For more than 20 years, Sandeep Shah lived with arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy – a rare, genetic condition affecting the heart muscle and at the start of 2019, his world came crashing down around him. Attending an elective ablation procedure to help him better manage his heart condition, Sandeep suffered three cardiac arrests. His condition deteriorated to the extent that he was in end-stage heart failure and was placed on the heart transplant waiting list.
“Being listed for a heart transplant was scary. I’d very quickly gone from a position of familiarity to suddenly having a lot of unknowns in my life and that was hard to come to terms with.”
During the next few months, Sandeep’s transplant journey was far from straightforward; he had three false alarms in a short space of time, each one being called off at a different stage.
Once a potential match has been made, organs go through multiple checks – at the donor hospital, in transit and when arriving back at the recipient’s hospital – to ensure they are in the best possible condition for transplant. In December 2019 he received his life-saving heart transplant.