Giving

From High-Risk to Heart-Healthy: One Man’s Transplant Story

“Mr. Jordan, we have a heart for you.”

Limuary Jordan will never forget those words, spoken to him in the early hours of October 19, 2010, in the Advanced Heart Failure Unit at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute. They meant the waiting was over for this 65 year-old patient. That day he was wheeled into surgery, where Alfredo Trento, MD, director of the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, led the team that gave Limuary a new heart.

Two months earlier, following almost twenty years of heart problems, Limuary had received a BiVAD, a device that helped the ventricles in his weakened heart pump more strongly. Despite Limuary’s high-risk status, the Cedars-Sinai team led by Michele Hamilton, MD, director of the Heart Failure Program, was committed to moving him forward to transplant.

“The BiVAD bought me the time I needed to wait for a donor heart,” says Limuary. He calls the teamwork and follow-up in the Heart Institute “exceptional and seamless—a wonderful thing to receive.” Grateful to the staff and volunteers who watched over his wife, Marilyn, he says, “They took care of me and my family.”

Limuary Jordan received the 54th heart transplant at Cedars-Sinai that year. “From now on,” he says, “that’s my lucky number.”

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