Middlesbrough girl gets heart transplant after near 18-month wait
Five year-old Evie Green has been on a 'Berlin heart'
A girl from Middlesbrough is recovering from a heart transplant after waiting in hospital for nearly 18 months.
Five year-old Evie Green was diagnosed at four months-old with dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition that affects the blood flow to the body.
She recently found a donor but was on a 'Berlin heart' machine since being admitted to hospital.
Her mum, Chloe, said: "Part of my way of coping with this journey is the control element and researching and having all the information and I knew post-transplant isn't easy. There's a whole host of new problems that you have to deal with, so when the offer did come, there was maybe five percent excitement and then the rest was anxiety and worry.
"We're getting to a point where we're nearly ready for the ward and not intensive care that hopefully we're on the home stretch a little bit. As soon as you've got the heart transplant, your kind of mindset changes that you're not in here for life, you're in here to get out of here, whereas when you're on a Berlin heart waiting, you're just kind of toddling on.
"There's one thing I've been talking to Evie about at the beginning of the year, she's loving Disney at the minute, and Moana 2 comes out in November, so I think she'll be allowed out of isolation by then that hopefully I can take her to the cinema. Just something as simple as that to see Moana 2. I think she'll be over the moon to do something like htat.
"We won't be diving straight into loads of things. We'll make sure that things are on the up and certainly safe for her and then we can start planning things like going on little holidays, because six months before she got admitted, we only went to West Midlands safari park and it's such a highlight in her memory.
"It's very simple stuff that people take for granted like going to the beach, or going to the park, because we weren't able to leave the hospital grounds so those sorts of things mean the world to us. Just generally start living normal life again and then just going on staycations in the UK, I'm also looking forward to hopefully planning some more of them."