On Melinda Hull’s first day as a nurse with ThedaCare, she said she felt overcome with emotion as she watched a solemn procession move through the corridors.
The ritual, called an honor walk, celebrates the precious gift that organ donors provide. As a heart transplant recipient herself, the ceremony carried special meaning for Melinda.
“I had a really hard time for the longest time thinking, somebody else died in order for me to live,” Melinda says, reflecting on her experience. “But it’s what you do from here and moving forward that makes the opportunity, the second chance at life, worth it.”
With her second chance, Melinda became a registered nurse at ThedaCare Regional Medical Center-Neenah. Rewind 12 years, and she was in a hospital bed awaiting word of a potential donated heart to replace her failing one.
First Signs
Melinda’s heart issues started during college at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. She was enrolled in the school’s College of Nursing.
“I graduated from New London High School in 2007, and when I was picking my college, I really wanted to choose a place that had nursing and softball,” Melinda says.
UW-Oshkosh offered both.
“I always had an interest in the medical field. I knew I wanted to start helping people,” Melinda says. “That’s kind of cliché, but I just knew that caregiving and being part of people’s lives was something that I wanted to do.”
Melinda began to realize something was amiss with her health in 2011, during her last semester of the nursing program. She kept experiencing what she thought were heart palpitations.
“I started having weird feelings in my chest, and it always seemed to occur when I was working,” she says. “I worked at a nursing home in New London. I would be doing my work and then all of a sudden, my heart would skip a beat and I would hurry and try to sit down and listen to it. I could never catch it.”
Melinda’s symptoms persisted.
“I wasn’t able to sleep. I started getting what felt like hot flashes,” she says. “I was thinking, ‘this is kind of weird.’”
Turning Point
One day in February 2012, Melinda experienced a heart emergency at school.
“I felt like I was going to pass out,” she says. “I remember the dean walking through and she was like, ‘Hi Melinda, good morning,’ and I couldn’t even say good morning. I just smiled and waved at her. I made it a little bit farther down the hall and I just passed out.”
The dean and other college staff helped Melinda to her feet. She was taken to the hospital, where doctors diagnosed Melinda with heart failure. She was just 23 years old. Being so young, she questioned the diagnosis.
Heart failure occurs when the heart muscle doesn’t pump blood as well as it should. It can result in fluid buildup in the lungs. Heart failure symptoms may include but aren’t limited to:
- Shortness of breath with activity or when lying down
- Fatigue and weakness
- Swelling in the legs, ankles and feet
- Rapid or irregular heartbeat
- Reduced ability to exercise
Melinda was transferred to ThedaCare Regional Medical Center-Appleton where cardiovascular experts confirmed her heart failure diagnosis.
“They told me my heart was expanded to the size of a football,” Melinda says. “They needed to … [pull] fluid out of my heart and lungs. I was there for five days, and in those five days they pulled three and a half liters of fluid from my heart and lungs.”
More Challenges
Eventually Melinda would be discharged from the hospital. She was prescribed medication to help shrink her heart and ease the buildup of fluid. It worked for a while, but eventually Melinda’s doctor recommended more advanced care.
Melinda was referred to Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin. The health network provides additional care to ThedaCare patients for services such as heart and lung transplants and advanced heart failure. ThedaCare continues to provide collaborative care to patients locally before and after.
While at Froedtert, doctors implanted a pacemaker in Melinda’s heart. A pacemaker is a device that can ease symptoms and help manage heart failure through improving the heart’s pumping efficiency.
The treatment worked for a while, helping allow Melinda to graduate from nursing school. A nursing career seemed well within her grasp. Then, her health again began to fail.
“I graduated in April, walked across the stage in May,” Melinda says. “I was doing pretty good, but by July I started going downhill. I went from about 210 pounds down to about 150 pounds, and at that time I had had less than 15% of my heart function.”
Dream Deferred
Melinda would soon learn she would need a heart transplant. But first, she would undergo Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD) surgery. The implanted device helps pump blood from the left ventricle of the heart to the rest of the body. People with an LVAD wear an external controller unit and battery pack.
The device was a positive step for treating Melinda’s ailing heart. However, it was a hurdle over which she could not leap when it came to taking her state board exam — the test nursing graduates take to become certified as registered nurses.
State officials told her she could not bring anything with her into the exam hall, including her LVAD.
“My surgeons, my coordinator, my doctors, my cardiologist, they all wrote letters supporting me and explaining the need for my device,” Melinda says.
Melinda’s doctors even offered to alter the device to help alleviate any concerns that it could be used to unfairly aid her in the exam.
“My doctors said, ‘We can strip it down so it’s just the wires. You can see that there’s no notes on it or anything questionable,’” Melinda says.
The state refused to yield. For the next decade, Melinda set aside her dream of becoming a registered nurse as she focused on her heart health.
Finding a Heart
Eventually, a major concern required immediate attention. Melinda’s LVAD was failing. She would need it replaced and then soon after would require a heart transplant.
A heart transplant is an operation in which surgeons replace a failing heart with a healthier donor heart. It’s a procedure generally reserved for people whose condition hasn’t improved with treatments or other surgeries. More than 4,000 people in the United States are waiting for a new heart, according to Donate Life America.
After Melinda’s LVAD was replaced at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, she was added to an organ transplant waiting list. Miraculously, it wasn’t long before she received the call she had been hoping for.
“I got a phone call at 1:51 in the morning from my cardiologist,” Melinda recalls. “He said, ‘I called to tell you that we have a heart for you.’”
It took a moment to process the news.
“I just didn’t believe it, and he said, ‘I’m serious, we have a heart for you,’” Melinda says. “I had three open heart surgeries in five months, and then it ended with my transplant at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.”
Melinda’s health improved after the transplant. She eventually resumed many of the activities she enjoyed — competitive archery, hunting, snowmobiling and coaching high school softball.
Coming Full Circle
Melinda still had one major, long-awaited goal to achieve: becoming a registered nurse.
“My donor passed away in February on Valentine’s Day,” Melinda says. “I wanted to honor them in the best possible way I could. So, I ended up taking my board exam in February and I passed. I went 12 and a half years from when I graduated nursing school to when I passed my board exam.”
Melinda chose to start her nursing career where her health care journey had begun — ThedaCare.
“My first official day in training, all of a sudden, a message came across the speaker system announcing that there was an honor walk,” Melinda says. “I remember thinking I just wanted to walk up and squeeze the family and tell them that I am on the other end of what you’re going through. Obviously, you can’t do that, but I just knew that out of this sad experience, something good would come from it. And I was living proof of that.”
The experience brought Melinda full circle.
“I just knew I was meant to be here,” she says of her career as a registered nurse at ThedaCare. “Seeing the honor walk on my first day was like that closing chapter to my book of life.”
Melinda’s personal health care experience as a patient now fuels her care philosophy. “I really can genuinely understand when people say they are tired of being in the hospital or they’re in pain or they miss their family,” she says. “I always give them little tidbits of things that helped me as a patient. I just have more empathy for them and a little bit more understanding. That’s something I can really bring to my patients.”
