Baseball Hall of Famer Rod Carew's organ transplants unite two families

ENCINO >> It all happened in what seemed like an instant.

As soon as the Carew and Reuland families met, they instantly felt like they had known each other for a lifetime.

After the two families discovered, and confirmed though, Konrad Reuland’s organs helped saved Rod Carew’s life, they decided to meet.

And as Carew and his wife, Rhonda, joined Reuland’s mother, Mary, and his brother, Austin, at Encino Little League on Tuesday morning, the connection seemed deep.

As Rhonda would speak, Mary gazed over with tears in her eyes. As Austin addressed the audience, Rod stayed focused on his words. And vice versa.

“It’s truly an honor to have a new partnership with a new family,” Rhonda Carew said. “They are absolutely remarkable, I can only imagine Konrad himself mirrored through the Reulands as a whole.

“I told Mary (Reuland) when we first met I told her that I felt like we had known each other forever. I feel that way still.”

The connection was indisputable.

How could it not be?

It felt like these two families were destined to be a part of each other’s lives.

“The universe kind of connected the dots with this,” said Mary Reuland, who sat just two seats down from Carew on Tuesday in Encino. “It was just a wonderful thing to hear a part of my son still here on the Earth.”

“To hear (my son’s heartbeat) again (through Carew’s chest), I don’t know if there is a word to describe it ... Miraculous?”

Miraculous is one way to describe the two family’s lives that have been intertwined since before either of them realized.

Carew — the Major League Baseball Hall of Famer and 18-time All-Star, who had always felt healthy — collapsed on the first hole at the Cresta Verde Golf Course in Corona in September 2015.

Alone, and on the first tee, he returned to the clubhouse to have them call the paramedics.

“I never thought that there was anything wrong with me until the morning that I had a massive heart attack, on the golf course,” Carew said in a press conference at Encino Little League. “By myself.”

For Reuland, who played 30 career NFL games for the New York Jets and Baltimore Ravens, he was in the best physical shape of his life.

Just two days after Thanksgiving last year, Reuland felt a “click” in his brain, just one minute into his workout post-holiday feast in Mission Viejo.

He instantly called home.

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“By the time we got to the emergency room, about 15 minutes after Konrad, it was discovered that he had a brain aneurysm, and it was pretty bad,” Mary said.

Reuland went through a 17-hour surgery to try and repair the brain aneurysm that eventually burst four days later.

He went into a coma and never came out. But his organs had been donated — a decision that he made that previous April.

Carew received Reuland’s heart and kidney.

“I promised I would take care of Konrad’s heart,” Carew said. “And whatever journey I take, he’s going to be right there with me helping me it save other people’s lives.”

The probability that the two families were to meet, even this quickly after the transplant, is seemingly unheard of.

“I was really excited to meet Konrad’s family and we knew that we had to wait. I had gone through this with my youngest daughter,” Carew said about his daughter Michelle. “We had to wait three of four years before knowing who the person was that would give her life again.

“When we first met (the Reulands it was) like we’d known each other for a lifetime. And they were very interested in what was going on inside of me, as much as I was interested.”

And although they were connected in an instant, they will forever be apart of each other’s lives.

“Rod has already expressed that he would like to stay close with our family,” Austin Reuland said. “There’s even been a mention of a Christmas card. He’s a part of our family now and it brings Konrad closer to us.”