‘I get to love you with two hearts now’: Chicago mom thriving after complex double-organ transplant

Shortly after she was born, Laura Valentine turned blue.

Doctors quickly discovered the cause: the infant’s heart only had one ventricle (or lower chamber) instead of two, making it much harder to pump oxygenated blood throughout the entire body.

In addition to this rare heart defect, Valentine also has a condition known as situs inversus, in which the organs in her abdomen are positioned in a mirror image, or reversal, of normal anatomy.

These and other challenges led Valentine to receive a dual-organ transplant last summer at the University of Chicago Medicine. Today, the 35-year-old is thriving.

Valentine has since gotten engaged, enrolled in a doctoral program, and even climbed 94 flights of stairs to the top of a famous Chicago skyscraper as part of a charity event.

“I know I'm a bit of a medical miracle and a unique case study,” she said. “If I can put myself out there to help others learn how to treat patients like me, or help patients like me feel a sense of comfort because I made it this far, I'm always going to do that.”

Life-saving referral for organ transplant

To survive her congenital heart disease (CHD) condition, Valentine underwent her first open-heart surgery — called a Fontan procedure — before she was even two years old.

With her circulatory system successfully rerouted to improve oxygenation, she was able to experience a relatively normal (albeit closely monitored) childhood and young adulthood: swimming; riding horses; attending college and graduate school as an education professional; and becoming a mother.

But in July 2023, she started feeling "not quite right," eventually going to a hospital with abdominal swelling and pain. Doctors found out that she been experiencing silent atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat without any noticeable symptoms. The condition had caused her to develop blood clots in multiple organs.

Although medications and procedures got her out of immediate danger, a major concern loomed: Her heart and liver were failing. She was referred to UChicago Medicine, where she met with Valluvan Jeevanandam, MD, Director of the Heart and Vascular Center, and Michael Earing, MD, Chief of the Section of Pediatric Cardiology.

They acknowledged her case would be extremely difficult, but they brought in other experts and took on the challenge, performing imaging scans so they could construct intricate 3D models and work out how to make a transplant feasible with Valentine’s unorthodox organ placement and circulatory system.

On February 13, 2024 — the day before Valentine’s Day and also National Donor Day — she learned she’d been accepted to UChicago Medicine’s heart transplant program. Soon after that, she checked into the hospital to begin her preparation.

Dedication to ‘prehabilitation’ before transplant surgery

While waiting for suitable donor organs to become available, Valentine walked four miles every day through the halls of the hospital at Jeevanandam’s insistence.

“When you’re a really hard case that not a lot of people will take, and you find someone who’s willing to treat you, you do whatever he says,” Valentine said, with a smile.

Jeevanandam and other members of her care team said her dogged “prehabilitation,” consisting of her daily walks and physical therapy workouts, was crucial to the success of her transplant operation and rapid recovery.

“She's a young, active mother, and she had all these goals and things she wanted to get back to after her hospitalization,” said Allison Postel, PT, DPT, a UChicago Medicine inpatient physical therapist. “I didn't have to sell her on the benefits of working hard to build strength; she really knew, so she was eager to do anything that we asked of her.”

Valentine’s young daughter visited regularly throughout her preparation and waiting process, playing enough charades and other games with the staff on the cardiovascular floor that she started naming stuffed animals at home after them. She still has a giant stuffed taco named “Nurse Nicole,” and Valentine and some of the nurses still text each other daily scores from online puzzle games they played together.

Team approach to transplant surgery results in triumph

After 84 days in the hospital, Valentine finally received the news that a suitable organ donor had been found.

“The first question my daughter asked me after we explained the transplant situation to her was: ‘Are you still going to be able to love me when you get a new heart?’” Valentine said. “Because in the mind of a kid, love is synonymous with your real heart.

I told her: ‘No, I’ll never not love you. I’m going to get to love you with two hearts now.’”

Using the 3D model they’d constructed, Jeevanandam, Earing, pediatric cardiologist Stephen Pophal, MD, and Rolf Barth, MD, Director of Liver, Kidney, and Pancreas Transplantation, painstakingly designed new connections and plotted out how they would position her new heart and liver.

“It takes more than a team to care for these patients: it takes a metropolis,” Jeevanandam said. “We called ourselves the ‘surgical Twister team’ because everyone was contorting themselves and bending over backwards to make this operation work.”

Valentine spent almost 24 hours in the operating room, emerging with a new, fully functioning heart and liver. She was wheeled out of the hospital just 16 days later to joyfully return home to her family and make a full recovery.

“I think the thing I admire most about Laura is her fearlessness. She is a force to be reckoned with,” said cardiac surgery nurse Angela Kilburg, RN. “She’s headstrong, and she really believed in herself and the team that got her through to the other side!”

Going the extra miles

Less than 6 months after her transplant surgery, Jeevanandam cornered Valentine at a holiday party he was hosting.

“You’re joining our team for the stair climb, right?” he said — referring to Hustle Chicago, an annual charity event in which participants race up the 1,632 stairs at 875 North Michigan Avenue, formerly known as the John Hancock Center, to raise money for lung disease.

Valentine reasoned that since her surgeon was the one telling her to do it, she must be “medically cleared” to attempt the race, so she trained hard and did the full climb just 2 months later with her fiancé and UChicago Medicine friends, with Celine Dion playing in her earbuds for motivation.

Now, Valentine is training for a 5k race that will take place just a few days after her transplant anniversary in June and raise funds and awareness for organ donation. Ann Nguyen, MD, Medical Director of the Heart Transplant Program, who is providing Valentine's post-transplant care, has also put her in touch with other complex CHD patients who are awaiting transplant, giving her the opportunity to encourage them with her own experience.

“There are points along the transplant and recovery journey that feel so hard you want to give up, but I want people to know that even if something doesn’t feel ‘worth it’ in the moment, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it overall,” Valentine said.