Here is an incredible story about Hannah Clark. She is a 16-year-old year girl with a shy laugh and a love of animals and babies. She likes to go shopping with friends and dreams of a career working with children.
But Hannah Clark is not an ordinary teenager and her normal life today could not have been possible without a unique, life-changing heart surgery. In 1994 when she was eight-months-old, Hannah was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy — an inflammation of the heart muscle that impairs the heart’s ability to work properly.
Hannah’s heart was failing and she needed a transplant. But instead of taking her own heart out, doctors added a new donated heart to her own when she was just two-years-old. The so-called “piggyback” operation allowed the donor heart to do the work while Hannah’s heart rested. But Hannah was not in the clear yet. As with any organ transplant, Hannah’s body was likely to reject her new heart and she had to take powerful immune suppression drugs.
Those drugs allowed her body to accept the donor heart but also led to cancer and yet another medical battle for Hannah that lasted for years. Nearly 11 years after receiving the extra heart, there was more bad news: The immuno-suppression drugs were no longer working. Hannah’s body was rejecting the donor heart.
In February 2006, her doctors tried something that had never been done before: They took out the donor heart. Doctors theorized that the donor heart had allowed Hannah’s heart to rest, recover and grow back stronger. Now for the first time Hannah’s father, Paul Clark, describes the agonizing decision the family had to make at the time: “If she’d never had it done, she wouldn’t be here.
“In the very beginning it was a 50/50 chance she wasn’t going to make the operation. But in the next one it was even greater because it had never been done before. But we had to take that risk,” he told. The doctors were right. Three years later, Hannah has no need for any drugs and has been given a clean bill of health. The operation was a success.
“It means everything to me,” Hannah told after the pioneering operation. “I thought I’d still have problems when I had this operation done. I thought after the heart had been removed I thought I’d have to visit hospitals. But now I’m just free,” she said, smiling. Dr. Magdi Yacoub performed Hannah’s original transplant and came out of retirement to perform the second.
“The possibility of recovery of the heart is just like magic.” Dr. Yacoub said at a media conference. “We had a heart which was not contracting at all at the time. We put the new heart to be pumping next to it and take its work, now it is functioning normally.”
The findings have been published in the British medical journal, this seems like a true miracle. I am curious how the old heart was able to still beat, because you think as a muscle that was not being used it would have went into atrophy.
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