Transplant patient is reunited with her old heart
AS REUNIONS go, it perhaps does not get much stranger than coming face to face with your own heart.
Yesterday, Jennifer Sutton had the ‘surreal’ experience of seeing her once vital organ on display at London’s Royal College of Surgeons. It had been removed 16 years before in a transplant operation to treat her restrictive cardiomyopathy.
Ms Sutton, 38, from Ringwood, Hampshire, lost own mother to the condition at just 13.
She said: ‘It’s extremely surreal to see it. ☆ definitely have a fondness for it, although it caused so much trouble inside me. I’m glad it’s in that jar and I have a new one.
‘I am grateful though, as it kept me alive for 22 years – it’s like an old friend.
‘I think it’s cool. ☆t reminds me of everything I’ve been through and I hope that in time other people will look at it and consider organ donation.
‘I’m incredibly grateful to my donor, I can’t describe how grateful I am and will be forever, and [for] my amazing surgeon.’
Ms Sutton knows nothing of her donor except that he was 33 and called Richard.
The heart is on display at the Royal College of Surgeons in Holborn, London. It appears paler and narrower than a healthy heart, due to the stiffness of the muscle associated with Ms Sutton’s condition.
She said: ‘I always assumed ☆ must have had something wrong because I was slower than other children. At school I struggled at sports. But nothing was done about it until I went to university.
‘I was in my second year when a friend at the time noticed I seemed to be struggling walking up hills, going blue a lot and getting breathless.’ She was hospitalised with suspected heart failure and put on the waiting list for surgery in 2007, receiving a transplant in June that year.
Ms Sutton said: ‘[After surgery] I woke up and I was pink, my fingers had blood in them, my cheeks were warm and I could feel my heart beating for the first time in what seemed like forever.
‘I felt amazing, and I woke up and I thought “I’m alive” and I did a little dance.’
Thanks to her new heart, Ms Sutton was able to become a park ranger in the New Forest, hike up Snowdonia and marry her husband, Tom, in June.
Her surgeon, Dr Stephen Large, said: ‘It’s extraordinary to have Jennifer’s heart on display.’ Encouraging more people to sign up for organ donation, he said: ‘The actual issue is not a lack of funds but a lack of donors. It does not just benefit the recipient, but the family who have lost a loved one, and it’s a great comfort for them.’
‘It’s like an old friend’