Have heart: How an organ transplant gave this 20-year-old her life back (2024)

One day in early December, Maariyah Rahman developed a cough. The next day, she felt an unfamiliar pain in her chest.

Maariyah, a 20-year-old Ryerson University student at the time, wasn’t used to feeling weak. She had always been athletic – swimming, playing hockey and dabbling in rugby. The pain prompted her to visit a walk-in clinic near her home in Scarborough, Ont.

The doctor at the clinic assured her it wasn’t anything to worry about. “It’s just anxiety. Exams are coming up,” he told her.

Trying her best to ignore the chest pain, Maariyah continued on with her business management studies, as well as her part-time job with TD Securities.

But on day four after her symptoms began, the pain became crushing. Maariyah’s parents took her to the local emergency room, where a chest X-ray revealed pneumonia. She was told to go home and wait for antibiotics to kick in.

The next morning, however, she felt even worse.

“I could not breathe, move or eat. I lay on the sofa all day, and I could not lie down flat,” Maariyah recalls. Too sick to take the exam scheduled for the day, she cried as she suffered.

On the advice of Maariyah’s aunt, a physician, the family drove to Toronto General Hospital’s emergency department. After a flurry of tests, a cardiologist told Maariyah she had heart failure.

Maariyah was in shock. “Four days ago I just had a cough, and now I’m dying?” she asked herself. Doctors told her an infection had likely attacked her heart, damaging it severely. Later, they would discover that Maariyah has a genetic mutation that makes her susceptible to such an infection.

Maariyah was sent to the hospital’s cardiac intensive care unit. “We’re going to try you on meds. We’re going to try you on some devices. If that doesn’t work, you’re going to need a heart transplant,” her new cardiac team told her.

“It was so overwhelming,” remembers Maariyah. She had an internship in Montreal scheduled to begin in January, but that seemed impossible now.

Though Maariyah had the best care possible, she just got sicker. Days after being admitted to the hospital, she was rushed into emergency open heart surgery to implant a biventricular assist device, which would help her heart pump. She had to stay attached to the cumbersome, external part of the device.

“I could not walk without a whole team helping me,” she recalls.

Maariyah’s deteriorating condition meant she was able to get to the top of the heart transplant list in Ontario. Just over 200 heart transplants happen in Canada every year, and many people wait on lists for months or even years, as there are not enough donor hearts for those who need them.

Less than a week later, a heart became available to save Maariyah’s life, and she had an open-heart procedure to implant the organ.

This all happened around Christmas. When she woke up from surgery, her big, extended family was surrounding her, loaded down with gifts. She later found out that as her family waited during her surgery, they had asked everyone in the waiting room to sign up for organ donation.

Just over a week later, Maariyah went home. For the next few months, she recovered from the operation, learning to walk again.

“After that, it was mental recovery,” she says. It took months to process the opportunities she had lost and the changes to her body.

As soon as she was able, Maariyah returned to school, where she started a group to encourage her fellow students to register for organ donation. She also started playing hockey again and joined a dragon boat racing team with other heart transplant recipients.

Now 22 and looking forward to starting an MBA program, Maariyah says that physically she feels so much better than before her heart troubles began. “Back then, I hadn’t noticed that I was feeling really tired and drained,” she says. “[Now] I feel a lot healthier and just more energized.”

It can be challenging to relate to older transplant patients, and her peers sometimes struggle to empathize with what she’s been through. Doing advocacy work has helped. Maariyah hosted a fundraising event a year after her surgery that raised $23,000 for Toronto General Hospital, and she speaks to high school students about organ transplants. While Maariyah herself signed up to be a donor back when she was 16 and first got her driver’s license, she knows many young people don’t think about such things.

“Once I share my story, they see why it’s so important,” she says.

Maariyah’s hope is that more people will be inspired to act. More than 90 per cent of Ontarians are in favour of organ donation, yet only one in three have registered their consent to donate. Stories like Maariyah’s demonstrate how the simple act of signing up to be an organ donor can save a life.

Advertising feature produced by Globe Content Studio with The Government of Ontario. The Globe’s editorial department was not involved.