By Chris Faulkner
Emily Walker received a heart for Valentine’s Day.
Not a chocolate heart. Nor a heart-shaped card or those little hard candies with words on them. But a living one to replace the ailing 10-year-old heart Walker was born with.
Walker, a Fort Madison youngster who is a fourth-grader at Holy Trinity Catholic, underwent a heart transplant on Feb. 15. She came home two weeks later to begin recovery.
“After eight weeks, I can do whatever I want,” Emily said. “Mom and Dad (Maria and Brad Walker)have already signed me up for softball (in the Denmark League),” Emily said.
“She will be able to do anything and everything she ever wants. This (the transplant) gives her a second chance,” Maria Walker said.
“It’s been stressful to me, not putting her at risk for larger problems. We’re always going to run the risk of rejection.”
She is finishing her school year as a Holy Trinity Catholic student at home — the online version made necessary three years ago during the COVID-19 outbreak.
She will have physical and cardio therapy and doctor’s appointments that will keep her out of school too often. The therapy is because she’s been bedridden since the end of December.
“My teacher said whatever I can’t finish it’s fine,” Emily said.
Unknown ailment
Maria, a teacher at Holy Trinity, said the problems began well before Dec. 22, when she had to be sent to Iowa City.
“It started last summer,” Maria said. “We noticed she wasn’t as energetic. She was tired a lot. She just didn’t feel well.”
They went to the doctor, and he treated her for acid reflux, but that wasn’t the problem.
The next visit in September resulted in an asthma diagnosis because Emily had difficulty breathing, but that wasn’t the issue either.
The doctor. suggested it was “a socio-emotional situation,” Maria said, and he recommended counseling. “That didn’t seem to do anything.”
In December, Emily and her older brother Jacob got sick and stayed home from school for a week.
But on Dec. 21, Emily was sick again.
A day later, Emily began to get dry heaves and Brad took her to the emergency room.
A snowstorm had hit the area. Blizzard conditions and 60-mile-an-hour winds prevented Emily from being air-lifted to Iowa City. She was instead taken by ambulance and arrived at the Stead Family Children’s Hospital 3 a.m.
Maria thought it was a bad case of the flu, but she found herself talking to a myriad of doctors: “Cardiologists, kidney doctors, liver doctors, the on-staff doctors, the surgeons, everybody was in her room.
“We found out she had influenza A, pneumonia, and she was septic,” Maria said.
The cardiologist, Dr. Gary Beasley, said her heart had taken a big hit with the flu.
“Her heart was squeezing out only 15 percent of the blood,” Maria said, and that affected other parts of her body.
But while her kidney and liver recovered after a week’s rest, her heart condition still hadn’t changed.
Dr. Beasley recommended different medicines for another week.
But, “even at a resting heart rate, it was at 160,” Maria said. “That’s where most people are when they’re exercising. She was getting up over 200 if she was getting agitated.”
Medications given through a pic line didn’t help.
Emily was finally diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, and an enlarged heart and a transplant was deemed necessary.
So the family was presented with a few options for Emily to be able to go home, “To keep her safe and stable.
“The first was a defibrillator,” Maria said. “Any time her heart would get out of control, it would send a shock to her heart.”
Option No. 2 was the placement of a Left Vascular Assist Device, and that’s the road the family went down.
“A motor was placed into her heart and it would pump blood through the rest of her body,” Maria said.
A cord came out of her abdomen and connected to two batteries if she left the home or was hooked up to home power and plugged into the wall.
She had LVAD surgery on Jan. 11, and that put her on top of the list for a transplant.
Emily was sent home on Jan. 30. Two weeks later, the family got the call that a heart was available. It was the day after Valentine’s Day.
Large support group
Throughout the ordeal, students and teachers at Holy Trinity Catholic put on fundraisers to help with the medical expenses, and not just members of the Holy Family parish but people in Fort Madison and surrounding towns reached out.
“A lot of people called,” Emily said. “Every minute, I’d hear a ding, ding, ding, ding, ding,’ ” as the phone made non-stop notification sounds.
“The first surgery, everybody sent me gifts and cards,” Emily said, “and I felt overwhelmed by the level of the stuff in my room. We didn’t have a really big room.”
“There were a lot of stuffed animals,” Maria said. “It was nice to know that everybody was thinking about (her).”
The hospital staff made a giant heart-shaped cookie that Emily said she couldn’t finish, and the staff also gave her a giant Happy Heart Day poster.
A few days before she left, Emily even received a visit from the University of Iowa women’s basketball standouts Caitlin Clark and Kate Martin; it was a surprise visit.
“I turned my head, and I basically jumped right out of my seat,” Emily said. “I got to take a photo with them. They signed my shirt, my water bottle, and my heart pillow.”
Regardless of what people say about sibling rivalry, Emily also said she missed being around her brothers, Jacob and Nathan.
When asked what she thought about the reality that someone had to die for her to get a heart, Emily said, “I thought somebody else was giving up their healthy heart for me, and then they would get a healthy heart too,” Emily said.
But such is not the case, so will there be a connection made between the Walkers and the family whose loved one gave up their heart?
“We asked how that would work,” Maria said. “At this point our transplant coordinator said, if we would like to write a letter and reach out we can certainly write a letter to them, and they would be able to contact us.” It has to be a mutual agreement, she said.
For now, Maria said, trying to hold back tears, “It’s hard to put into words how to thank them for this gift.”
Of her daughter, she said, “She’s a miracle.”