Girl with two hearts makes medical history

LONDON - For 10 years, Hannah Clark was known as the girl with two hearts.

She was barely a year old when her parents rushed her to hospital because the tiny heart she had been born with wasn't strong enough to pump blood around her body.

Faced with certain death, doctors performed a life-saving transplant when she was 2.

But instead of removing the sick heart, they grafted a donor heart on to hers, allowing the weaker organ to rest and rebuild inside her body.

Life became a constant struggle as Hannah's immune system slowly began to reject her transplant.

But yesterday, in her first public appearance, the healthy 16-year-old from Mountain Ash, South Wales, spoke of her delight at being given her original heart back after becoming the first person in Britain to have an organ transplant reversed.

"It was really strange, I felt empty," Hannah said of the moment she awoke after the groundbreaking operation and realised her real heart was pumping fully for the first time in a decade.

"A second heart had been inside of me for so long but all of a sudden it was gone. I could actually feel that something was missing in my chest. But I was so happy."

The surgery to give Hannah use of her original heart took place at Great Ormond Street Hospital in February 2006. Yesterday, the specialists behind her operation were reunited with the teenager to mark the publication of the team's findings in the Lancet journal.

Sir Magdi Yacoub, a transplant pioneer and the doctor involved in Hannah's transplant 15 years ago, said the operation was unique and her recovery proved how it was possible to restore a once-weak heart that had been allowed to recover inside the body using support from a healthy donor organ.

Sir Magdi, who came out of retirement to help with the reversal of the original transplant, said: "The possibility of recovery of the heart is just like magic. A heart which was not contracting at all at the time we put in a new heart now functions normally."

Until the transplant was reversed, Hannah's life had revolved around a constant routine of medication to keep her immune system suppressed and regular visits to the hospital.

Born with cardiomyopathy, a heart disease which occurs in about 1.2 children in every 100,000, Hannah was given months to live, until a donor heart was found.

But, afraid that her body might reject the transplanted organ, doctors inserted the new heart alongside her weak one which, once allowed to rest, began to recover.

Although her new heart saved her life, it also left the exercise-mad teen, whose favourite hobbies are swimming and shopping, painfully vulnerable to infections and malignant growths which are often caused by a suppressed immune system.

She had to have two sessions of chemotherapy and at one point was put on a ventilator because a cancerous growth was crushing her windpipe.

By November 2005, when she was 12, a scan showed Hannah's body was beginning to reject her transplant and doctors had no alternative but to take out the transplanted heart and hope that her old heart had become strong enough to operate independently.

Five days after the transplant was reversed, Hannah was back at home and no longer having to take a cocktail of 17 drugs each morning. She has a summer job working with animals - something that would have been unthinkable on a suppressed immune system - and returns to sixth form college in September to study child care.

Fighting back tears, Hannah's parents, Paul and Liz, described how the operation had given them their daughter back.

"Our life has been changed from a normal life to upside down and now we've got it back again," said Paul Clark, a 45-year-old truck driver.

"Hannah's life before the operation, when she was 10 months old, was very traumatic. She was going from one extreme to the other. She needed a donor heart so badly, it was just like a rollercoaster ride.

"It was very worrying and stressful but we just kept on and made her fight for it. We would tell her 'Come on Hannah, you can't give up, you've got to keep going'. And here she is today."

The only way they coped, the couple said, was to never give up hope that their daughter would pull through.

- INDEPENDENT