MIAMI — D’Zhana Simmons says she felt like a “fake person” for 118 days when she had no heart beating in her chest.
“But I know that I really was here,” the 14-year-old said, “and I did live without a heart.”
As she was being released Wednesday from a Miami hospital, the shy teen seemed in awe of what she had endured. Since July, she’s had two heart transplants and survived with artificial heart pumps — but no heart — for four months between the transplants.
Last spring, D’Zhana and her parents learned she had an enlarged heart that was too weak to sufficiently pump blood. They traveled from their home in Clinton, S.C., to Holtz Children’s Hospital in Miami for a heart transplant.
But her new heart didn’t work properly and could have ruptured, so surgeons removed it two days later.
And they did something unusual, especially for a young patient: They replaced the heart with a pair of artificial pumping devices that kept blood flowing through her body until she could have a second transplant.
Dr. Peter Wearden, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh who works with the kind of pumps used in this case, said what the Miami medical team managed to do “is a big deal.”
“For (more than) 100 days, there was no heart in this girl’s body? That is pretty amazing,” Wearden said.
The pumps, ventricular assist devices, are typically used with a heart still in place to help the chambers circulate blood. With D’Zhana’s heart removed, doctors at Holtz Children’s Hospital crafted substitute heart chambers using a fabric and connected them to the two pumps.
Dr. Marco Ricci, director of pediatric cardiac surgery at the University of Miami, said this case demonstrates that doctors now have one more option.
“In the past, this situation could have been lethal,” Ricci said.
And it nearly was. During the nearly four months between her two transplants, D’Zhana wasn’t able to breathe on her own half the time. She also had kidney and liver failure and gastrointestinal bleeding.
When D’Zhana was stable enough for another operation, doctors did the second transplant on Oct. 29.
D’Zhana said now she’s grateful for small things: She’ll see her five siblings soon, and she can spend time outdoors.
“I’m glad I can walk without the machine,” she said.
Doctors say she’ll be able to do most things teens do, such as attending school and going out with friends. She will be on lifelong medication to keep her body from rejecting the donated heart, and there’s a 50-50 chance she’ll need another transplant before she turns 30.
