When I was 16, I had a heart transplant.
This happening to me was completely unexpected, I had no health problems, never had. I was rarely sick and had lots of energy, just a normal kid really. At the time of my transplant we lived in the country in a small town in Texas. My mom would come home from work and we would take a walk after dinner most nights. She walked to try to help her blood pressure and I would go with her. On this day in Spring of 2002, we went for our usual walk and got to the bridge over the creek which was our usual point we went to. We turned around and started heading back, but I felt a little tired. We were about half way back to our house when I told my mom I wanted to take a break and sit down. I sat down right there in the middle of the road. My mom came over and started dragging me over to sit at the side, obviously beginning to notice by this point that something was likely wrong. All of a sudden I passed out cold right there.
The next thing I knew there was a man in a mailman uniform, my panicked mother, and a guy in a cowboy hat with a big bristly mustache standing over me. I felt groggy and stood up to finish the walk home, brushing the incident off as nothing. The cowboy told my mom to take me to the hospital. I shouted that I absolutely did not need to go to any hospital as my mom and the mailman loaded me into his pickup truck. The mailman dropped myself and my mother off at our house telling my mother once again to take me to the hospital. I again insisted I was not going. I walked into the house, weaving wildly but thinking I was walking a straight line the entire time. I went inside, laid down on the couch, and asked for a glass of water saying I wanted a nap. My family obliged and let me be.
By this point, my parents(mother and step-father), were discussing what they should do eventually deciding to take me to the hospital. So they load me in the car and take me to the little country hospital nearby. I walked inside and laid down on the floor waiting for my mom to park the car. The nurses saw me and took me into the back, my mother meeting me there a few minutes later. They tried to perform an EKG but I would not stat still enough to do it. Next they tried drawing blood but would only get a small spurt of blood before the flow stopped altogether. I then started fighting with the staff and attempting to get up to leave. Somehow through some other testing they were able to determine that I had had a massive heart attack with 100% occlusion of my main aortic valve. The heart attack explained much of my bizarre behavior, as my blood was not getting to my brain. The only option to save my life now was immediate open heart surgery. I was then flown to a bigger hospital where they had more skilled surgeons.
I had a triple bypass on my heart to try to save it that night, they took a vein from my leg and used that to fix my heart. It unfortunately could not repair all of the damage and the doctors began looking at other options. They eventually settled on sending me to yet another big hospital to wait for a heart transplant. It is not as simple as it might seem, getting a transplant, first there are tests done to see if you qualify - psychological tests even. Next you are put on a wait list which is already numbered in the thousands. The way the list works is the sickest patients get first priority and I was one sick girl so I was put on the list with what is called a 1A status. This means I was one of the top patients in line. I waited in the ICU for my heart to come, mostly sedated with a breathing tube shoved down my throat.
One night, the call finally came. I had been on the list only 10 days. Ten days! That is an amazingly short wait for a transplant. Four hours later, my new heart was beating in my chest. I was in the hospital for another month or so relearning everything from how to walk to eating solid food and of course, my new medicine routine for the medications I will take for the rest of my life.
