Claire Sylvia’s Transplant Journey – NaPodPoMo

In this episode of Self Powered Healing, I’m going to tell you about a lady named Claire Sylvia who developed primary pulmonary hypertension and wound up requiring a heart-lung transplant.

In the last episode of Self Powered Healing, I talked about how we can be resistant to healing and also about things we can do to overcome that resistance. In the case of Claire Sylvia, her story is not about resistance, instead it’s about having the will to live in spite of the odds being against you. There’s also an interesting twist to the story that relates to some information about the human heart.

Claire was a professional dancer with several modern dance companies and had taught dance at both high school and the college level. She had even at one point opened her own dance school. But at the age of 43, she was diagnosed with primary pulmonary hypertension. At the time, her doctor didn’t really indicate it was a serious condition, but in 1985, she learned that it could result in needing a transplant. At that point, she was 45 years old.

And soon after that, her disease began to progress and she got to the point where she was put on the transplant list for a heart lung transplant. Which in 1985 was a very rare surgery.

Claire’s disease progressed to the point where she could do very little. She was in a wheelchair and unable to do most household tasks that we take for granted, and yet she persevered. She was a very caring and giving person in spite of her condition.

She decided to throw a party to thank all of her friends for their support. She had a lot of help putting that party together. Claire’s daughter, Amara, ordered a big cake inscribed with the phrase, “To Life.” Years later, one of Claire’s friends told her she thought the party marked a turning point. She told, “Claire, you had every reason to give up, but here you were making a statement, just like the phrase on that cake, that you intended not only to survive, but to live.”

In 1988, there was a motorcycle accident and a young man named Tim, at the age of 21, passed and became the donor of the heart and lungs that Claire received. Claire was not only determined to heal for herself, but she formed a support group to help other transplant patients.

Following her surgery in 1988, she began developing some strange cravings. Cravings for sweets that she had never liked before and a new liking for green peppers. She also developed a strange craving for chicken nuggets, but only if they came from Kentucky Fried Chicken and a liking for beer. She also had a sense of a new masculine energy within her and had recurring dreams about a young man. Dreams that were from the perspective of that young man.

Three years after her surgery, Claire tracked down the family of the man who had passed away and they had a little get together and confirmed that the cravings and the feelings that she had appeared to have come from Tim.

I wanted to know a little bit more about Claire. I searched the internet, I didn’t find a lot, I just found an article talking about her life and her passing. In there it told us that in 1998, Claire had had an additional health problem that led her to receiving a kidney from a former dance partner. And then in 2009, she passed at the age of 69, 21 years after her heart lung transplant.

So now for that little bit of information about the heart. In 1991, scientists discovered a complex intrinsic nervous system within the heart. They found roughly 40, 000 cells that are now considered to be the brain within the heart. That little brain is able to act independently from the brain in your head.

It’s able to learn, remember, feel, sense, and even send signals to the brain that control internal organs. Furthermore, that little brain in the heart makes heart transplants possible. There are nerve fibers running through your vagus nerve that connect your brain to your heart, but during a transplant, those are disconnected. They are cut and never reconnected.

But from the moment that heart is in place, it begins to beat because of the intrinsic nervous system that enables it to function on its own. That’s also why Claire had these memories and these cravings that she hadn’t had before because she had a little bit of memory from the man who gave her her heart and her lungs.

Thanks for listening today. If you have any comments on this episode or on the whole NaPodPoMo concept in general, you can visit this page to leave comments either on this page or at SelfPoweredHealing.com/November2024. You can also find a listing and link for all November’s episodes on that same page: SelfPoweredHealing.com/November2024.  

By the way, Self Powered Healing is still looking for interviews with people who want to share a story of healing. Do you have a healing story? I would love to hear about it and see if maybe you could share it on our show. So if you’re interested in sharing, then visit selfpoweredhealing.com/share to schedule a chat.  

You aren’t committing at this point. You’re just having a chat with me to see what’s going on. It will be confidential unless or until you decide you want to share. And if you get there and there’s not a convenient time for you, send me a message because we’ll always find a time.  

And remember this always,  