A fourteen year old South Carolina girl survived for more than one hundred days without a heart in her chest.
Since July 2008, D’Zhana Simmons had two heart transplants — and survived with artificial heart pumps instead of a heart between the two surgeries. That’s a total of one hundred and eighteen days without an actual heart in her chest.
When the Simmons family found out that D’Zhana had an enlarged heart that was too weak to pump blood properly, they traveled to Holtz Children’s Hospital in Miami for a transplant. The heart she received in July 2008 didn’t work properly and was in danger of rupturing, so surgeons removed it after two days.
The faulty ticker was replaced with artificial pumps. The pumps kept blood circulating through D’Zhana’s body until she could have a second heart transplant. These pumps (ventricular assist devices) are usually used with a heart still in place. But the surgeons at Holtz Children’s Hospital used two pumps and fabric heart chambers to simulate the real thing.
There is currently no federally approved artificial heart for children. But it’s rare for children to NEED them — so companies don’t spend as much money developing the technology.
D’Zhana’s four months without a heart weren’t easy. She needed help breathing for half the time. She also suffered kidney and liver failure and gastrointestinal bleeding. The machine that housed the pumping device was the size of a photocopier and took at least one person to move. It made her feel like a “fake person” to have no heart in her chest.
Doctors performed the second heart transplant in October 2008.
So what comes next for D’Zhana? Hopefully she’ll be doing most of the things normal teenagers do. She will be on medication for the rest of her life to keep her body from rejecting the donated heart. And there’s a fifty percent chance she’ll need another transplant before she turns thirty. But before then, she told news services that she’d been grateful for the small things: spending time with her family, going outside, and just walking around without the machine.