By The Survivors Club Staff
July 14, 2009

The Survivor of the Week award goes to Hannah Clark, a young British woman who proves that the healing power of the human heart.

In 1995, British doctors came up with a radical idea to save 11-month-old Hannah who was experiencing heart failure. In a so-called "piggyback operation," they implanted a donor heart from a 5-month-old baby directly into Hannah's own failing heart.  The theory behind the operation was that the donor heart would pump while Hannah's heart rested.

After 10 years with two hearts, Hannah's original heart did what many experts believed would never happen: It became healthy and strong enough for doctors to remove the donated heart.

Hannah also paid a price: the drugs she used to prevent rejection of the donor heart led to cancer that required chemotherapy.

The details of Hannah's extraordinary story are revealed online in the medical journal Lancet.  [Many of the details in this TSC account of Hannah's story come from Maria Cheng's Associated Press report and from Atika Shubert's report on CNN.]

In 1994, when Clark was eight months old, she developed severe heart failure and doctors put her on a waiting list to get a new heart. But Clark's heart difficulties caused problems with her lungs, meaning she also needed a lung transplant.

Since then, Hannah - now 16 years - has started playing sports, gotten a part-time job, and plans to go back to school in September.  "Thanks to this operation, I've now got a normal life just like all of my friends," says Hannah, who lives near Cardiff, Wales.

"The possibility of recovery of the heart is just like magic," said Dr. Magdi Yacoub, a leading heart surgeon who performed the original piggyback procedure and came out of retirement for the removal.  "We [had] a heart which was not contracting at all at the time. We put the new heart to be pumping next to it and take its work, now [it] is functioning normally."

For more information about heart health, please visit The Survivors Club Heart Disease Support Center.