I had 3 months to live and my only choice was to be put on the transplant waiting list

“I was at home about to have dinner when I saw my mother take a call. She told my father it was the hospital. I put the spoon down – something told me it was the call,” she says.

Mary Poku was 13 years old when she received treatment for cancer. “As a teenager, I just wanted to get back to school, but I was just getting weaker and weaker. My heart was beating very rapidly, and I was short of breath all the time,” she recalls.

Mary was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy – a disease of the heart muscle which affects its size, shape, or thickness. In Mary’s case, her heart had become enlarged and was no longer able to pump enough blood around her body. She was told that her only option was to have a heart transplant. That was 36 years ago.

Back then, heart transplant surgery was considered a somewhat controversial operation. “At the time, my parents were not in favour of me having the surgery at all, because in ‘85, only 200 people had had the surgery in the UK,” she says.

BHF-funded and world-renowned surgeon Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub performed Mary’s heart transplant. Sir Yacoub, together with Sir Terence English, helped to make heart transplantation a successful reality in the UK in the late 1970s and 1980s. In fact, it was Sir English who performed the UK’s first heart transplant with long-term success in 1979 - just six years before Mary’s surgery.

The surgery that saved my life

“I actually burst into tears the first time I met Sir Magdi Yacoub,” Mary recalls. “I’d got to a point in my life where I was very fed up. Sir Magdi persuaded my parents and gave them the courage to let me have the surgery, and I’m so grateful that he did!”

Mary and her mother were picked up by an ambulance within the hour of receiving the call – the call telling them that a donor heart had become available. Mary remembers not being scared of the surgery itself, but instead, worrying about the risk of infection. “You just become tough when you’ve been ill for so long as a teenager,” she says.

“I’m so thankful to the donor for giving me another chance at life.”

Recovery and beyond

Currently, around 200 heart or heart-lung transplants are carried out in the UK each year, but there are still challenges. Around one in six people do not receive the heart transplant they need. “I would love to see efforts to use all the available hearts, to increase the awareness of the population. There are people dying – children, adults - in the prime of their life, people like Mary, who can benefit tremendously from such a donation. It is literally a donation of life,” Sir Magdi Yacoub says.

Following the surgery, Mary managed to go back to school. She then went on to qualify as a legal practitioner and is now an esteemed barrister. Today she leads a healthy lifestyle by exercising daily and watching what she eats. “If I look after myself, I look after my heart, and that’s my way of thanking the donor. It’s a small sacrifice to prolong the longevity of my heart,” she says.

Do you want to hear more from Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub and Mary Poku?

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