‘This could have been a totally different day’
Hilliard teen survives sudden heart failure, transplants
“We had seen so many young people with COVID come through and die; some were even pregnant mothers, and we’re still going through that now. Everybody saw Gigi as a young person that we might actually be able to save. It was part of our rallying cry.”
THE Glowhumeidan’s of candles reflected off Gigi face last week as a dozen friends and family members stood behind her and
sang “Happy Birthday.” ● Watching his daughter from across the room, Ed Humeidan was struck with emotion. ● “This could have been a totally different day,” he said. ● Four months ago, it did not look like Gigi (her nickname; her given name is Janine) would ever celebrate her 17th birthday. ● She survived a sudden cardiac arrest and total heart failure on Aug. 28, brought on by an extremely rare genetic defect. ● Kept alive through multiple resuscitations, the diminutive teenager – she is 4 feet, 9 inches tall and weighs about 85 pounds when healthy – first had her heart replaced with an artificial one to keep her alive, then with a transplanted
Dr. Nahush Mokadam
A heart surgeon at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center
Circulatory complications from her time on various machines forced doctors to amputate her right leg below the knee. She was fitted with a prosthetic leg.
After months of recovery, Gigi returned to her Hilliard home for Christmas. By last week, she was already navigating steps without help, and even eyeing a return to her beloved sport of field hockey.
Her father is not the only one marveling at her recovery.
“When she came to us, she was very sick,” said Dr. Nahush Mokadam, a heart surgeon at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center who headed Gigi’s treatment. “Our backs were against the wall, but our team came together and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.”
Mokadam determined Gigi had a defect to her PPCS gene and said there are only four or five known cases of this in the world. The defect can cause heart failure and arrhythmia.
He said he has no idea why Gigi went more than 16 years feeling perfectly healthy.
On Aug. 28, Gigi played a field hockey game for her club team, the Lynx, which is based out of Hilliard Bradley High School, where she is a junior this year.
Afterward, Gigi wanted to go out with friends, but was convinced to go to her grandmother’s house instead for a family gathering. An aunt, Michelle Humeidan, who is an anesthesiologist, made a last-minute decision to go as well.
That confluence of decisions might have saved Gigi’s life, for when she suddenly slumped on the couch and went limp, it was Michelle who jumped into action and performed CPR until paramedics arrived.
At Nationwide Children’s Hospital over the next two days, Gigi flat-lined 16 times, her father said, and each time defibrillators were needed to “get her going again.”
“They probably shocked her 70 times,” said Ed Humeidan.
Gigi was put on an Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine, which basically does the work of the heart and the lungs, and transported to Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center to await a possible heart transplant.
At OSU, Mokadam said that because Gigi continued to be unstable on the ECMO machine, he decided to remove her heart and implant an artificial heart to bridge her to the hoped-for transplant. That proved tricky as well, because the smallest artificial heart still was too big for Gigi.
Mokadam ended up keeping her chest open an inch or two while the artificial heart was in place.
Gigi arrived during last year’s COVID-19 surge caused by the delta variant, and the hospital staff was already overworked and exhausted, Mokadam said.
“We had seen so many young people with COVID come through and die; some were even pregnant mothers, and we’re still going through that now,” he said. “Everybody saw Gigi as a young person that we might actually be able to save. It was part of our rallying cry.”
Kelly Coakley, a nurse who worked in the cardiothoracic transplant unit, was part of that team and one of several nurses who would pull 12-hour shifts, rarely leaving Gigi’s bedside.
“We get possessive of our patients, especially if they are super-sick and you bust your butt all day taking good care of them,” said Coakley, who has three children, ages 23, 19 and 4. “Obviously, with (Gigi) it was at the next level, because our maternal instincts kicked in and we wanted to protect her even more.”
Coakley got to know Gigi’s family well – her dad Ed, mom Rola and her three siblings: brother Manar, 22, sister Emily, 21, and brother Laith, 15.
Blood clots or a loss of circulation in a limb are common complications among those who have been on ECMO machines and artificial hearts. While on the transplant list, part of Gigi’s right leg had to be amputated.
About 10 days into her ordeal, a donor heart was located. At the last minute, it was decided the heart was not a good match, devastating the family, Ed said.
A week later, another heart was identified. By this time, though, Gigi was declining, and Mokadam, Coakley and the team had to huddle and make a lifeor-death decision:
Was she strong enough to go through with the transplant?
“We said, `You know what? Somebody who is 16, we know younger people have a greater resilience,’” Mokadam said. “I can tell you that if she was 60, we would not have done the transplant, we would have let her pass. But because she was 16, she had a reserve in her body and might be able to withstand this.”
The transplant was performed Sept. 18.
Her mother, Rola, said when Gigi first woke up after the surgery, she quickly noticed the leg amputation. She had been sedated throughout her stay until then.
“She thought she was in the hospital for that reason, that something was wrong with her leg,” Rola said. “She didn’t realize she had had two transplants.”
While recovering, she was visited by Blake Haxton, an Upper Arlington native who won a silver medal for the United States in paracanoeing at the 2020 Paralympics in Tokyo. Wexner Center officials had reached out to Haxton and asked him to visit.
“It was my first time talking with someone with a
prosthetic,” Gigi said. “He told me his story and then he told us, `It (the prosthetic) doesn’t matter, you can just do regular things.’”
In November, Gigi transferred back to Nationwide Children’s for physical and occupational therapy.
Gigi is extremely quiet – outside of her family and friends, at least. She doesn’t remember much from her pre-transplant time in the hospital and mostly just shrugs when asked about her ordeal.
“She pretty much spoke in one-word sentences,” Mokadam recalled. “The only time she talked to me was when I asked her to explain the rules of field hockey. Then she lit up.”
Mokadam said there is no reason why Gigi can’t return to play her sport once she regains her strength. He said transplanted hearts should offer no physical limitations.
Gigi went back to school for the first time Tuesday. Ed said the plan is to try to attend classes a few days a week and see how it goes.
He watched her party last week, which included a “drive-by parade” of well-wishers who drove past the house, honking and yelling encouragement. Some stopped and handed gifts out the window to Gigi’s siblings, as she stood in the driveway on one crutch. This birthday indeed was worth celebrating. “When you talk to the physicians and nurses now, they tell us, `You don’t understand, she was even more gone than you guys think,’” Ed said. “But she has an amazing amount of support, a lot of family and community support, people pulling for her. And I really believe that helped.” kgordon@dispatch.com
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