This Man Survived Without A Heart For A Full Year
He wore his heart on his sleeve in his backpack.
Stan Larkin is your average basketball-loving 25-year-old, except that he wears* his heart in a backpack.
*"Wore," actually. Stan received a successful heart transplant in May 2016, more than a year after he left the hospital with an artificial heart in his backpack.
Stan was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy when he collapsed while playing basketball.
This specific heart disease can strike healthy people suddenly, is passed hereditarily—Stan's older brother Dominique has the same diagnosis— and is the leading cause of sudden death among athletes.
In cases like Stan's, when both sides of the heart fail, patients use a device called a total artificial heart. It delivers compressed air via tubes to pump blood through the body, since the heart can't do it alone.
Usually, these devices weigh 400 pounds, are the size of a washing machine and confine the patient to the hospital while she or he waits for a transplant—which could take months or even years.
But instead, Stan was the first Michigan patient to be sent home with a 13-pound, wearable version of the artificial heart. He wore it for 555 days.
After spending months in the hospital, going home with his artificial heart felt "like freedom," Stan said. In the year and a half that followed, he got back to a regular life, including pick-up basketball games with his family and friends.
Stan's extended use of the total artificial heart helped to develop solutions for thousands of others with advanced heart failure.
His doctors at the University of Michigan Frankel Cardiovascular Center said he helped develop understanding of the device and that as a young, active patient he "pushed the envelope with this technology."
After 555 days living without a human heart, Stan has received an organ donation and is happy to be back in the game.
