This Little Heart…

This little heart of ours, we’re gonna make it shine.
💙💚
A heart transplant is not a cure for heart disease… it is essentially trading one heart disease for a better, more manageable one.
Paisley will take immune suppressing meds every 12 hours for the rest of her life so her body doesn’t try to find and fight her heart, which is a foreign object. This is what is most life threatening to a heart transplant patient, and what we live in constant fear of… rejection.
If her immune system detects her heart/the foreign object, it will attack it. And if we don’t catch this very soon and treat it she could die very quickly. It is very important for Paisley to take her meds on time and to never miss doses.
And because most rejections happen as a result of illness, which revs up the immune system to fight off the illness, allowing the immune system to find the foreign organ, often spiraling into full blown rejection sometimes from a simple cold… you can understand why we transplant parents are such crazy germaphobes. It is so important for Paisley and people like her to stay healthy, and why we are so protective of her health. Any illness could easily mean a hospital stay for her, and could even put her heart at risk.
For the most part, we don’t limit our girl. She was given this incredible gift so that she could live, and she lives wild and free. But we want to take the very best care of this beautiful heart that we possibly can. It is a precious gift that we will never take for granted, and we want to let it shine for as long as it can.
💙💚