Transplant patient’s life

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33092, 6 December 1972, Page 6

Transplant patient’s life

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuler—Copyright) CAPE TOWN, Dec. 5.

Miss Dorothy Fisher, the longest surviving heart transplant patient in South Africa, sneaks the odd smoke and the occasional tot of liquor —- against doctor’s orders. This is the measure of confidence she has in her health, which all but killed her less than four years ago, and in her new heart, which was stitched into her chest on April 16, 1969. The operation was performed at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town by Dr Christiaan Barnard’s team — the same one that performed the world’s first human heart transplant just five years ago yesterday. Before the operation she was bedridden and close to dying. She had suffered heart

trouble since the age of seven, when she had rheumatic fever, and had already undergone three heart operations.

Then came the transplant. Suddenly she was back on the way to full recovery, and sudenly she was also an international celebrity. Letters arrived from all over the world. One was a marriage proposal from a railway worker in Guernsey who had never met her, NEAR NORMAL

“The letters don’t pour in like they used to — I don’t like writing back, you see,” says Miss Fisher. Today, at 41, she is living a near normal life.

After the operation her weight shot up to about 200 lb because of the anti-rejec-tion pills she had to take. She still swallows about 30 pills a day, but she has lost most of the excess weight. She goes to Groote Schuur Hospital every Friday for a check-up. Her house is a spick and span four-room building in the suburb of Retreat which she manages to keep clean by herself. She does everything except the floors.

Cooking, she says, is her favourite pastime. That, and going to parties. She has lost the old tiredness and rarely goes to bed before midnight. “Some people criticise the transplants,” she says, “but if they knew what I suffered, and what I am like now, they wouldn’t criticise. That is why I hope Professor Barnard and the heart team vyill go on with their work."