HMN 2025: How Mom is thriving after advanced double-organ transplant

Shortly after she was born, Laura Valentine turned blue.

Doctors shortly found the trigger: the toddler’s coronary heart solely had one ventricle (or decrease chamber) as a substitute of two, making it a lot tougher to pump oxygenated blood all through your complete physique.

In addition to this uncommon coronary heart defect, Valentine additionally has a {condition} generally known as situs inversus, during which the organs in her stomach are positioned in a mirror picture, or reversal, of regular anatomy.

These and different challenges led Valentine to obtain a dual-organ transplant final summer season on the University of Chicago Medicine. Today, the 35-year-old is prospering.

Valentine has since gotten engaged, enrolled in a doctoral program, and even climbed 94 flights of stairs to the highest of a well-known Chicago skyscraper as a part of a charity occasion.

“I do know I’m a little bit of a medical miracle and a novel case study,” she mentioned. “If I can put myself on the market to assist others discover ways to deal with sufferers like me, or assist sufferers like me really feel a way of consolation as a result of I made it this far, I’m all the time going to do this.”

Life-saving referral for organ transplant

To survive her congenital coronary heart illness (CHD) {condition}, Valentine underwent her first open-heart surgical procedure—known as a Fontan process—earlier than she was even two years previous.

With her circulatory system efficiently rerouted to enhance oxygenation, she was capable of {experience} a comparatively regular (albeit carefully monitored) childhood and younger maturity: swimming; using horses; attending faculty and graduate college as an schooling skilled; and turning into a mom.

But in July 2023, she began feeling “not fairly proper,” ultimately going to a hospital with belly swelling and ache. Doctors came upon that she been experiencing silent atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat with none noticeable signs. The {condition} had induced her to develop blood clots in a number of organs.

Although medicines and procedures bought her out of fast hazard, a significant concern loomed: Her coronary heart and liver have been failing. She was referred to UChicago Medicine, where she met with Valluvan Jeevanandam, MD, Director of the Heart and Vascular Center, and Michael Earing, MD, Chief of the Section of Pediatric Cardiology.

They acknowledged her case could be extraordinarily tough, however they introduced in different consultants and took on the problem, performing imaging scans so they may assemble intricate 3D models and work out methods to make a transplant possible with Valentine’s unorthodox organ placement and circulatory system.

On February 13, 2024—the day earlier than Valentine’s Day and in addition National Donor Day—she discovered she’d been accepted to UChicago Medicine’s coronary heart transplant program. Soon after that, she checked into the hospital to start her preparation.

Dedication to ‘prehabilitation’ earlier than transplant surgical procedure

While ready for appropriate donor organs to turn out to be obtainable, Valentine walked 4 miles daily by means of the halls of the hospital at Jeevanandam’s insistence.

“When you are a very arduous case that not lots of people will take, and you discover somebody who’s keen to deal with you, you do no matter he says,” Valentine mentioned, with a smile.

Jeevanandam and different members of her care workforce mentioned her dogged “prehabilitation,” consisting of her every day walks and bodily remedy exercises, was essential to the success of her transplant operation and fast restoration.

“She’s a younger, lively mom, and he or she had all these targets and issues she wished to get again to after her hospitalization,” mentioned Allison Postel, PT, DPT, a UChicago Medicine inpatient bodily therapist. “I did not must promote her on the advantages of working arduous to construct energy; she actually knew, so she was wanting to do something that we requested of her.”

Valentine’s younger daughter visited repeatedly all through her preparation and ready course of, enjoying sufficient charades and different video games with the workers on the cardiovascular flooring that she began naming stuffed animals at house after them. She nonetheless has an enormous stuffed taco named “Nurse Nicole,” and Valentine and a few of the nurses nonetheless textual content one another every day scores from on-line puzzle video games they performed collectively.

Team method to transplant surgical procedure ends in triumph

After 84 days within the hospital, Valentine lastly obtained the information {that a} appropriate organ donor had been discovered.

“The first query my daughter requested me after we defined the transplant scenario to her was: ‘Are you continue to going to have the ability to love me once you get a brand new coronary heart?'” Valentine mentioned. “Because within the thoughts of a child, love is synonymous together with your actual coronary heart.

I instructed her: ‘No, I’ll by no means not love you. I’m going to get to like you with two hearts now.'”

Using the 3D model they’d constructed, Jeevanandam, Earing, pediatric heart specialist Stephen Pophal, MD, and Rolf Barth, MD, Director of Liver, Kidney, and Pancreas Transplantation, painstakingly designed new connections and plotted out how they might place her new coronary heart and liver.

“It takes greater than a workforce to take care of these sufferers: it takes a metropolis,” Jeevanandam mentioned. “We known as ourselves the ‘surgical Twister workforce’ as a result of everybody was contorting themselves and bending over backwards to make this operation work.”

Valentine spent nearly 24 hours within the working room, rising with a brand new, totally functioning coronary heart and liver. She was wheeled out of the hospital simply 16 days later to joyfully return house to her household and make a full restoration.

“I believe the factor I like most about Laura is her fearlessness. She is a power to be reckoned with,” mentioned cardiac surgical procedure nurse Angela Kilburg, RN. “She’s headstrong, and he or she actually believed in herself and the workforce that bought her by means of to the opposite facet.”

Going the additional miles

Less than 6 months after her transplant surgical procedure, Jeevanandam cornered Valentine at a vacation get together he was internet hosting.

“You’re becoming a member of our workforce for the stair climb, proper?” he mentioned—referring to Hustle Chicago, an annual charity occasion during which members race up the 1,632 stairs at 875 North Michigan Avenue, previously generally known as the John Hancock Center, to lift cash for lung illness.

Valentine reasoned that since her surgeon was the one telling her to do it, she should be “medically cleared” to aim the race, so she skilled arduous and did the total climb simply 2 months later together with her fiancé and UChicago Medicine associates, with Celine Dion enjoying in her earbuds for motivation.

Now, Valentine is coaching for a 5k race that can happen only a few days after her transplant anniversary in June and lift funds and consciousness for organ donation. Ann Nguyen, MD, Medical Director of the Heart Transplant Program, who’s offering Valentine’s post-transplant care, has additionally put her in contact with different advanced CHD sufferers who’re awaiting transplant, giving her the chance to encourage them together with her personal {experience}.

“There are factors alongside the transplant and restoration journey that really feel so arduous you wish to surrender, however I would like folks to know that even when one thing does not really feel ‘price it’ within the brief time period, that does not imply it isn’t price it total,” Valentine mentioned.