EASTER is all about rebirth, but “a good event” doesn’t come close to describing Leonnee Pinchen-Martin’s Good Friday this year as the heart disease sufferer received the phone call she’d been waiting a year for.
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At 4.45am on Good Friday, Ms Pinchen-Martin was lying in bed, having woken up to feed her 11-month-old baby, Levi, when she got a call from St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney.
“Leonnee had woken up with Levi and then she couldn’t get back to sleep, thinking ‘what if I got the transplant call this weekend’, because all her friends from Sydney had arrived to spend Easter weekend together in Tamworth,” Ms Pinchen-Martin’s mother, Kathy Martin, said. “Some had arrived at midnight and Leonnee couldn’t go back to sleep after feeding the baby when her phone rang. They said, ‘Leonnee, this is St Vincent’s, we’ve got an Easter present for you’.”
Mrs Martin said her daughter called her to tell her the good news that she was getting a new heart.
Ms Pinchen-Martin was diagnosed with peri-partum cardiomyopathy when she was 21 years old and 37 weeks’ pregnant with Levi.
She was living day-to-day with a LVAD (left ventricle assist device) while awaiting the transplant.
When she got the magic phone call, she was all packed and ready to go.
“I chucked a few things in a bag and was out the door,” Mrs Martin said.
Her partner, Joe Stolker, drove Ms Pinchen-Martin, Mrs Martin and Levi to St Vincent’s Hospital in the quickest trip to Sydney they’d ever done.
“We had no stops, drove just straight through,” Mrs Martin said.
Her friends turned around and drove back to Sydney to wait with the family at the hospital for news on the transplant.
“There was a dozen or more in the intensive care waiting room,” Mrs Martin said. “We arrived at 10am and they told us at the hospital that this could be a false alarm, but at about 11am, they said it was all go and ‘it’s going to happen’. Leonnee went into theatre about 1pm and we didn’t see her again until midnight. We just all waited. One of the friends had been up all night cooking for an Easter picnic they were going to have in Tamworth, so the friends who followed brought the food and we had a picnic in the waiting room – it was a real Easter feast.”
The family don’t know any details about the donor, but they knew she had to be female and about 22 years old.
“I think they’ll tell us a little bit more soon, but we just won’t know who it was,” Mrs Martin said.
Ms Pinchen-Martin, her mum and Levi will spend the next three months in the units at the back of St Vincent’s Hospital as the heart recipient attends meetings and has blood tests and counselling.
She will be released from hospital in the next couple of days.
“She’s done well,” Mrs Martin said. “They’re not expecting she’ll be in much longer than the 10 days.”
Mr Stolker returns to work in Tamworth today after a week with his fiancee and will travel to Sydney each weekend.
Mrs Martin said she didn’t think the enormity of what she’d gone through had hit her daughter as yet.
“I’ve asked her how she feels with someone else’s heart and she told me she thought she would feel bad, because they died for her, but she said, ‘They didn’t die for me; they died and helped me’,” she said.
Mrs Martin said she couldn’t praise the surgeon, Kumid Dital, highly enough, nor the staff and facilities at St Vincent’s Hospital.
“I am so pleased this place is here,” she said. “They saved her last year with the LVAD and they’ve given her a new lease of life now. I can’t speak more highly of this hospital.
“Having the units so close means I can keep her baby close to her. I am just so grateful for everybody – the doctors, hospital and the donor. It’s given my baby life.”
Mrs Martin said Ms Pinchen-Martin had some quality of life before with the LVAD, but she was now looking forward to having a bubble bath with Levi and giving him swimming lessons.
“All those little things just mean so much,” she said.
“I was in tears when I saw the surgeon and all I could say to him was ‘thank you’.”
Since The Leader ran the first story on Ms Pinchen-Martin’s transplant wait on March 26, Levi has started to walk independently.
The two shared their first cuddle yesterday morning as Sydney Morning Herald photographer Janie Barrett snapped their pictures.
Friends Megan Gill and Alicia Sullivan, who went to school with Leonnee, are preparing for The Sydney Morning Herald Half-marathon next month where they will run to raise money for St Vincent’s Hospital cardiac unit.
They will run on May 20 under the team name of Love and Hearts.
Donate to their effort at www.everydayhero.com.au/love_hearts
