Mayo doctor to run Donna Marathon, 1 year and 1 day after receiving a heart transplant

On Feb. 5, 2021, doctors at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville transplanted a heart into one of their colleagues, physician Dawn Mussallem. Her heart had been damaged years before by extensive chemotherapy and radiation as she fought Stage 4 cancer, and by then she was so weak she couldn't walk or drive and could barely stand.

Sunday she'll join the runners at the Donna Marathon at the Beaches, aiming to complete all 26.2 miles — one year, plus one day, after her transplant operation.

Mussallem says she's not heard of anyone else who's done such a thing so soon after a heart transplant. But setting some kind of record? That's not why she's doing it. Instead, it's to celebrate being alive.

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She speaks with big smiles, in a rush, unwilling to tamp down the enthusiasm and excitement that courses through her with this new heart beating in her, giving her life. Her senses are on fire: The grass seems glowing and green, and bird calls are a symphony.

“When you wake up, and you feel that heart breathing — it's that heightened existence, where every single sense is on that glorious level," Mussallem said. "I have not lost that. I will never lose that. It is so profound, so cool. That is what completely ignited me to do what I want to do.”

On a Smucker's jar

When Mussallem was a girl in Columbus, Ohio, she decided she wanted to live to be 100. She wanted to be like those centenarians featured by Willard Scott on the "Today" show, wanted to see her 100-year-old face eventually featured on a Smucker's jar, like the others.

Still in elementary school, she set out on that goal, exercising, eating well. She studied nutrition and exercise physiology in college, then did research on centenarians who were still running long distances. She herself commonly ran 10 to 14 miles a day and did fitness contests. "I just upheld this wildly healthy life," she said.

But while in medical school, she was clearly getting weaker, sicker. One day she collapsed, simply walking home to her apartment. Then came a diagnosis: Stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

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Some doctors told her she should quit medical school and that she had just months to live. She was 26 — barely a quarter of the way to her 100-year-old goal.

A different doctor came in the next day. I'm going to fight with you, every step of the way, he said.

She was treated with chemotherapy, radiation, had surgery and a bone marrow transplant. It was aggressive treatment, but it worked. Even as she was being treated, she took to once again climbing Arizona mountains, or running 10 miles a day. It felt magical, she said. She even had those heightened perceptions she would later experience after her heart transplant.

And she stayed in medical school the whole time. But she soon started feeling unwell again, and in 2003, within a few weeks of delivering her daughter Sophia, she could barely breathe. Doctors found her heart was beating at just 8 percent of capacity; the necessary aggressive treatments she had to save her life from cancer had also damaged her heart, badly.

Mussallem believes that being fit saved her life at that point, and that let her continue to practice medicine at Mayo where she's now a diagnostic breast specialist.

Still, she struggled since with heart issues and other struggles, including the loss of her husband, Charles Mussallem, who died suddenly 14 years ago. She remarried 10 years ago to Brandon Bass, which helped she said with her healing.

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Her heart function went up and down over the years. She was no longer able to exercise, and just meeting the demands of daily life got difficult. In 2006 she was put on a list for a heart transplant.

By 2016 she went into cardiac arrest while in a conference with other Mayo doctors. Her troubled heart, for the first time, stopped beating.

"Everything was dark," she said. "It was quiet, it was peaceful, it was cool. It was the state of existence where you felt more comfortable than you’ve ever felt in your life. It was the most profound experience. It was just a state of complete stillness. There was no concern.”

She had flatlined. But her defibrillator brought her back to life after multiple shocks.

Still, she continued to worsen, and in 2108 she passed out while driving with her daughter. It became hard to stand up, to examine patients, to talk. "My life was slowly but surely being taken away from me," she said.

Heart and soul, together

Before her surgery, still waiting for a heart, Mussallem stayed in a hospital bed for weeks receiving medication that helped her heart beat.

On Feb. 5, 2021, she was told, "We have a heart for you." She was joyous, unafraid, though she couldn't help but mourn for the woman — still unknown to her — whose death made this possible.

After her transplant surgery, she stayed another two weeks, taking her first few weak steps leaning on a walker, then more every day, until she was walking a mile or more around the hospital.

She did cardio rehab and within a couple of months had talked with her surgeon to get the go-ahead to start jogging. She ran 5 kilometers before four months were through, then shortly followed that up with an official 5K run for the World Transplant Games, held virtually.

Before five months were gone, she climbed Camelback Mountain in Arizona, outside Phoenix. The climb is steep, intense, but magic: "I felt as one. I felt my heart and soul were going up together."

Mussallem is 47 now, not quite halfway to her goal of 100. But she's thankful to be able to join the Donna Marathon after all these years of watching it, of passing water out to the runners. She's glad, she said, that she's able to take part in a charity that has done so much for the breast-cancer patients she sees each working day.

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Mussallem is Roman Catholic, and during her training runs she prays for her patients, and prays for the woman who donated her heart so she could live.

She thinks often of the concept of grace, defining it as “receiving something from someone else, and passing it on, so everything around you changes gradually.”

Just like her heart, which now has a name: Grace

“I talk to her," Mussallem said. "Running, at mile 18: 'Grace, how are you doing?'"

She laughed: "It's like I have this little person with me, all the time.”

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Mayo Clinic Jacksonville doctor gets heart transplant, runs marathon