The Girl That Had A Heart Transplat That Healed The Old Heart
LONDON – British doctors designed a radical solution to save a girl with major heart problems in 1995: they implanted a donor heart directly onto her own failing heart.
After 10 years with two blood pumping organs, Hannah Clark’s faulty one did what many experts had thought impossible: it healed itself enough so that doctors could remove the donated heart.
But she also had a price to pay: the drugs Clark took to prevent her body from rejecting the donated heart led to malignant cancer that required chemotherapy.
Details of Clark’s revolutionary transplant and follow-up care were published online Tuesday in the medical journal Lancet.
