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Chicago woman lives and thrives a year after complex heart and liver transplant
Climbing the stairs to the top of the former John Hancock Center is a feat unto itself, but Laura Valentine did it just months after undergoing a very complicated double organ transplant.
Earlier this month, Valentine marked the one-year anniversary of her surgery — a major milestone.
"You feel looser," said Valentine. "You feel freer when you get to that year mark."
Valentine's medical problems started at birth.
"There's a lot of technical terms, but the best way to describe it is that I had half a heart when I was born," Valentine said.
Valentine was born with only one ventricle, or lower chamber in her heart. This made it harder for her heart to pump oxygenated blood throughout her body, and because of this, she turned blue shortly after she was born, according to UChicago Medicine.
Valentine had her first open-heart surgery when she was under 2 years old. She was able to experience a relatively normal childhood as a result — swimming, riding horses, attending college and graduate school as an education professional, and becoming a mom, UChicago Medicine noted.
But the congenital heart condition was not the only condition with which Valentine was born. She also had a rare genetic condition that caused her organs' positions to be reversed—her heart and her liver are
"I'm a mirror image of you. So if we were to hug, our hearts would essentially be touching," said Valentine. "So my heart's on [my right] side, and then my liver's on [my left] side."
In July 2023, Valentine noticed some troubling new symptoms. First, doctors found she had been suffering from silent atrial fibrillation — an irregular heartbeat with no symptoms that had caused blood clots in multiple organs, UChicago Medicine said. Medications and procedures eliminated any immediate danger, but the problems with her heart had also caused her liver to fail.
"The biopsy came back cirrhosis, and my heart was failing. It was bad news," Valentine said. "So by December '23, I knew I needed new organs."
While awaiting the new organs, Valentine walked four miles every day through the halls of the hospital for "prehabilitation." And then in June of last year, she got the new organs transplanted.
"She was born with a heart that only one ventricle as opposed to two, and was pointed in the wrong direction in the wrong place," said Dr. Valluvan Jeevanandam, director of the Heart and Vascular Center at UChicago Medicine. "Other than that, it was perfectly fine."
Dr. Jeevanandam did Valentine's heart transplant.
Jeevanandam — along with Dr. Michael Earing, chief of the Section of Pediatric Cardiology at UChicago Medicine, pediatric cardiologist Dr. Stephen Pophal, and director of liver, kidney, and pancreas transplantation Dr. Rolf Barth — used a 3D model to design new connections for Valentine's organs and figure out where to put her new heart and liver.
"So we basically made it so we could fit a heart… by moving all these vessels from the left side to the right side," he said.
The surgery took about 20 hours. It was complicated, but went as planned.
Now a year later, Valentine's outlook has changed.
"Once you pass out a year, and if you've not had any major complications — your kidneys are working, everything else is working — then at that point, we're now looking for decades of life, not just years of life," said Jeevanandam. "She is really, really special. I mean, she has willed herself for so long, despite how sick she was. She willed her through the surgery, and now she's willing herself to a fantastic life."
At a holiday party less than six months after the surgery, Jeevanandam urged Valentine to join the annual Hustle Chicago, in which participants climb 1,632 stairs up the former John Hancock Center to raise funds for lung disease.
Valentine made the climb two months later with her fiancé, with Celine Dion in her earbuds to inspire her.
Meanwhile, Valentine is also now passionate about organ donation, and wants to encourage more people to participate.
