Woman reunited with heart-lung transplant surgeon after 35 years

She underwent the life-changing operation at age 15

A woman who had a life-saving heart and lung transplant at age 15 has been reunited with her surgeon after 35 years.

Katie Mitchell, from Sidcup in Kent, underwent the operation in 1987 after being diagnosed with Eisenmenger syndrome at the age of 11.

Eisenmenger syndrome is a rare condition in which there is irregular blood flow to the heart and lungs, leading to heart failure and irreversible lung damage.

As a child she was previously diagnosed with heart disease, because there was no treatment for Eisenmenger syndrome and most patients died before the age of 30.

This changed in 1984 when a team of surgeons at a hospital in Cambridgeshire, formally the Papworth Hospital, performed Europe’s first successful heart-lung transplant. Three years later, professor John Wallwork carried out the operation on Mitchell.

Mitchell was reunited with the surgeon at the Royal Papworth Hospital on Thursday (29 September), where the pair hugged and smiled for photographs.

“Without him I wouldn’t be here,” Mitchell said of the 76-year-old medic.

She also thanks the medical team, donors and donor families, adding: “None of this would be possible without them.”

Recalling her earlier years before the operation, Mitchell said she struggled to walk upstairs.

“If I went up to bed that was it and it would take me 20 minutes or half an hour to get there,” Mitchell said. “It was quite bad at the end.”

Katie Mitchell and John Wallwork (PA)

Describing the change from before the operation to after, she said: “I was so breathless and so blue from not getting any oxygen that literally as soon as I woke up from the surgery I was very pink and I could breathe and I remember thinking how easy it was to breathe compared to the day before. It made such a big difference.”

Wallwork, who is now a chairman of the hospital, said that at the time of the operation, it was too novel to predict how long patients may live.

“35 years is exceptional, there’s no doubt,” he said of Mitchell’s case. “To see her now this many years later having led a good life, not just having survived, is wonderful.”