chin and quickly jerked it back up as he tugged at the quarters of his suit jacket as he added the kicker to his sermon.
“I’m lookin’ pretty good today,” Reid said, prompting laughter to slip past the lumps that had formed in audience members’ throats.
“’Cause y’all played some really good music.”
And four months after that — on Feb. 8 of this year, two days shy of his heart-transplant anniversary — Reid fulfilled his promise: He walked briskly through most of the Cupid’s Cup 5K course in the Dilworth neighborhood.
But with 100 yards left, propelled by the higher power that’s been guiding him for decades, he broke into a run, and skipped like a kid across the finish line.
This story was originally published August 28, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
