Colchester resident Cindy Sypher had already survived one heart attack. So when she started to feel strange in a similar manner while traveling to work one morning, she took it seriously. She remembers getting herself to a local urgent care center — and nothing else until she awoke on a life-saving heart-and-lung machine at Hartford Hospital.
The heart of this 47-year-old woman had failed.
“I was in disbelief,” she recalls from the moments after she awoke. “This can’t happen to me.”
Her husband, David, was understandably upset.
“I worried about losing my wife,” he said.
She was immediately placed on the list for a heart transplant. Her life at that point became dependent on a portable pump called a ventricular-assist device. This was only a stopgap measure until a donated heart became available. At least, that was the hope.
Finally, the call came from the Hartford HealthCare Heart & Vascular Institute: a matching heart was on its way, and Cindy was the intended recipient.
“I thought I’d be nervous. I wasn’t,” she said. “I had total faith in my doctors. They are the best team.”
David recalls the joy — and the blur — of that evening.
“(There was) a little bit of craziness,” he said. “A little bit of disbelief. A LOT of happiness.”
The transplant surgery was a success, leaving Cindy and David relieved and grateful for her second chance at life.
“All the stress from the last two years melted away,” said David, recalling his feeling as he saw his wife for the first time immediately following her surgery. “I wailed in the room, and she said, ‘Hi, honey.'”
“It’s a gift every morning that I wake up,” Cindy said.
Learn more about the Hartford HealthCare Heart & Vascular Institute here. Want to learn more about organ donation and transplantation services at Hartford HealthCare? Visit here.