New heart gave three decades of life
Jessica Diggens was first infant to survive transplant
Nearly 31 years after being the first Canadian infant to survive a heart transplant, the woman once known as baby Jessica has died.
But her father, Greig Diggens, who had been making funeral arrangements in 1986 for a daughter who wasn’t expected to live, said three decades of life were a blessing.
A host of other children undergoing similar surgery at the time succumbed within weeks.
“It was such a happy story, but not everything lasts forever,” said Diggens.
On Wednesday, his daughter, Jessica Diggens, 31, collapsed in her Black Diamond home after suffering what her boyfriend described as chest pains.
Her father said it was the last act in a life rescued and extended, but not made perfectly healthy by five hours of surgery in February 1987 at the Loma Linda International Health Institute in southern California.
She’d been born with a severely malformed heart, presenting an almost insurmountable challenge, said Diggens.
“But it’s like a paramedic in a disaster, your job is to revive that person — how do you let your kid go?” he said.
Ten-week-old Jessica, who had been born four months prematurely and weighed only 4 lbs. 9 oz., was given the heart of a Mexican boy who had been born braindead.
Physically accepting the heart was a struggle from the start, said Diggens.
“They used to call her the rejection queen,” he said.
“But she was a milestone-setter, even if it’s something that’s done regularly now.”
Diggens and his wife, Brenda, spent 14 months in southern California after the surgery by Dr. Leonard Bailey, who’d performed the first neonatal heart transplant in 1984 when he implanted a baboon heart in a 12-day-old girl known as baby Faye.
But even by leaving California to return home to Calgary, the family was setting a precedent, he said.
“They never had any of those babies leaving the area,” he said.
As a token of their gratitude to Bailey, the family tagged Jessica’s younger brother Justin with the nickname Lenny.
The novelty of Jessica’s life-saving procedure saw family members take part in the Jerry Lewis Telethon and other public engagements.
At her 18th birthday in 2004, she expressed optimism in an interview with the Calgary Herald.
“As long as I keep taking these pills when I’m supposed to, everything should be fine and I should live a lot longer,” said the young woman, who had ambitions of becoming a mortician.
She was an animal lover who kept two iguanas and three cats at the time of her death, said her dad.
But Jessica couldn’t shake lingering health challenges, some of them side-effects from anti-rejection drugs.
She suffered at least two previous heart attacks, one of them three years ago that led to triple bypass and heart valve replacement surgery, said Diggens.
“She had a great attitude at first but it starts to wear you down,” he said.
Though the surgery gave her years she’d never have had, Diggens said it doesn’t ease the grief of his daughter’s death.
“You’re not supposed to outlive your kids,” he said.