Maddie Price came back home after attending a baseball game with her family and her chest tightened and her stomach ached.
She ignored it and a few days later she fainted before leaving a coffee shop.
She was taken to the hospital close to her hometown in Palm Harbor, Florida, a bustling beach community near Tampa. Doctors informed her that she needed a new heart.
Price had felt chest pain before but this one was different. She was born with a congenital heart defect, a critical health condition that has occurred in more than 100 surgeries including two heart transplants.
After her birth, doctors realized Price was not getting enough blood flow. She had to undergo open-heart surgery to replace her aortic valve and pulmonary valves at 2 1/2 years old.
When doctors told Price her heart was failing, she was bewildered. “I was like, ‘No, you guys just need to rerun it. I have the flu. I know what it is, I’ve had it before,’ she tells PEOPLE. Heart failure can deceptively start out with flu-like symptoms: fatigue, nausea, back pain. “The doctors said I get similar symptoms a lot worse than most people, and my heart was just not pumping blood as much as it should.”
She underwent her first transplant when she was about 5 years old. Though she doesn’t remember much. “I colored in my hospital room and hung out with my mom,” she recalls.
Though the surgery was successful still doctors were doubtful because Price’s body had a strong rejection reaction to the transplanted heart, and they told her that it would be difficult to recover.
“Until I was a teenager, I thought, ‘Oh, this is normal. You go to the doctor every week, you get labs done, you take a ton of medicine two, three times a day,” Price, now 19, says. “It wasn’t until I started going to the doctor on my own that I really started to understand that this is a condition I’ll have forever, and I have to be responsible about it.”
There were several complications after her second heart transplant at age 16. She received an adult heart over a child’s heart for the second transplant. But her body had to “grow into the new heart” since it was larger than what her body was used to.
The larger heart made it difficult to breathe as it pressed on her lungs. “It was hard because I was trying to make more friends and meet new people but I left halfway through my sophomore year … I kind of missed out on playing sports or being in clubs,” she says.
Her teachers and friends paid a visit to the hospital as she recovered from surgery and helped her catch up on homework so she could finish high school on time. They even threw a birthday party for Price at the hospital.
“I’m really lucky to have them and not just be alone all the time in the hospital,” she says.
“People always ask me, ‘Oh, isn’t it hard to miss so much and have to go to the doctor every week?’” she says. “But for me, I get to meet new doctors and nurses, serve on hospital boards and advocate for families that don’t understand the processes.”
Now, Price is studying communications at St. Petersburg College and dreams of working for the American Heart Association. She is part of the American Heart Association’s 2020 Go Red for Women “Real Women” initiative to raise awareness of heart disease and stroke in women.
“Some of the women are in their 40s and 50s, and I’ve already been through a lot more, medically, than some of them,” she says.
She continues: “It just shows that heart disease can happen to any woman, any man, at any age. People need to take care of their health! Go to the doctor, just get your heart checked. It takes an hour and helps save your future.”
Doctors informed her a few weeks ago that she would need a kidney transplant, but the surgery has been postponed until her white blood cell count is higher to prevent infection during the procedure.
“Life is so precious, you just take every moment that you get and keep going even when there’s bumps in the road,” she says.
[rumble video_id=v5b307 domain_id=u7nb2]