A gift from the heart
Transplant surgery is exceptional in that, not only does it require two skilled medical teams often working under intense time constraints, it also requires both a recipient and a donor.
Living donors, such as 20-year-old Cindy Skrine, may make the generous decision to help a loved one. Cindy donated her kidney on March 5 to a recipient in California so her mother could receive a new kidney through Emory's paired donor exchange, resulting in a lifesaving six-person kidney swap. Others make the choice to become an organ donor in the event of their death, knowing they will never meet the recipients who benefit from that decision.
When 68-year-old twins Jack and Joe Stott participate in the Transplant Games for Team Georgia, as the heart recipients have done every year since 1998, there is always a poignant moment when the athletes walk into the stadium to rousing applause from the donor families. Then the recipients applaud the families in turn. "Without them, the stadium would be empty," explains Joe, who wears a vest honoring his 19-year-old donor, Bryan, an ROTC cadet who was hit by a car while crossing a street by his high school. Joe remembers how, upon their first meeting after his 1996 transplant at Emory University Hospital, Bryan's foster mother put her head on his chest to hear her son's heart, beating anew.
Joe's identical twin, Jack, received his transplant 18 months later (the brothers are among those featured in a photo essay on heart transplant recipients that begins on page 22.) Raised with eight siblings on a 10-acre farm in Atlanta by nurse Mary Edna Willingham Stott, who worked on the pediatric floor of what was then Crawford Long Hospital, Jack and Joe consider themselves ambassadors for organ donation and Emory's transplant program. Jack, a field engineer, spreads the word to his customers and co-workers at GE Energy, and Joe hands out business cards that read "Heart Transplant Recipient" in large red letters. "I had cardiomyopathy and congestive heart failure," Joe says. "For me, it was a heart transplant or a pine box. I enjoy every minute of my second life."
The first heart transplant in Georgia was performed here at Emory. Since 1988, we have performed 648 heart transplants, 18 heart-kidney transplants, one heart-kidney-liver transplant, and one heart-liver transplant. We average 26 heart transplants per year. Pediatric heart transplants are performed by our Emory team at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. Emory heart transplant recipients gather each spring at the Miller Ward Alumni House to celebrate (this year's "Heart to Heart" group appears on the opposite page.) To quote David Vega, director of Emory's Heart Transplant Program: "It's a miracle every time."
