At 2½ years old, Hannah Clark had two hearts beating inside her chest.
Doctors said she wouldn't survive without a transplant.
In 1995, legendary heart surgeon Magdi Yacoub performed a rare "piggyback" transplant. Instead of removing Hannah's failing heart, he left it in place and added a donor heart beside it.
For the next 10 years, both hearts beat together.
The donor heart did most of the work. Hannah's own heart simply rested.
She went to school. Made friends. Grew up like any other child.
Then came a devastating complication.
The anti-rejection drugs keeping the donor heart alive weakened her immune system and led to lymphoma, a form of cancer.
Doctors faced an impossible choice:
Keep the donor heart and risk the cancer.
Or reduce the medication and risk losing the transplant.
Then they looked at Hannah's original heart.
Something extraordinary had happened.
After a decade of rest, the heart that had once been too weak to keep her alive had healed itself.
Its size had returned to normal.
Its pumping strength had recovered.
It looked healthy.
In February 2006, Hannah went back into surgery.
The donor heart was removed.
For the first time in medical history, a transplanted heart was successfully taken out because the patient's own heart had recovered.
Her original heart took over immediately.
No hesitation.
No failure.
It simply started doing the job it was born to do.
Without the donor heart, Hannah no longer needed anti-rejection drugs. Her immune system recovered, and the cancer went into remission.
The little girl who once needed two hearts to survive is now an adult living with the same heart she was born with.
Sometimes medicine saves a life.
Sometimes it buys the body enough time to save itself.