Melissia Boynton got the “best Mother’s Day present ever” — a new heart at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Boynton, 47, of Dallas, Georgia, got the call about 3 a.m. on Mother’s Day that her new heart was available.
“You’re just flooded with all these emotions,” she recalled. “I’m crying. I’m scared. I’m happy. I’m nervous. Like it just all hits you all at once. It’s a feeling that you can’t even describe.”
Immediately, her plans changed from a barbecue around the family pool, where she would have struggled to breathe in her previous condition, to a middle-of-the-night drive to Nashville to get her new heart. She and her husband, Michael, rushed to VUMC while her three daughters — Kelsey (28), Emily (26) and Sydney (18) — waited for good news.
John Trahanas, MD, assistant professor of Cardiac Surgery, performed the four-hour transplant procedure. He called his wife to let her know that he wouldn’t be able to take her out for dinner for her first Mother’s Day as a new mom.
“I was expecting her to get upset, but instead she said to me, ‘What a wonderful thing that you’re going to give this woman a new heart on Mother’s Day,’” Trahanas said.
Boynton’s heart failure journey has been a whirlwind. She had no issues until August 2023, when she began having a hard time catching her breath.
“I thought I was having a panic attack,” she said. Her oldest daughter, Kelsey, took her to the emergency department of her local hospital, which led to genetic testing and a diagnosis of congestive heart failure and dilated cardiomyopathy, a disease that causes the main heart chamber to stretch and enlarge.
“She has something called a titin mutation,” Trahanas explained, “which is genetic, runs in families and it causes you to have heart dysfunction for no apparent reason. One day you start not feeling well.”
Soon, she was waitlisted for a heart transplant at her local hospital. As time wore on, she decided to also become listed at VUMC because she was considered a patient with high antibodies. She thought that becoming listed at Vanderbilt would increase her odds of getting an organ.
As it turned out, she only had to wait two weeks on the list at Vanderbilt. “This has all happened so quickly for me,” she said. “To get the call on Mother’s Day, I still can’t believe it. Is this really happening to me?”
Trahanas said Boynton is doing “fantastic” and is ahead of the recovery curve.
“It’s a great thing for her, and it certainly gives us the motivation to keep doing what we’re doing,” he said. “The hours are long and the work is hard, but when we take a moment and think about what we’re doing to help people, it’s meaningful.”
Best Mother’s Day ever, Boynton said.
“I don’t see how anything could ever top this, that’s for sure,” she said.
In addition to Trahanas, the operating room team on Mother’s Day included Brian Lima, MD; Jared Cummings, MD; Kaitlin Pinter, RN; Tamara Hapner, RN; Creighton Casey, CST; Michael Longo, MD; Kim Hawkins, RN; Lisa vanNocker, RN; and Chandramouli Swaminathan Rathnam, MD.
