Cheney's heart

Dick Cheney recently received a heart transplant. Not a moment too soon, and at least 12 years too late. Some ethicists have raised the question of whether a heart should have been wasted on a man as old as Cheney. Certainly there are younger individuals who are doing more worthwhile things with their lives (anything on the positive side of the balance sheet). Still I think it's good that he got a heart transplant. It has always been obvious that he needed one. I'm not just talking about his congestive heart failure, the failure of his heart to work as a pump. Like the Grinch it was always clear that Cheney's heart was three sizes too small.
Any heart surgery is a major operation, and a heart transplant is the ultimate cardiac surgery carries with it huge implications. While many of these implications are simply medical in nature, there is an interesting phenomenon that suggests when we transplant a heart we transplant “the heart”in both senses of the word. There are fascinating accounts of people who have had heart transplants who develop personality changes where their new personalities or traits are qualities that the heart donor had. For example someone who never liked spicy foods after receiving a new heart suddenly has a craving for spicy foods and only later learns that the donor used to love spicy foods. Sometimes the changes are as trivial as a like or a craving, sometimes their changes in mood or emotional traits.
My personal fantasy is that it could also be a change in politics. Indulge me for a second in this fantasy. Cheney gets out of recovery, and for the first time in his life he feels something that feels different to him. His heart is larger and more spacious cable to care about people he never cared about before. Struggling with this new sensation he notices that he begins to look at the world in a different way. Slowly he comes to see the ethical errors in his politics. His heart challenges him to try to make amends. He becomes confessional, insisting on telling the press the various political crimes and ethical errors he has made.
Fantasies aside, I am not a medical ethicist, I don't know if Cheney merits a new heart more than the next person on the list. I do know that on a certain level we all deserve another chance. I hold onto the belief that anyone can change. For men like Dick Cheney, change is highly unlikely. I don't know what it would take to actually change him. Perhaps something as radical as a heart transplant.