Pocatello councilman’s daughter gets long-awaited transplant

    A little more than four months since Sarah Brown was told she was eligible for a heart transplant, she underwent that surgery on Sunday.

    The daughter of Pocatello City Councilman Steve Brown and his wife, Julia, Sarah was born with several heart defects and has undergone numerous surgeries during her 19 years, many of them coming before she could even walk and most coming before her 10th birthday.

    At 10 years old, another ailment was thrown into the mix, one Steve said can occur in those with Sarah’s condition. Sarah was diagnosed with Protein Losing Enteropathy, or PLE, a condition where the proteins are not absorbed in the intestines and it produces more fluid that must be flushed out. That causes swelling, diarrhea and vomiting.

    While the PLE was able to be controlled for lengthy periods, Sarah did have serious bouts as a sophomore at Century High School, and again beginning in October of 2011, after a stomach virus aggravated the condition.

Other side effects have included serious scaring to Sarah’s liver.

    But that last bout with PLE led Sarah, who had previously been treated at Children’s Primary Hospital in Salt Lake City for so many of her ailments as a child, to the University of Utah Hospital because she had become an adult.

    That also put Sarah in front of a new cardiologist who specialized in working with adults who had heart defects as babies. Tests conducted by that doctor eventually determined a heart transplant could be performed on Sarah, an option that had not been available in the past, the family told the Journal in a story earlier this year.

    Steve said on Wednesday that as the Brown family awaited that heart, Sarah became increasingly ill. On March 13, she was permanently placed in Children’s Primary, where the transplant would be done when a heart became available.

    On Friday, as Julia and the Browns’ other children were preparing to leave the hospital for Pocatello, one of Sarah’s doctors came into the room.

    “Her cardiologist came in and asked what our plans were,” Steve said. “Julia says, ‘Well, if you have a heart, we will stick around.’”

    They had a heart.

    “The instant that you feel this immense amount of joy, your heart instantly breaks for the donor family,” Steve said of finding out a heart was available for Sarah. “It was a very surreal experience, to have it actually happen.”

    The heart that doctors transplanted into Sarah during an eight-hour surgery that began that night and continued into Monday morning was as perfect a match as they could have hoped for. Given Sarah’s declining condition, finding such a match had become unlikely.

    Steve said Sarah was doing well as of Wednesday afternoon, but recovery could take several weeks. She is struggling some, but doctors have told her family that such struggles were to be expected given how ill she was prior to the surgery.

    Sarah will be in intensive care for at least two weeks. The hope is that the new heart will resolve much of Sarah’s health issues.

    “Her goal is to be a marathon runner,” Steve said. “I have no doubt she will accomplish that.”