Sarah Bounces Back Quickly After Heart Transplant
When many heart transplant recipients tell their story, it includes years of slowly declining heart function, difficulty catching their breath and fatigue that makes it hard to accomplish anything.
Not Sarah Russell. The 58-year-old’s heart went from perfectly healthy to 10% function in just one day. Fortunately, she had the team at the UW Health Heart Transplant Program helping her, and she received the gift of life with a heart transplant eight days after her cardiac event.
On the evening of September 20, 2020, Sarah—who lives in Davis, Illinois—complained of a sore throat to her husband, Mike. After they went to bed, she got up, saying she didn’t feel good. As he followed her downstairs in their house, she told him she thought she was having a heart attack. She wouldn’t let him call 911, so he drove her to the nearest hospital where doctors performed a catheterization and found a blood clot in her heart. They attempted to place a stent, but while they were doing so, the clot came loose, blocked her blood flow and damaged her heart beyond repair.
Sarah was transferred to a bigger hospital, where doctors used a technique called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) to connect her to a machine that acted as an artificial lung so she could be transferred to University Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin.
The doctors weren’t sure if she was going to live through the night, so Mike called her adult children so they could come to say goodbye. “I knew it was bad,” he says. “It was so surreal.”
In the meantime, they performed the necessary tests so she could get on the wait list for a new heart. Within days, they had four possible donor matches, and on September 27, 2021 Sara received the gift of life.
Because Sarah was in such good health prior to her cardiac event, she bounced back quickly and was walking two days after surgery. “Everyone at the hospital took such good care of me,” she says. “They explained everything that was happening as we went along. They helped me with anything I asked for, and they were so happy to walk the halls with me. All the nurses and nurse aides who answered my call button never made me feel like I was a problem. Every meal that was delivered to my room came with a smile.”
Soon after she returned home, Sarah was back to her job performing data entry for an insurance company. She and Mike already were active before her transplant, but they quickly resumed their routine of walking and exercising often. “I never felt afraid throughout all of this,” she says. “I felt like I was in good hands.”
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