'My two little girls almost died from deadly heart condition but doctors' brilliance and strangers' kindness saved them'
WATCHING adoringly as her two daughters play happily in the sunshine, Joanna Perry cannot believe how her fortunes have changed.
She lay in Great Ormond Street Hospital clinging on in intensive care until, against all the odds, a suitable replacement heart was found in just a matter of days.Credit: Oliver Dixon - The SunBut seven years later, the family discovered they would have to go through the same horrific ordeal all over again with their then four-year-old daughter Isobel.
Incredibly, Isobel’s heart went back into a normal rhythm by itself, but the medics then spotted a bleed on her brain and operated immediately to save her.Joanna and Phil were told Isobel needed a new heart, but she could not be put on the transplant list until she was strong enough. And their daughter recovered so well that, at the start of August last year, Isobel was put on the transplant list.Joanna — who also has an eight-year-old son, Jude, with Phil — said: “I pulled over in the car and sat there, sobbing.
And she is delighted that new rules on organ donation, brought in in May, will mean people now have to opt out of being a donor. Matthew Fenton, director of paediatric heart transplants at GOSH: “In my 17 years at the hospital, I can remember only a handful of cases like this, where siblings from the same family and with the same heart condition both received a life- changing heart transplant, making cases like that of the Perry family incredibly rare.
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