Allie’s Heart Transplant

Please help us pay Allie’s medical bills for her recent Heart Transplant she received on June 11th. Allie is our 29 year old daughter who received her first heart transplant when she was only three years old. She has lived a wonderful life for 25 years and then her heart started failing and getting weaker and weaker last year so her doctors placed her on the United National Organ Donation Heart Transplant list in August 2021. She waited for 10 months and a heart finally came in for her on June 7th. She had the transplant on June 8th and there was something wrong with that heart. It stopped beating in her chest after working for 30 minutes. The doctors tried everything to get it beating and pumping again but it just wouldn’t. They had to come out and tell us the bad news that the heart didn’t work and they would have to keep her alive on the heart-lung machine until another heart came in. We were all in shock and began asking God for a miracle! The doctors put her at the top of the heart transplant list as Category 1 Emergency Status and 2 days later on June 10th, another matching heart came in for her!! Allie received a new wonderful strong heart the morning of June 11th, 2022. And her heart has been performing like a champion!

While Allie was on the heart-lung machine those 72 hours, a lot happened. She gained 20 pounds of extra water weight and swelled up like a balloon. They had to give her 24 hour dialysis to continuously pull off the fluid and she needed several blood transfusions to keep her blood volume adequate. After having 2 heart transplants back to back all within 72 hours, we would all realize she had many big battles to overcome.

Her first battle was trying to breathe on her own after the intubation tube came out. Her lungs still had fluid around them from the heart lung machine and she wasn’t able to breath on her own even with full oxygenated support, so the best solution was to undergo a Tracheostomy so they could continue to support her through the ventilator. She has been working and working to wean herself off the ventilated support, and she was able to start breathing on her own all throughout the day, then at night she would go back on the ventilator. After a couple weeks, a bacterial infection started setting up in her lungs and they started treating it with high powered antibiotics which she responded great to. She has been walking and doing physical therapy to help with the recovery process. She was released from ICU 1 month after getting her new heart. She is now on the Pulmonary floor with the lung doctors evaluating her lung condition. She had been struggling so much to breathe so she had to undergo a Bronchoscopy to suction out a lot of that fluid, and that seemed to help. Then they discovered fluid around her right lung and they had to perform a Thorachotomy to remove fibrous tissue that had hardened and attached to her right lung and chest wall. This was a very painful procedure, more painful than the heart transplant recovery she said. She is currently trying to recovery from this latest surgery and she has had to go back on the ventilator support to breathe. The chest tubes they placed in her chest were draining quite a bit after the surgery, but now they have slowed down and there is still fluid in there that needs to drain. The surgery doctors are reassessing to figure out what needs to be done. Meanwhile, all physical rehab has slowed down to almost nothing because Allie is still in pain and struggling to breathe. She has to be on ventilator support to breathe. The doctors are still hopeful for a full recovery but we are still waiting to find out how they are going to proceed to get Allie healthy again. She is on 3 antibiotics now to kill off a resistant strain of pneumonia which is making her extremely tired.

Allie and her boyfriend are needing financial support to pay off her Out of Pocket Maximum to the hospital for her insurance to cover the heart transplant and all these additional surgeries and procedures she has needed. Her heart transplant normally would cost over $100,000 but Allie has health insurance. We are asking to meet a goal of $6,000 which is her Out of Pocket Max. Any financial help you can give is appreciated by Allie and her boyfriend. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts!! Allie is so precious to all of us and we want to do anything we can to help her recover and continue to live a strong healthy life. All funds will go towards her medical bills first then any additional funds donated will go towards Allie’s basic living expenses after she gets out of the hospital.   God bless and Thank you!!