Woman receives heart transplant after suffering rare condition after childbirth: “Life can stop at any point in time”
Washington – Kristin King has seen it as a blessing every day since he received a heart transplant in September 2023.
“Life can stop at any time,” King told CBS News. “You never know when it will. I’m healthy and I’ve never had a heart problem in my life. I need a complete new organ.”
The King’s transplant happened four months after her heart began to fail childbirth.
“I started to have difficulty breathing in the middle of the night. I couldn’t lie down.” “I’m not drinking or eating, I’m really tired.”
The couple initially “cut all symptoms to post pregnancy and after caesarean section, but it has been built and built,” said the king’s husband Gavyn Johnson-Dean.
Johnson-Dean finally insisted on her going to the emergency room. Doctors found that she had perinatal cardiomyopathy, a rare condition that weakened the heart during the last month of pregnancy or months after delivery.
Symptoms of peripheral cardiomyopathy include fatigue, heart pal and shortness of breath.
“Become your own health advocate,” said Dr. Phillip Lam, a heart failure and transplant cardiologist at the Medstar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C., where King performed the transplant procedure. “If you really feel something is wrong and something is not right, seek care and don’t ignore it.”
Lin is the king’s post-doctor, and he describes her case as rare and very aggressive. Her newborn Gage was still hospitalized while she was at home while she was waiting for her donors.
Johnson-Dean said of that time, “It’s a whole bunch of different emotions, happiness, but also fear, anxiety.”
After the eleven-hour operation, Kim had a new lease on life. Now she wears a bracelet to honor her donors and everything she has given her.
“I don’t want them to know what?” King said of her donor. “The biggest thing for me is that this decision may be really easy or difficult for them to make me a mom. Every day I want to be my family, not there, what their life would be like.”
Now, she has been in what her family calls lifelong recovery for about 18 months.
“It’s kind of surreal,” King said. “Like I said, I hardly have moments that mean the world to me.”
