I honestly didn’t think she was going to make it
The heart came with a disease which she picked up. It’s extremely rare, and no one knew what it was for a really long time. So at that point it then disseminated throughout her body and got into her lungs. She was doing great transplant-wise, but after Christmas was re-hospitalized – I think it was the third admission post-transplant. And I honestly didn’t think she was going to make it. I didn’t know what it was, but I said, “She’s so sick at this point, and this is the third time we’ve come in and nobody knows what it is.” It was really, really scary. And it was hard, because I can’t say enough positive things about Cardiology, and then I’m dealing with two other departments. And Infectious Diseases especially, they rotated people through, so you’d have to repeat all over. I was like, “Can we just have one person who knows what they’re doing?” And everyone would say, “Well, we’ve done everything we can do, we don’t know what it is.” I was like, “Ahh!”

I ended up getting on WebMD and doing all the things that I think are dumb to do when you’re the patient! But when they found out what it was and I looked that up, I was like, “Oh funny!” And it was, like, textbook – how long it takes to find it when it’s these weird cases – so they actually did everything the right way, but in the middle of it, I felt like, “You people are idiots! What’s wrong with you?” [laughs]

Mother of Eva, 13

 

Nothing to do with you
With the histo we thought we had done something wrong and we felt so guilty. I don’t think Cardiology was happy that it came from the donor, but we were so relieved, “It wasn’t us!” Because we thought we had done something, we thought we had mold in the house, we were going to move…and then it was like, “Nope! Nothing to do with you.”

Mother of Eva, 13

 

Knock on wood
It took three months to wait for that heart, but I think it was perfect. Because I think she might have had maybe two bad cells in all of the biopsies we’ve had, and never rejection [knocks on wood], nothing! Even the doctors say, “Usually you go through at least one,” and knock on wood, there hasn’t been anything. No issues – other than it takes her a little longer to get over childhood sicknesses. She’s had the flu, even though we get the flu shot every year. She got the flu this year, she had walking pneumonia, she gets all the stomach bugs and the colds, which really stink – it’s hard to get rid of, because she can’t take anything for them. But nothing other than that.

Mother of Alanna, 15