I was 26 when I first started having heart problems. I’d have chest pains while I was driving…turning to look in the rear view mirror would make my chest hurt.

I was living in Columbus, Ohio, then, but I’d been thinking about moving to Philadelphia. My college pastor was working to start a church for college students there and I wanted to help. A lot of my friends had moved there to work with him, too.

So I was looking for a job in Philadelphia, and in early 1998 I got an interview for a job as a financial aid counselor with a medical school there. As it turned out, it was the day before my flight out that I got my diagnosis of congestive heart failure.

The doctor asked me to consider canceling the trip, but I told him I had a job interview and that I wasn’t about to skip it. He cautioned me not to do anything strenuous. I’d made arrangements to stay in a historic bed and breakfast inn, because I wanted to make the trip special. But of course when I got there, I found out my room was on the 4th floor and there was no elevator!

But I didn’t get the job, so I stayed in Ohio. I was put on digitalis, and my health stabilized. I wasn’t going to run a marathon, but I was basically OK. Everytime I went for an echocardiogram I was hoping the condition would go away, but it never did.

Then the same job opened up again in August of 2000, and somehow I just knew I was going to get it that time. I was actually a little scared…the thought of moving to a new city and having to start over, especially with the heart condition, was kind of overwhelming. But I reapplied, and sure enough, I got the job, so off I went.

I settled in and found a new doctor, and every thing was fine for a few months. But then I went home for Christmas to see my family in Chicago, and every thing changed. It was the coldest Christmas I’d ever experienced. It was –20 degrees at night and I caught a really bad cold.

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I know exactly when the switch flipped. I was on my way home from a New Year’s Day party, and when I stepped out of the car, I took maybe 4 steps and suddenly felt like all the air had been sucked out of my lungs.

From then it just got worse. I was retaining water, gaining weight. I couldn’t sleep. My best friends lived 2 blocks away, but I couldn’t visit them because they lived down a hill and I could walk there but not back.

In February I made an appointment with a new doctor. She took one look at me and admitted me to the hospital. She told me I’d be in the hospital for a week, and I remember thinking, “A week! I can’t be in the hospital for a week!”

As it turned out, I was in there for a lot longer than that! During that week they did an electrophysiological study of my heart and I went into fibrillation. The doctors nearly weren’t able to restore my heart’s rhythm. I lost 2 days. When I woke up I had burn marks on my chest from when they shocked me to get my heart working again. They told me I wouldn’t be able to leave the hospital until I got a heart transplant.

I kept having my limits pushed. I would just be getting comfortable with my situation, and then it would be something else. I couldn’t believe it…a heart transplant? From kindergarten to college I missed 1 day of school; I was never sick. So it was hard to accept being in the hospital for so long. I remember being afraid that I would still be there on my 30th birthday, which was July 16th, 2001—5 months away.

But then, on April 1, I ran into my doctor while I was out walking in the hall with my friend Melissa, and she told me to go back to my room. That surprised me, because the doctors were always getting on me to walk. I asked her why, and she said they had a heart for me. Melissa, of all people, started crying. I didn’t cry at all, for some reason. I guess I was just more matter-of-fact about the whole thing by that point.

Things happened very quickly after that. The surgeons came, the interns came, they started taking blood. I called my mom to tell her. Mind you, it was April Fool’s Day. She called me back 20 minutes later because she didn’t believe me. I said, “Mom, why would I joke about this?”

My aunt’s boss was very successful in the computer business, and he was incredibly supportive of my family throughout this whole thing. He flew my parents out that day, and they were able to see me before I went under. I was in surgery from 8:00 PM to about 1:30 in the morning.

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Everything went fine. The first week after the surgery was rough, but I was out of the hospital 2 weeks after the surgery. I’ve never been readmitted since, and that was more than 4 years ago.

I don’t really think about the transplant much now. It’s not how I define myself. Would you go on for the next 20 years about a root canal you had? But it did change me. I would never have taken the LSAT; I would never have traveled to Ireland by myself if I hadn’t had the transplant. I figure that if I can get a heart transplant, I can do anything!

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