Washington — Kristin King counts every day as a blessing ever since she received a heart transplant in September 2023.
“Life can stop at any point in time,” King told CBS News. “You never know when that will be. I was healthy, I had never had a heart problem in my life. And I needed a complete new organ.”
King’s transplant occurred four months after her heart began to fail following childbirth.
“I started having problems breathing in the middle of the night. I wasn’t able to lay down,” King said. “I wasn’t to drink or eat, and I was really, really tired.”
King’s husband, Gavyn Johnson-Dean, said the couple initially “chalked up all the symptoms to after-pregnancy and after a C-section, but it just kept building and building.”
Johnson-Dean finally insisted she go to the emergency room. Doctors discovered she was suffering from peripartum cardiomyopathy, a rare condition in which the heart weakens that can happen in the last month of pregnancy or within a few months of delivery.
Symptoms of peripartum cardiomyopathy include fatigue, heart palpitations and shortness of breath.
“Be your own advocate for your own health,” said Dr. Phillip Lam, a heart failure and transplant cardiologist at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C., where King underwent the transplant procedure. “If you really feel like something is not right and something is off, seek care, don’t ignore it.”
Lam, who was King’s post-care doctor, described her case as rare and very aggressive. While she waited for a donor, she remained hospitalized while her newborn, Gage, was at home.
“It was a flood of different emotions, of happiness, but fear, anxiety as well,” Johnson-Dean said of that time.
Eleven hours of surgery later, King had a new lease on life. She now wears a bracelet to honor her donor and all they have given her.
“What do I not want them to know?” King said of her donor. “The biggest thing for me is that this decision that may have been really easy or hard for them, has allowed me to be a mom. Every day I just imagined my family, and not being there for them, and what their lives would be like.”
She is now about 18 months into what her family describes as a lifelong recovery.
“It’s kind of surreal,” King said. “Like I said, I have little moments that mean the world to me.”
