Heartfelt pleasure in the gift of life
MADISON Annibale has found love and is working in her dream job — all thanks to a priceless gift a decade ago.
Madison, now 27, had been taking a gap year after graduating from Cairns State High School when she fell desperately ill and had to be flown to Brisbane. Soon after she arrived, doctors at The Prince Charles Hospital had to operate to connect her to an artificial heart.
“She was very sick, on death’s door,” cardiologist George Javorsky recalled.
For almost two months Madison pulled her artificial heart around with her and then she “got the call” that changed her life. In mid-2008 she received a donor heart.
“Because of my donor, I got to go to university and to meet my partner John Larney and fall in love for the first time,” she said.
“I’ve been able to travel. If not for my donor heart, I wouldn’t have even been able to reach my 18th birthday.
“I will forever be grateful. I’m pretty much living my best life right now.”
The year after her transplant, she started a business degree at James Cook University in Cairns and then switched to a Bachelor of Games and Interactive Entertainment at QUT in Brisbane.
After graduating from university in 2015, she landed a prized job at Brisbane’s HalfBrick Studios.
“My main role is quality assurance. In a nutshell, I spend all day playing games and telling people what issues there might be or what improvements could be made based on design or bugs,” Madison said.
Her hope is to be able to one day develop games that children having a transplant could play to educate them about the procedure and follow-up treatment.
Madison is one of more than 400 people who have had heart transplants at The Prince Charles Hospital since the first in June 1990.