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JENNIFER’S STORY
Among the lessons to be learned from the devastation from Hurricane Katrina is the notion of how fragile our lives are, and how quickly one’s life can change when catastrophe strikes. Jennifer Shih learned this lesson one year ago, when a rare disease that attacked her heart drastically altered her life. Twenty-nine year old Jennifer Shih had been studying to be a doctor since high school, when she began taking pre-med classes at Louisiana State University. She spent the next eight years completing her undergraduate and medical school studies at LSU and LSU Medical School in New Orleans. She then moved to Atlanta to begin her residency program in pediatrics at Emory University. Three years later, Jennifer completed her residency and could have begun practicing as a pediatrician like many of her classmates. However, for years, Jennifer has wanted to help infants and children with heart problems, so she left a huge circle of friends and the familiarity of Atlanta to pursue her goal of becoming a pediatric cardiologist. In June of 2004, Jennifer moved to Cincinnati to begin her fellowship at one of the top cardiology programs in the nation. Ironically, just a few months into her fellowship, Jennifer would encounter heart problems of her own. On Monday, August 30th Jennifer began to think that the exhaustion she was experiencing was more than just fatigue from being on-call for five out of six days. She performed an echocardiogram on herself (a skill she had just learned the previous month in her fellowship) and found that she had fluid around her heart. With her blood pressure rapidly dropping, she went to the emergency room. Initially, doctors thought she had a virus causing fluid to collect around her heart but later realized the disease was attacking the heart itself. She was eventually diagnosed with an extremely rare disease called Giant Cell Myocarditis. Jennifer’s condition deteriorated, and by Wednesday September 1st, she was airlifted to The Cleveland Clinic due to the severity of her condition. On Thursday, doctors determined that her heart was too damaged to pump on its own, and performed emergency surgery to implant a temporary device that would act as an artificial heart. They later determined that a heart transplant was Jennifer’s only hope for survival. Jennifer was placed at the highest priority level on a transplant list and remained in ICU, weak and in a great deal of pain. On September 12th, a miracle occurred when a donor heart was found. After waiting an agonizing five hours to determine if the heart was a match and enduring a six-hour surgery, Jennifer received her heart transplant.
While Jennifer has a second chance at life, the road to recovery is long and filled with regular biopsies, immunosuppressant drugs, and a high risk of rejection. This past year has been quite a trial of Jennifer’s character, strength, and attitude. Jennifer has been hospitalized twice since the transplant. She has endured 14 invasive cardiac biopsies and suffers from countless medication side effects (daily nausea, tremors, and “pins and needles” throughout her body). Jennifer has not been able to work for the past year and will never be able to fulfill her dream of becoming a pediatric cardiologist. In fact, because the life-sustaining drugs suppress Jennifer’s immune system, she can no longer work with sick children due to the risk to her own health. This has been one of the most devastating consequences of her transplant, since she had been working towards this goal to help others for 25 years. Jennifer constantly struggles with the discrepancy between her will and desire to accomplish things and her physical abilities to do so. Her future career goals are still uncertain, and financial burdens are ever-present. Jennifer is currently on disability, which barely covers her monthly medical expenses and does not leave any money leftover for living expenses. Money raised from last year’s Have A Heart Benefit has helped considerably, but more help is needed.