Stan Larkin was 16 when his heart simply stopped right in the middle of a basketball court. It was the first warning sign of a hereditary disease that would also affect his older brother, Dominique.
By the time he arrived at the University of Michigan’s Frankel Cardiovascular Center, Stan was dying while connected to life support. The doctors, led by Dr. Jonathan Haft, made a drastic decision: they removed his heart and replaced it with a total artificial device that he had to carry in a backpack weighing more than 6 kilos, connected to his body 24 hours a day.
For 555 days, Stan lived like that. Without his own heart, but still shooting hoops while he waited for a donor. In May, the transplant came. Two weeks later he said he felt able to go out for a jog, and he asked for only one thing: to one day meet the family of the person who gave him a second life.
