The patient, D'Zhana Simmons of South Carolina, said the experience of living for so long with a machine pumping her blood was "scary."Remarkable story made even more remarkable by the time it took to find a donor. Please, if you haven't done so, sign up to be an organ donor.
"You never knew when it would malfunction," she said, her voice barely above a whisper, at a news conference at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Center.
"It was like I was a fake person, like I didn't really exist. I was just here," she said of living without a heart.
Simmons, 14, suffered from dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the patient's heart becomes weakened and enlarged and does not pump blood efficiently.
-Wes
2 comments:
Doc, I have signed up to be an organ donor, but since I have a Heart Defect (Tricuspid Atresia), how is that going to the transplant decision? Are my organs useful or am I just wasting time and resources?
I signed up when I got my driver's license - obviously, I feel that it's the right thing to do - and never really thought about it until now.
SteveC-
While transplant centers might not use your heart, the range of other organs used for transplants is remarkable: kidneys, pancreas, liver, skin, corneas, etc., etc. While not every organ may be viable for tranplant, your organ donation (whatever it becomes) might make a tremendous difference for someone else.
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