First child heart transplant patient in Spain is 'alive and well' 33 years on

María Dolores Ortega, known to friends and family as 'Lola', was 11 years old when Dr Diego Figuera conducted the first heart transplant in the country on her – the first to be carried out on a child, at least – at the Puerta de Hierro hospital in Madrid.

“There I was, at the age of eight, and had no life,” Lola reveals.

“My life could disappear in a second – but now I'm alive and well.”

She is one of over 8,000 people in Spain to have been given a heart transplant, of whom 427 – Lola included – were children at the time.

Lola had to have a second heart transplant as an adult, but her first pioneering operation gave her years, if not decades of life that she is unlikely to have seen without it.

Heart transplants in Spain reached their maximum in the year 2000 with a total of 353 operations that year alone.

At present, around 250 to 300 new hearts are fitted every year.

Last year, the most recent for which figures are available, was fairly typical with 281 transplants, of which 20 were in children.

The world's first-ever successful heart transplant was carried out exactly 50 years and one week ago in Cape Town, South Africa.

It was on December 3, 1967 that the South African surgeon Dr Christiaan Barnard of Grote Schurr Hospital conducted the operation, which was a success at first.

The patient, aged 53, died 18 days later from pneumonia, but the actual transplant operation was said to have gone according to plan and was a massive breakthrough in medicine.

Dr Barnard's transplant patient was suffering chronic heart failure caused by diabetes, and his operation took five hours, of which 52 minutes were spent stitching.

At the time, the surgeon said that it was the moment he saw a man lying on a bed without a heart but alive that he really started to 'feel terror'.

Dr Barnard had learnt the technique from Professor Norman Shumway at Stanford Lane Hospital in San Francisco, California, USA, after the American surgeon had successfully carried out heart transplants in animals in 1959.

The centre in Cape Town has been renamed after Christiaan Barnard, and is pointed out to tourists whenever they visit the city.

Initial attempts to replicate Dr Barnard's work in Europe had poor results – cardiologist Cristóbal Martínez Bordiu, Marquis of Villaverde and son-in-law of dictator General Franco, conducted a heart transplant in Madrid's La Paz Hospital in 1968, but the patient died within hours.

The first one in Spain considered to be a success was in May 1984 when cardiologists Dr Josep María Caralps and Dr Josep Oriol Bonin conducted a transplant at Barcelona's Santa Creu i Sant Pau Hospital, although the patient only went on to live for another nine months.

The second heart transplant patient in Spain was operated on in July 1984 at Navarra's Clinical University Hospital by Dr Ramón Arcas, and is believed to have survived.

Lola Ortega was the third, and the first patient who was still a child at the time.

Nowadays, survival rates for a year or more following a heart transplant are around 80%, and a typical 70% are still alive more than five years after the operation.

Over 500 Spanish patients have lived for 20 years or more with their new hearts – in Lola's case, 33 years and counting.