'I did it my way': Chicago veteran honors father with preserved tattoo after heart surgery

CHICAGO - This Veterans Day, a Chicago veteran is especially grateful, not only for his new heart but also for a small but meaningful act of kindness that kept his father’s memory alive.

Louis Smith, a 65-year-old Army veteran, faced advanced heart failure with his heart operating at just 10 percent capacity. His condition was so critical that he spent only two weeks on the transplant priority list before learning that a donor heart was available.

Before heading into surgery at Northwestern Medicine Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute, Smith had one request for his surgeon: to save a tattoo that held special meaning to him.

"That’s when I said, can you do me a favor?" Smith recounted. "If I have to have this new heart, can you make sure…when you cut it, can you try to save the tattoo a little bit? Because it’s a saying that me and my father used to say. We used to listen to the song by Frank Sinatra, I Did it My Way, and that’s our saying."

Smith’s tattoo, a line from Sinatra’s famous song, honors a connection he shared with his late father—a bond that led him to enlist in the Army at 17 to follow in his father’s footsteps. He would go on to serve more than 20 years, with deployments to Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Germany, and Korea.

Dr. Benjamin Bryner, the cardiac surgeon who performed Smith’s transplant, said the team understood the importance of the tattoo and did their best to preserve it.

"There’s no way to do a transplant without leaving a scar," said Dr. Bryner. "But we take all the time we can to get the tattoos to at least line up, and I was happy with the results."

Nearly a year after his transplant, Smith is back to his regular routine. He says he proudly tells people that he is both a soldier and a heart transplant survivor.