Today we celebrate a special anniversary of one such person who received his heart as a teenager, and is now in the prime of his life.
Heart transplantation is a miracle of modern medicine that gives people who have no other options - a second chance at life. At the INTEGRIS Health Heart Hospital at INTEGRIS Health Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City, our surgeons have performed 688 heart transplants to date. Many of those recipients have gone on to live long and fulfilling lives. Today we celebrate a special anniversary of one such person who received his heart as a teenager, and is now in the prime of his life.
Tyler Groom was just 17 years old and starting his senior year of high school when he began having trouble breathing during football workouts. He tried to fight through the pain, but the pressure on his chest became unbearable.
Tyler was diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy, and the deterioration of the heart muscle was both rapid and severe. He was transferred from a hospital near his hometown in Kansas to INTEGRIS Health Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City, where doctors first tried to manage his condition with optimal medication. When he showed no signs of improvement, they came to the conclusion that a heart transplant was his only option. He received his new heart on Aug. 19, 2008.
Now 32 years old, Tyler returned to INTEGRIS Health to thank many of the doctors and nurses who cared for him for the additional 15 years of life - he almost didn’t have. Click below to watch the joyous reunion.
“I just want to thank them for their dedication to not just myself, but all of their patients,” expresses Tyler. “The care and the support they gave us was phenomenal and beyond anything we could of ever imagined. They literally saved my life, so I owe them forever.”
Douglas Horstmanshof, M.D., is the director of INTEGRIS Health Advanced Cardiopulmonary Care at INTEGRIS Health Baptist Medical Center. He has cared for Tyler since the very beginning. “To see him there with his family and all the people around him, it’s just that reminder of what we do changes lives and changes people forever. He’s been incredibly successful and I told him I hope we can do this again in another 15 years.”
