I was born with half a heart and it looks like ‘cookie dough’
A woman has gone viral on TikTok after sharing that she was born with half a heart.
Jessica Manning from New Zealand was diagnosed with several heart defects from the time of her birth and has undergone 200 surgeries since age 3.
By her 3rd birthday, she had already had two open-heart surgeries, and went under the knife again for a small-hole closure before turning 6.
Manning additionally was discovered to have more holes within her body as well as twisted arteries and multiple leaks in her valves, which were considered life-threatening.
She was given only a few years to live.
“My biggest heart surgery was my Fontan, which connects the heart to the pulmonary artery using a tube, that was almost like a reconstruction of my heart,” Manning told Jam Press.
“This led me to have an amazing life [until my late teens] but over time, caused issues to my liver,” she said. “While my friends were living their best lives, it was super hard for me to process and a lot for my body to go through.”
The now-28 year old spent her 19th birthday in the hospital. She recovered at home for a month before going into heart failure.
“I spent the next three months in hospital fighting for my life, with only 5% heart function,” she said.
At 25, Manning had both a heart and liver transplant, following pacemaker surgery and emergency lung surgery a few years earlier.
She said she waited over a year for the procedure because she was the first heart and liver transplant to be performed on someone born with heart disease in New Zealand and Australia.
“I had both organs done together and recovery was super hard as I lost all my muscle memory and had to learn how to move again,” she explained.
Four weeks after her transplant, Manning went into cardiac arrest.
CPR and a defibrillator didn’t work, so the surgeon re-opened her chest and manually massaged her heart, she told Jam Press.
She was placed back into a coma for three days and again lost muscle memory.
“I also had septic shock, where all my organs shut down and basically restarted,” she said. “I recovered really well after that and have had no issues since.”
Manning received free health care in New Zealand, but estimated that her transplants alone cost about $3 million NZD, which is about $1.8 million USD, due to complications and aftercare.
While she has not suffered any complications since receiving her transplants, she still will have to take medication for the rest of her life as a preventative measure.
“My donor was a lot older than me, around twice my age, so I also take medication for cholesterol and blood thinner.”
Since Manning had a successful surgery, she offered her heart and liver to go to a New Zealand university for research. Two months later, she was told her heart was ready to collect.
“They called saying they still have my heart as they only needed a small portion of it and asked if I wanted the rest. I said yes, because at that time, I was doing a few talks for heart kids and I took it for ‘show and tell’ so they could see what a diseased heart looked like.”
She has also received a lot of support from her family and friends, and said they have stuck by her side “every step of the way.”
“I wouldn’t have been able to do it without them,” she said. “My parents raised me just how they raised my siblings, so I was able to grow up with as much of a ‘normal’ life as possible.
Now that Manning has her heart, she shared her story on TikTok, showing it off to the social media platform. One of her videos has garnered more than 1.4 million views and 168,000 likes.
She starts the now-viral video by giving a trigger warning in advance of revealing her actual former heart and telling viewers about her situation.
Manning, holding up her old heart in a clear plastic bag, quips that it looks like “cookie dough.”
“Your heart is the size of your fist, I was only born with half a heart, so my heart should initially be smaller than my fist,” she explains. “But due to it being so damaged it was actually really swollen and took up my entire chest cavity.”
She points out the dark spots on the heart, which she says are dead tissue, and a wire still attached, which was her old pacemaker.
TikTok users reacted in the comments, and many of them were surprised by the sight.
“No idea why I thought it was going to be red,” one said.
“I was expecting a photo of it after or during surgery, not for it to be in a plastic bag,” another wrote.
“So you literally have a big heart,” a user commented.
Manning now says that her heart and liver are doing “amazing” and she hasn’t suffered organ rejection, which is rare.
For now, she wants to keep her heart.
“When I’m ready to let go, I will be burying it somewhere sentimental to me – but for now, I use it on TikTok.”
