A Gift from the Heart

As fourteen-year-old Donna Ashlock lay in bed at the Pacific Medical Centre in San Francisco, recovering from a heart transplant operation, her anxious father gave her some astonishing news. Donna owed her life to the devotion of her fifteen-year-old boyfriend, Felipe Garza, who had given his own heart to save her.

A few days before Christmas 1985, Donna had been told by doctors that she had just four months to live. Her heart muscle had degenerated so severely that a transplant was essential. When Felipe heard of his girlfriend’s tragic plight, he announced to his family that he would die so that she might live.

 

Since  Felipe was apparently in perfect health, his parents had dismissed the notion as a romantic fantasy. But on January 4, Felipe collapsed, due to a blood clot in the brain. He was rushed to a hospital in Modesto, California, where doctors pronounced the young boy brain dead.

Felipe’s parents had never met Donna,  but they remembered their son’s pledge and contacted the Ashlock family. That night, Felipe’s body was flown to San Francisco; in a five-hour operation surgeons transferred the boy’s heart to his girlfriend.

So successful was the operation that Donna was well enough to leave the hospital after just a two-week convalescence. She went home a celebrity, with movie companies vying for the rights to tell her story.

Yet the miracle of Felipe’s sacrifice is still unexplained. What had caused his sudden, fatal hemorrhage? Did the lovesick boy have a premonition of death? Or did he will himself to die to save his beloved Donna?