Mar Mesa celebrated its 25th birthday in style. She is actually 52, but she has long been attaching more importance to the day she was reborn. She was reborn the day her heart was transplanted at the Sant Pau hospital in Barcelona, ??where the first successful intervention of this type was performed in Spain 40 years ago. On May 9, 1984, a team led by doctors Josep Maria Caralps and Josep Oriol Boní grafted a donor heart into Juan Alarcón, a 29-year-old young man. Since then, some 10,000 transplants of this organ have been registered in Spain.
When Mar Mesa entered the operating room at Christmas 1998, the average life expectancy of a person with a heart transplant was just over 10 years. “Ten years of gift,” she thought. “Ten years ahead that we must take advantage of.” 25 have passed and the woman is perfectly fine.
The problems began, apparently, with a flu that left him with consequences. She was choking, in the mornings she woke up with a “smoker’s” cough when she had not tried a cigarette. That flu that seemed innocuous had caused dilated cardiomyopathy for which he was treated until his heart said enough, a year and a half after the diagnosis. He was admitted in a very serious condition to the Vall d’Hebron, where his parents could not choose an alternative to the transplant but only the center: Sant Pau or Bellvitge. They opted for the pioneer hospital, but tried to hide the reality from the girl. Fifteen years after her first intervention, a heart graft was still a big thing for her. “My parents thought that she was very young and that I would not take the news of the transplant well. They told me they were taking me for valve surgery,” she recalls. But lies, even pious ones, have short legs: “A visiting doctor told me that she was waiting to see if they would put me on the waiting list or not because they had to give me a heart transplant.”
After the intervention he was left with a great feeling of guilt. “If I was alive it was because someone else had died, although in reality they would have died anyway. I had to overcome that grief,” she recalls. He also had to overcome the main adversary of the transplant, rejection. Specifically, eight rejections in a row, with tests and biopsies until the doctors found the right medication. He was starting a new life: “I have become another person, but not because my feelings have changed. My first heart was pounding that I don’t feel now. “It has given me a lot of desire to live, to do everything that I would not have thought I would do because I was a much more sedentary person.” Mar Mesa worked, now she spends her time walking, swimming, practices tai chi, takes online Egyptology courses, she is a language volunteer… she has far exceeded the expiration date that her heart could have had. No problem: “Sometimes it beats out of time or makes a series of beats in a row, but I’m used to it and it doesn’t scare me. If anything has to happen to me, it is a gift of 25 years, I take it for granted, I don’t live in suspense.”
Since May 9, 1984, 650 heart transplants have been performed in Sant Pau. Antonino Ginel, director of the cardiac surgery service, highlights the vision of the pioneers: “A person who knows how to see where the future is and convinces you that this is the way and makes people row synergistically in the same direction.” .
According to Ginel, who has directed around a hundred interventions, the big difference compared to the beginning is that more complex cases can now be addressed. He also highlights the evolution of immunosuppressants and the control of ischemia times (lack of blood supply to the organ). And the future? The doctor expects advances in three lines, a product of the work and collaboration of many people in different parts of the world. Advances in immunosuppressants to increasingly control rejection. Secondly, mechanical assistance systems, machines that help the heart function, developed between doctors and engineers, will be increasingly compatible and with fewer intrinsic problems. Finally, Ginel points to the transplantation of animal organs. “The design of the heart of any mammal is practically the same, although it is already difficult for one person to accept the heart of another, it will be more difficult to accept the heart of a mammal, further removed from you from the point of view of the genome.”
Sonia Mirabet, head of the heart failure unit, highlights the radical change in the lives of transplant recipients. “They arrive with an absolute limitation to lead a normal life, there are patients who get tired reading or eating and the transplant allows them to recover a normal life. “They don’t have to obsess over things that can happen but rather try to enjoy what they can have after the transplant.”
Professionals and patients vehemently praise the figure of the donor. “Let it be very clear that I am very grateful to my donor, to his family. They were super strong and super brave. Let people be aware that thanks to donations many of us live” (Mar Mesa). “Normally they are relatively young people with an acute cause of death, a brain hemorrhage or a traffic accident. The family has not had time to prepare for such a painful moment, and in this emotionally violent context, having the generosity to make the donation is priceless generosity, it is miraculous” (Antonino Ginel).