Jessica Melore knows just how Brian Whitlow felt. She had a heart attack at sixteen. Her left ventricle was destroyed. Melore needed a new heart. But would she get one in time?
Luckily, scientists have invented machines that can help patients like Melore lead normal lives during the long wait. Surgeons attached a doughnutsized device to Melore’s heart. Powered by batteries, it did the pumping her left ventricle would have done.
The artificial pump allowed Melore to finish high school and get into college. Four days before graduation, she got word that doctors had found a new heart for her. Melore missed graduating with the class but says, “The heart was a good graduation gift.”
Back to Brian Whitlow. Altogether, he waited thirteen months for a new heart. Finally, doctors called with good news. There was a heart available for him. Because hearts can’t live long outside the body, Whitlow hurried to the hospital.
In the operating room, doctors hooked Whitlow to a machine that adds oxygen to blood while the heart isn’t working. Then surgeons removed his damaged heart and put the new heart in its place.
Whitlow recovered quickly. “I had my surgery and started practice for high school basketball the following October,” he says. But the recovery wasn’t easy.
“I moved to a new high school after the transplant,” Whitlow recalls. “I was taking medicine and gained seventy pounds. Other students made fun of me, and that was hard. I had to keep telling myself they didn’t know my story.”