She already had his heart. And now she has his kidney.
Richard Mach gave his ailing wife, Joy, the ultimate Valentine’s Day gift this year — a life-saving kidney transplant.
The dual surgeries took place Thursday at New York Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell.
“It’s certainly the best Valentine’s gift I could ever give her,” Richard Mach, 62, told the Daily News. “I don’t think I’ll be able to top it ever again, that’s for sure.
“I think we’ll have to go back to chocolate after this,” he quipped.
Joy Mach, who suffers from Crohn’s disease, started experiencing kidney problems a few years ago.
Sitting in side-by-side hospital beds, Richard Mach raised his wife’s right hand to his lips and gave it a gentle kiss.
The transplant means she will likely avoid ever having to undergo painful dialysis treatments.
“It couldn’t be a better gift,” Joy Mach said from her hospital bed. “We laughed about it, that he couldn’t come up with any ideas after 40 years so he decided to give me one of his organs. It was so fortuitous. It really was.”
Both New York City natives, the couple met at a Friday night mixer in Queens on Jan. 11, 1974.
Richard Mach marked their first Valentine’s Day together a month later by giving his future wife two roses.
“The rest is history, as they say,” said Joy Mach.
They married three years later, moved to an apartment in Gramercy Park and had two daughters — Lindsay, who is now 30, and Danielle, 26.
Richard and Joy Mach married three years after they met, moved to an apartment in Gramercy Park and had two daughters — Lindsay, who is now 30, and Danielle, 26.
Valentine’s Day remained a special occasion for the Machs.
When Joy was working as a financial analyst, Richard, a special-education teacher, always sent a bouquet of roses to her office.
One year they went to the top of the Empire State Building. Another year they spent the night strolling through the Cloisters.
And they would always exchange two cards — one humorous, one touching.
“We always celebrated it in a low-key, romantic kind of way,” Joy Mach said.
It wasn’t their plan to have the surgeries so close to the holiday.
Richard and Joy Mach met up for the first time postsurgery on Friday afternoon.
But there they were on Thursday morning, being rolled into side-by-side rooms inside the hospital on E. 68th St.
They were in very good hands.
The couple’s surgeons, Dr. Sandip Kapur and Dr. Joseph Del Pizzo, pioneered a technique to perform the procedure using telescopes sent into the body through a tiny incision in the belly button. This minimally invasive procedure yields less scarring and a shorter recovery time.
The surgeries were flawless. Minutes after Del Pizzo extracted one of Richard’s kidneys, Kapur and his team had implanted it into Joy’s body.
The couple met up for the first time postsurgery on Friday afternoon.
Sitting in side-by-side hospital beds, Richard Mach raised his wife’s right hand to his lips and gave it a gentle kiss.
Of the gift he gave his wife, Richard said, “It’s from the heart. It’s love. In the truest sense of the word, that’s what Valentine’s Day is all about.”
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