STITTVILLE, N.Y. -- Stephanie McLaughlin was in her kitchen one day nearly a year and a half ago when she suddenly felt lightheaded. She passed out on the cold floor, went to the emergency room and found out she had broken her foot.
The ER doctors told her to follow up with a neurologist - who later found nothing wrong - and told her to maybe add some salt to her diet, she recalled. The 37-year-old mother of three returned to life taking care of three children ages five and younger but the unexplained fainting continued, and became more frequent.
It wasn’t long after that doctors discovered McLaughlin’s heart wasn’t functioning properly. It wasn’t pumping blood like it should.
Sixteen months later, McLaughlin was hospitalized, dying and in desperate need of a new heart. A machine was acting as McLaughlin’s heart and lungs as she waited and hoped for a transplant.
The first heart that became available wasn’t a good match.
McLaughlin’s youngest daughter, Sophie, asked Santa Claus early this December for a new heart for her mom. The Christmas wish came true when doctors found a heart for McLaughlin.
After an eight-hour operation in Rochester, McLaughlin woke up with a fully functioning heart.
"I remember waking up with this breathing tube and I wanted it out,'' McLaughlin said recently in an interview with Syracuse.com | The Post Standard from her home in the Oneida County hamlet of Stittville. “But then I realized, wow, I made it through the surgery and I am alive.”
McLaughlin spent the next three weeks in Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester. She was incredibly weak and needed help to get out of bed, and her legs filled with fluid and looked like tree trunks, she said.
Her three children couldn’t visit because they were sick, so she talked to them on Facetime as she worked to get her strength back.
As the days progressed, the fluid began to dissipate, and McLaughlin could get around with a walker. Just before Christmas, she was discharged.
Christmas was quiet, but amazing, McLaughlin said. "I feel so much better - I can breathe and I just feel stronger,'' she said.
“I can feel this new heart beating and it’s really strong,” she said. “It’s hard to even wrap my mind around it, but I could barely feel my old heart beating.”
McLaughlin’s cardiologist, Dr. Himabindu Vidula of Strong Memorial Hospital, said McLaughlin’s heart damage arose from a rare condition called sarcoidosis. It is an disease that forms inflammatory cells that can deposit in any part of the body and leave scar tissue in any organ. Vidula said Strong has a number of specialists in sarcoidosis.
In McLaughlin’s case, the disease led to heart failure and abnormal heart rhythms.
By October, McLaughlin couldn’t walk from one room to another. She was nauseated, vomiting and couldn’t sleep, and her heart function had dropped to 10 percent, her doctor said. Although she had a pacemaker and a defibrillator inserted, nothing was helping.
She was flown by helicopter to the Rochester hospital.
"I was crying and so upset,'' McLaughlin recalled. “I was there for 54 days, went home for two days and had to go right back. It was then they started telling me I was a candidate for an new heart.”
Dr. Vidula said McLaughlin would not have lived without another heart. Doctors hooked her up to an ECMO (Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) machine, which uses a pump to move blood through an artificial lung and back into the bloodstream, essentially replacing her heart until a new heart was found.
“She was very sick, and while she was on the ECMO machine, she would never have been able to go home,” she said. “Her successful transplant is an absolute miracle.”
Heart transplants, first done in the late 1960s, have become more common. There were 3,551 heart transplants in the U.S. in 2019, up from about 2,200 a decade ago, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In New York, there were 255 heart transplants in 2019, compared with 154 10 years ago.
In the Northeast, the wait time for a heart is typically longer, Dr. Vidula said, but the number of donors has increased slightly because doctors can now use hearts from people with hepatitis C and from people who have died due to opioid overdoses.
Due to privacy concerns, McLaughlin doesn’t know if the heart came from a man or woman or that person’s age or what happened to them. She said what she does know is that she’s eternally grateful to the person for checking that organ donor box.
She does plan to write a letter that can be passed on to the family of her donor and telling them they can contact her if they’d like.
For the next six months, McLaughlin has to take it easy, avoid public places and wear a mask because the immune suppression drugs she has to take make it easier for her to get sick. If her children are ill, they may have to go her parents while they recover.
All small prices to pay, McLaughlin said, for the gift of life.
“I just feel like I am so blessed,” she said. “Here I got to be home for the holidays with my family, while it had to be a really hard holiday for the family of whoever’s heart I have. Someone with selfless courage saved my life.”
How many need organ donations and how to donate:
In New York state, there are nearly 10,000 people who need an organ transplant, according to the Finger Lakes Donor Recovery Network, an organ procurement organization that serves communities across 20 counties and 36 hospitals in the Finger Lakes, Central New York and the North Country.
About 6 million, or 38 percent, of eligible New Yorkers have registered to be an organ donor, which is well below the national average of 58 percent. In the Central New York, the Finger Lakes and the North Country, 51 percent of eligible adults have committed to the state’s registry.
At Strong Memorial Hospital, which provides heart, liver, kidney and pancreas transplantation, there are 550 people on waiting lists, including 43 who need a heart.
To learn more or register to be an organ donor, go to: donorrecovery.org.
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