Heart recipients join Utah doctors, caregivers to mark 40 years of transplants

SALT LAKE CITY — Heart recipients joined doctors and others at the Utah State Capitol on Tuesday to celebrate 40 years of success in saving lives through a collaborative heart transplant program.

Administrators called the UTAH (Utah Transplantation Affiliated Hospitals) Cardiac Transplant Program "unique" because healthcare providers who are otherwise in competition with one another have worked together to share expertise, research and resources for the good of patients.

The program, which involves the efforts of medical professionals and experts from Intermountain Medical Center, Primary Children's Hospital, University of Utah Health and the George E. Wahlen VA Medical Center, has performed 2,074 heart transplants.

"The program was created as a partnership among institutions and has evolved into a unique model, a true team of teams, united by a common purpose," said Dr. Stavros Drakos, a cardiologist. "This collaboration, we like to say, creates synergy which is far greater than the sum of the individual parts.

Drakos said this has allowed the Utah program to achieve far more than a single institution could accomplish alone, while giving many adults and children a second chance at life.

Among those people is Laurence Parker, a professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Utah.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Parker said symptoms that felt like COVID ended up being congestive heart failure caused by hereditary amyloidosis.

He received a new heart on Valentine's Day in 2021.

Parker recalled a conversation he had with his doctor at the time.

"He just said, 'You either have to get a heart transplant, and we either get you on the list soon, or you're not going to make it past two years, you just won't,'" Parker said in an interview with KSL.

He spoke with reporters at Tuesday's news conference, sharing his gratitude.

"It's a gift to be able to teach my classes and be active as a faculty member at the University of Utah," Parker said as he fought through tears. "Thank you very much. I appreciate it."

Kally Heslop, who has received two heart transplants, expressed gratitude for the choices made by her donors, and spoke specifically of those made by one of them, a 23-year-old woman from Las Vegas, when Heslop was 29 and in need of a new heart.

"It is because of her decision, letting her family know that she wanted to be an organ donor, and her family making that choice to donate, that I am here today, that I have been able to raise my four children, that I have been able to work and do everything everyone else does," Heslop said.

Dshyra Hobbs said she was grateful for the transplants her children, 15-year-old Haili Hunter and 8-year-old Aayden Hunter, received, as well as the care from the doctors in the UTAH Cardiac Transplant Program.

"My children — two children — two heart transplants, two completely different journeys, and somehow God was writing a story that I couldn't see yet," Hobbs said. "I want to say thank you. Thank you for your dedication, for your knowledge, your compassion and for choosing to do this work, because your work doesn't just change a patient's life, it changes an entire family."

Related topics