Callie Blackmore, sits comfortably next to her mother, Liz, with a senior-aged miniature schnauzer named Jack dozing on her lap. She looks like a healthy, happy 26-year-old.
You’d never know from looking at her that her mere existence is a miracle.
The Agassiz woman started life with heart issues. Before the age of six she had received one closed and two open heart surgeries – the first one when she was only three days old.
While her early years were rocky, the rest of Blackmore’s youth was smooth sailing. She was a normal teenager, described as outgoing, quick-minded, kind and loyal by friend Jessica Scott on a GoFundMe page set up for Blackmore’s family.
It wasn’t until Blackmore was in her late teens that her heart problems resurfaced.
It started smaller, with heart palpitations and fluid retention. But as the years went on it progressed and eventually she couldn’t stay out for more than a few hours.
Blackmore was too exhausted to do simple things like get groceries or go to work.
By the time she was 23, she was incapable of even walking one block without help.
Her heart was failing.
Finding a heart donor is difficult in any situation, but the multiple surgeries Blackmore’s heart endured when she was a child made it even tougher to find a match. The surgeries and blood transfusions had created a buildup of antibodies in her system that further narrowed the pool of hearts available to replace hers.
Her doctors made a recommendation: Move to Toronto where there’s more doctors, more people, and most importantly, more hearts.
Blackmore and her mother, Liz had no choice. It was life or death.
But the expenses of moving would pile up. Travel, accommodation and living costs, on top of leaving work, had the mother-daughter duo looking at a mountain of debt.
So Agassiz and Harrison stepped up.
In May, 2017, Callie’s Perfect Heart fundraiser brought in nearly $10,000. The community came out in droves for a dinner served by local RCMP in Red Serge, and Blackmore left with much-needed support, along with the money to take her to Toronto, where she hoped a new heart awaited her.
A GoFundMe page also raised more than $11,000 for the pair.
Now, Liz looks back and says that without help from the community, the experience could have been far more harrowing.
“It meant everything and it really did make it possible. I’m sure without it, we would have still done it but we might not have a home to come back to,” she said. “I hope they know how much it’s appreciated and it meant to us.”
Related: Finding Callie’s perfect heart Red Serge dinner raises close to $10,000
Related: VIDEO: Callie’s Perfect Heart fundraiser dinner
When they got to Toronto, Blackmore and her mother had two weeks to settle in before meeting her new doctors.
When they went in for the first appointment, the doctors, stunned by her condition, admitted Blackmore to the hospital immediately. Her condition had deteriorated rapidly.
She needed a heart soon.
And finding a new heart wasn’t the only challenge Blackmore and her doctors faced. Even if they found the perfect heart, recovering from the transplant would be long, strenuous and painful.
And it might not even work, or at least, not for the 26-year-old’s entire life time.
As reported in the Globe and Mail, a study released in 2011 by the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress found that heart-transplant survival rates were 86 per cent after one year, 75 per cent at five years, 62 per cent at 10 years and only 36 per cent at 20 years.
Blackmore knew her odds weren’t great, especially because of her previous heart complications.
“I knew people who had gone through transplants and didn’t wake up,” Blackmore recalled. “Or, they were not really living. They were hooked up to machines and really sick. I saw that and thought, I don’t want that to be my life.”
Blackmore told her doctors she didn’t just want to be alive; she wanted to live.
But doctors weren’t very positive.
Then one day, something incredible happened.
During an angiogram, a specialist noticed a slight narrowing in a small, almost invisible vessel hidden in Blackmore’s heart. He decided to put a stent in the vessel to open it up, hoping it would make her more comfortable while she waited for a heart.
But within weeks, she had become a new person.
“Her hair started to grow again, her nails started to grow again, she started to feel better,” recalled Liz. “By September she said, ‘I don’t want a new heart.’”
Liz speculates that the narrowed vessel had been causing the symptoms of heart failure.
Fixing it meant Blackmore could keep her heart, and her life.
The pair came back to Agassiz in February, and during a check up in June, Blackmore was officially taken off the transplant list.
Liz said doctors told her that her daughter was one of the only people that had been taken off that list without undergoing transplant surgery or dying.
| Callie Blackmore posted this photo to Instagram in November with the caption: it’s been a hard year, and I only know, from down this low it’s only up we go.... |
Now Blackmore has her life back. She’s regained her independence, focusing on her career, her travel goals and her health. She hired a personal trainer and goes to the gym frequently, suddenly able to exercise and focus on fitness in a way she couldn’t for years.
Heading toward her 27th birthday this spring, Blackmore suddenly has a renewed shot at life.
“I never had a future planned out for me because I never saw myself having a future,” she said. “Now it’s like, well I’m going to do this and save up for that and going to go see this place… those are things I never, ever thought about.”
“I feel like I have more perspective and more appreciation. I feel more focused now. These are the things I want to do [and] this is how I’m going to get there.”
Liz said it was truly a miracle for the family.
“I’ll never ask for another thing in my life. This is beyond what we could have hoped for.”
nina.grossman@ahobserver.com
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