Two-year-old Majesty Williams is in good spirits. She loves to dress up and she has a healthy appetite. Her mother, Shaneka Holloman, says she is blessed her little girl is doing so well just six months after she had a heart transplant.
“On the second day, once everything came out she was eating and doing everything like normal,” says Holloman.
According to her mom, Majesty was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy when she was six weeks old. It’s a heart condition that made it difficult for Majesty to breathe and could have taken her life.
“What was really concerning is she would have fainting spells. She was out for a minute before they were able to get her to wake up," says Dr. Svetlana Shugh, the pediatric cardiologist at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital who treated Majesty.
The then-infant was placed on a waiting list for a heart. What takes years for some children took seven months for Majesty. Holloman says they got the call in June. Majesty was on the operating table twelve hours later.
After the procedure, doctors expected Majesty would have to re-learn basic functions like walking, but the toddler bounced back to health almost immediately following surgery.
“Physical therapy came in to try to teach her to walk. Nothing had to be taught. She was walking down the hallway, waving at the nurses and blowing kisses," says Holloman.
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Majesty’s mother says she is grateful to the medical staff at the hospital, but who she is most in debt to is the family who donated their child’s heart.
“I cried. But not out of happiness. Out of sadness for the family who donated their child’s heart. They don’t know how appreciative I am that they gave my baby another chance at life,” says Holloman.
A hospital spokesperson says they have performed 67 heart transplants in the 10 years they have been doing the procedures.
