Jeanne Anne Love was only 11 years old when she went into heart failure. As an infant, she’d been diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy, and her pediatric cardiologist thought the medications he prescribed would keep things under control until she “outgrew the condition.” That was the case until she was 7, when her condition worsened.
At 11, the doctor told her parents that it was “time for a transplant” and, on New Year’s Eve 1994, Jeanne Anne got a new heart. “A new year, a new heart, a new life,” she remembers thinking. These days, a college graduate, she’s working at the hospital where she had her transplant—in cardiothoracic research—“where I belong,” she said.
