Euan Bisset will celebrate his 30th birthday this month, a milestone he shares with the service that saved his life.
Scotland’s first heart transplant unit was launched at Glasgow Royal Infirmary on December 16 1991 and a few weeks later on January 2, 1992, the first patient received a donor organ.
Since the service was was launched, more than 445 transplants have been carried out including 164 at the Golden Jubilee hospital in Clydebank, which took over the service in 2008.
“It’s a miracle to still be alive,” said the 29-year-old from Muir of Ord, near Inverness, who will turn 30 on Boxing Day, two years after receiving his new heart.
He was diagnosed with Becker muscular dystrophy at 17, which caused cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle.
A great uncle and another close relatives had the hereditary muscle wasting condition and died after suffering heart complications at a time when heart transplants were not an option. His younger brother James is also affected.
He was fitted with a cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) 2015 which helps detect abnormal heart rhythms but his condition worsened severely and he was placed on the ‘urgent’ list for a transplant in 2018.
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“When one of the surgeons told me that my ‘heart wasn’t good’, I knew it was serious, said Mr Bisset who had to give up his job working for the family’s welding firm and his hobby of mountain bike racing.
“But I welcomed the diagnosis as I had gradually been feeling worse over the years.
“I was really lucky, I only had to wait about four weeks after I went on the urgent list and I just remember being wheeled away and I didn’t wake up until 11 days later because there were complications.
“My new heart wasn’t pumping the blood right straight away and it was very touch and go and I was in ICU for weeks and had some problems afterwards too.”
It has been a long recovery process for the 29-year-old because of the combined effects of his illness and he had to learn to walk again. However this year is the first that he hasn’t spent any time in hospital and doctors are pleased with his progress.
“I’m doing really good now. I’ve had some problems but my heart feels perfect.
“It’s a miracle to still be alive and I’m just really grateful. Emotionally, it’s hard knowing that someone died for me to be alive.
“The family has done a very courageous thing in what is essentially their darkest hour.
“If I could say anything to them if would be that I’m trying my best day in day out to get to where I want to be. I want to race mountain bikes again and work and just be doing what everyone else is doing.”
The first heart transplant in the UK, on May 3 1968, was the tenth in the world and was carried out at the National Heart Hospital in London.
Dr Jane Cannon, Consultant Transplant Cardiologist at the Golden Jubilee hospital said medical advances have transformed heart transplantation for patients and surgeons.
She said: “Technology is evolving all the time so clinical practice changes in terms of the equipment that we have to use.
“One example is the organ care system which we use now to transport hearts. So traditionally a heart was put in a box with ice to cool it down but the time you had to transport that heart was limited.
“The organ care system is called heart in a box so the heart is perfused with the donor’s blood meaning that it’s safe for a longer travel time. Therefore you can take hearts from further afield in the UK knowing that it is well preserved.
“Over the years we traditionally used donors from brain stem death but now we use donors from circulatory death and with those hearts we use the organ care system to transport them.
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“The medical side has also changed in terms of immunosuppression. There’s less rejection now because of the advances in immunology through research so the types of medication we can use to preserve the donor heart has changed quite significantly.”
Dr Cannon isn’t convinced that the future of heart transplantation will be dominated by artificial hearts.
“Harefield where I used to work used total artificial hearts so that was the only hospital in the UK to do that but the outcomes from that weren’t very good at all so that’s now stopped in the UK.
“I think there will always be a place for human heart transplantation. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next 30 years.”
Theatre co-ordinator Hazel Colquhoun led the first Scottish team down to Harefield Hospital in Uxbridge to learn how to retrieve organs for transplantation in Scotland in the set-up stage.
She said: “I think the first time you retrieve organs from someone and see them going into someone else is like the ‘Circle of Life’ for me.”
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