Antía Piñeiro from Lanzarote, who received a first heart transplant in A Coruña in 2003 as a baby to treat a cardiomyopathy by the hand of cardiac surgeon Francisco Portela, is recovering in Gran Canaria after receiving a second heart at the age of 22 by the same doctor.
This is the first heart retransplant that has been done in the Canary Islands, specifically at the Doctor Negrín Hospital of Gran Canaria, and the sixth to be performed in Spain, as announced this Tuesday by the center's manager, Miguel Ángel Ponce; its transplant coordinator, Vicente Peña; the head of the Heart Failure Unit, Antonio García; and Dr. Portela, currently in charge of the pediatric and adult cardiac surgery services on this island.
When Antía was barely a year old, "her heart began to malfunction" and her parents consulted with a pediatrician they knew in Galicia, who recommended that they transfer the girl to the Teresa Herrera Maternal and Child Hospital for the heart transplant she needed.
After that first intervention, performed by Dr. Francisco Portela, Antía was able to have a "normal childhood", during which she was even able to play handball without problems, as she herself recalled this Tuesday in a press conference.
Twenty-one years later, at the age of 22, this woman from Lanzarote gratefully recounts how she has noticed a "rapid improvement" after the same surgeon transplanted a second heart this summer in Gran Canaria, a procedure from which she is still recovering with rehabilitation exercises that she does at home and attending periodic check-ups, and with a big smile that she hides behind a mask and with which she celebrates that she has stopped being "so fatigued" and that she has "much more energy".
Portela himself has highlighted that Antía grew well, as did her new heart, after her first transplant and explained that in these interventions "there is a chronic rejection that is controlled with medication until the symptoms of fatigue reveal that the organ begins to fail" again, which currently usually occurs after 22 years.
The diligence of the great team of specialists and workers at this reference hospital of the Canarian Health Service (SCS) and the "generosity" that a donor has given to Antía and that has allowed her to receive a new heart seven days after being admitted very seriously to the UMI of Negrín with a prognosis of "zero urgency", with risk to her life, is today a reason for celebration, both in the family of this young woman and in the medical community of the island.
The heart transplant program at the Doctor Negrín Hospital of Gran Canaria, in service since 2019, is about to register its first hundred interventions of this type, with which advanced insufficiencies are treated, "one of the epidemics of the 21st century", stressed Ponce, who also highlighted that the lung transplant program, which began a year ago, is already approaching twenty interventions.
Although the average waiting time to receive a heart transplant at this hospital center is two months, there are patients who can wait for a heart for up to six months or a year, detailed its coordinator, Vicente Peña, who stressed that donors are the pillar of this program.
Regarding the heart retransplant that Antía has received, who had to be anesthetized to be evacuated from Lanzarote to the Doctor Negrín Hospital of Gran Canaria, a large-scale logistical operation in which a large team intervened, since, as Peña has stressed, "donation and transplantation is the best example of teamwork" and a work that "dynamizes and enriches" the rest of hospital services, Antonio García pointed out.
