He Carried His Heart in His Backpack for More than a Year Until...

06-13-2016

You never know what's inside someone's backpack. You see you a 20-something guy and assume he's toting around a computer and snacks.

Not Stan Larkin. His backpack contained his artificial heart.

The 25-year-old Michigan native lugged around his artificial heart for a year and a half until he was finally able to get the heart transplant he so desperately needed.

Time was running out. Stan received his heart transplant just in the nick of time. He even broke a record for the length of time using his type of artificial heart: 17 long months. That adds up to about 150 million heartbeats.

It wouldn't have been so unusual for Stan to have died while waiting for a heart to become available for transplant. Lots of people do.  

There just aren't enough donated organs to serve all the people who need them. In fact, 22 people die every single day while waiting for an organ to become available to be transplanted into them. Right now 121,000 people are on waiting lists.

Stan met with reporters at the University of Michigan Frankel Cardiovascular Center, where he received the artificial heart he carried around for a year and a half before recieving an actual human heart.

"I got the transplant two weeks ago, and I feel like I could take a jog as we speak," he said.

"I want to thank the donor who gave themselves for me," he continued. "I'd like to meet their family one day. Hopefully they'd want to meet me."

As a teenager, Stan was diagnosed with a severe form of heart failure that has been known to suddenly kill young people without any warning. It's called familial cardiomyopathy and is a leading cause of death among athletes.

Stan was placed in the hospital's intensive care unit. Heart surgeon Jonathan Haft said Stan was "very, very ill" when they met in the ICU.

Haft said Stan needed a heart transplant but might not live long enough to get one. Thanks to a total artificial heart, he did.

The artificial heart, which replaces both failing ventricles and the four heart valves, was implanted inside Stan. Two tubes exit the body, which attach to a machine in the backpack.

The machine, a driver that weighs almost 14 pounds, delivers compressed air into the ventricles to allow blood to be pumped through the body.

Stan was able to move around freely, even play pick-up basketball, with his artificial heart, for a total of three hours at a time. That sure beats being bed-ridden, hooked up to a machine 24/7.

Stan's artificial heart was battery powered. He plugged it in to recharge the batteries at night while he slept.

Although the device allows greater mobility for artificial heart patients than ever before, it still wasn't easy.

"It was an emotional rollercoaster," Stan admitted.

Artificial hearts have come a long way since the first one was transplanted into a patient in 1969, who died three days later.

Now, the total artificial heart like the one Stan used, is implanted in more than 900 people in 65 hospitals.

Nearly 6 million American are living with heart failure. About 10 percent of them, or roughly 600,000 people, have advanced heart failure, according to the American Heart Association.

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