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Showing posts with the label double heart transplant

The girls with 2 hearts..

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LONDON, England (CNN) -- Hannah Clark is a 16-year-old with a shy laugh and a love of animals. She likes to go shopping with friends and dreams of a career working with children. But Hannah Clark is no ordinary teenager and her normal life today could not have been possible without a unique, life-changing heart surgery. In 1994 when she was eight-months-old, Hannah was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy -- an inflammation of the heart muscle that impairs the heart's ability to work properly. Hannah's heart was failing and she needed a transplant. But instead of taking her own heart out, doctors added a new donated heart to her own when she was just two-years-old. The so-called "piggyback" operation allowed the donor heart to do the work while Hannah's heart rested. But Hannah was not in the clear yet. As with any organ transplant, Hannah's body was likely to reject her new heart and she had to take powerful immune suppression drugs. Those drugs allowed her b...