Positivity: A 55 Year-Old Heart Keeps a 12 Year-Old Alive
In Kirkby Malham, UK, a last-minute transplant story with an amazing age difference:
Sep 11, 06:36 PM
DRESSED in jeans and trainers, she looks like a typical schoolgirl on the threshold of becoming a teenager.
But inside Sally Slater beats a 55-year-old heart.
Back in March 2000, Sally then a healthy six-year-old was struck down by a mystery virus which destroyed her heart muscle.
She was only hours from death when a donor heart was found.
And as Sally approaches her thirteenth birthday this Friday, it was revealed that the heart came from a 49-year-old woman.
That means her heart is 13 years older than her parents, who are both 42.
Sally wears a silver horseshoe chain around her neck a gift from the donor’s family to remember the woman whose death saved her life.
Sally said: ‘If it wasn’t for this lady, I wouldn’t be alive now.’ Apart from the chain, the only reminders of her ordeal are a faint scar and the drugs she takes every day to prevent her body rejecting the organ.
The schoolgirl lives in the North Yorkshire village of Kirkby Malham with parents Jon and Bridget and brothers Joe, 11, and Charlie, ten. She goes to Settle Middle School, enjoys playing the piano and acting and wants to become a teacher.
It’s a future that her parents did not dare to hope for when she was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit in Newcastle’s Freeman Hospital.
Sally had to be kept alive by a ventilator and an artificial heart pump after her own heart was destroyed by the virus in three weeks.
The heart pumps cost Pounds 40,000 each, and Sally needed two while waiting for a transplant. Luckily, a charity paid for both. But after doctors warned them that Sally had hours to live, Mr and Mrs Slater made an emotional appeal for a donor.
They have since revealed that they did not expect to be able to save their daughter, but simply hoped they could raise awareness of the shortage of organ donors.
They had even taken the decision to donate Sally’s organs if she died, saying: ‘We appreciate that any part of her could help someone else.’ But as Mr and Mrs Slater said goodbye to their daughter, their prayers were answered as a donor suddenly became available.
Sally underwent the transplant operation and began the slow process of recovery.
Two days after the operation, she squeezed her mother’s hand, and 24 hours later her eyes briefly opened for the first time.
And after coming off the ventilator, Sally was back at home within three months.
Mr Slater, a financial planner, said: ‘She has a pacemaker and takes pills every day, otherwise she’s normal and healthy.’ The identity of the donor is a secret, but there has been ‘tentative contact’ between the two families.
‘The heart is from a lady from the North-East,’ Mr Slater said. ‘The family will always be in our thoughts. It’s a debt we can never repay.’ As her heart is relatively old, Sally may require another transplant. But for the moment she’s just happy to be able to enjoy being a teenager.
