Genetic diseases related to heart are a very dangerous proposition as they can cause serious heart problems at such a young age. This 25-year-old guy Stan Larkin and his brother in the USA were diagnosed with a rare cardio disease called familial cardiomyopathy that results in severe difficulty of the blood-pumping action and heart transplant is the only available option left. Now heart transplants are still very complicated procedures and have long waiting lists since there is a dearth of donors around the world. As a result of this, Stan Larkin had to wait an astonishing 555 days before being able to get a healthy heart for a transplant.
Now, what did the poor man have to do in between to survive? Luckily, he is living in an age where artificial blood pumping devices are at an advanced stage and engineers were able to make one for him a Freedom® portable driver that used compressed air to perform the basic functions of a heart.
It is quite similar to working to the one Tony Stark aka Iron Man wears in the movies but it is not at that level, and Larkin only survives on that machine. He couldn’t play or run on it as it would risk putting the device into overdrive. Doctors haven’t claimed that it works as a replacement of heart at all. According to them, it is just something to keep you going while you wait for a heart transplant which we can see here take a LOT of time.
Now his brother got his matched heart under a year, but he himself had to wait for one and a half years on the artificial device before his heart transplant was scheduled. He is now a healthy man, and this is what he had to say about himself now:
“I got the transplant two weeks ago, and I feel like I could take a jog as we speak. I want to thank the donor who gave themselves for me. I’d like to meet their family one day. Hopefully, they’d want to meet me.”
The first heart transplant was performed fifty years ago, but the real fruits of the research and painstaking development have only begun to show nowadays. Human being and all its tough requirements of blood can now survive on a portable heart for over a year. So, even if you get a heart failure, you can have hope.