TRANSPLANT HOPE FOR ISABEL AFTER 15 YEARS
Go-ahead for life-changing double lung and heart op
Isabel Terry spoke of her delight hours before she jetted to the UK on a special medical flight with her mother Deirdre and partner Philip by her side.
The Cork woman, 42, will undergo the operation in Newcastle after being told she is compatible for donated organs that came available on Friday.
Isabel, from Bishopstown, said: “At last, I just got the goahead. I’m nervous but feeling good about it.”
She needed surgery as a result of a birth condition referred to as pulmonary atresia, a defect of her heart’s pulmonary valve.
Isabel hit the headlines last month when a Good Samaritan offered her a private plane for a hospital date after the HSE refused her request for an air ambulance.
She recently spoke of her tough battle to get to this point having first been put on the transplant list in 2002.
Isabel, who documents her medical journey on her Life On The List blog, has to date Isabel on plane to Newcastle undergone three open-heart surgeries and is on oxygen 24 hours a day.
She said: “I had about four or five calls for the heart, none of them went ahead.
“Your phone rings and it says, ‘Isabel, we have a possible heart for you’. You grab your bag and you go.
“My parents would have driven to the hospital or a couple of times I was brought by ambulance to Dublin.
“The first time I got called, after half an hour in the ambulance I picked up my phone and they said it’s not going ahead so you hang up and go home.
“There were four times I was prepped and they’d come in and say, ‘Look, the heart isn’t good enough, and they need to check it out’.” Isabel said at the time it was important to have a sense of perspective when transplants didn’t go ahead.
She added: “It is difficult when it happens, but I say to myself I get to go home. Someone is going home without their son or daughter that day.”
She issued an appeal to the public to talk about organ donation with loved ones.
For more info go to ika.ie or freetext DONOR to 50050.
news@irishmirror.ie
I’ve been prepped for surgery so many times and it didn’t go ahead ISABEL TERRY BISHOPSTOWN, CORK
A HEART–LUNG transplant is a procedure carried out to replace both heart and lungs in a single operation.
Due to a shortage of suitable donors, and the fact that both organs have to be transplanted together, it is a very rare Our story on the flight gift for Isabel procedure. Patients will be given antirejection drugs, and antibiotics to prevent infection after the operation.
Most prospective candidates for surgery have between 12 and 24 months to live.