When she grows up, Yaren wants to be a nurse. She knows many nurses, as she has been receiving treatment at Hannover Medical School (MHH) for several years. Like her sister, Yaren also suffers from a serious heart condition in which the pumping function of the left and right ventricles is severely restricted.

In October 2019, the nine-year-old's condition worsened and she had to be admitted as an inpatient. The physicians exhausted all medical measures, but in the end only a heart transplant could help Yaren. Now a race against time begins. The little patient develops life-threatening cardiac arrhythmia; in early December 2019, she suffers severe heart failure. The physicians have to resuscitate her and connect her to a heart support pump, known as extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). However, the therapy is only limited to a few weeks.

Pediatric cardiac surgeons Dr. Alexander Horke and Dr. Murat Avsar, together with the pediatric cardiology team led by Prof. Dr. Philipp Beerbaum, Director of the MHH Clinical Department of Paediatric Cardiology and Intensive Care Medicine, are already preparing alternatives to a transplant. "As a rule, children and adolescents wait an average of several months for a heart," explains Dr. Horke. "Yaren's condition was so critical at times that we considered artificial heart systems as an alternative, which we would have had to use to support the right and left ventricle. A very demanding and risky therapy."

During the daily ward round on 17 December 2019, Dr. Horke meets the patient in the intensive care unit: "Yaren is a real bundle of joy! Despite all the adversity, she was sitting happily on her bed and drawing. So I asked her to draw me a picture," says the Head of the Congenital Heart Defects Department of Cardiothoracic, Transplantation and Vascular Surgery. The result was a picture with a wish: a heart.

And then, like a small miracle, her wish was fulfilled on Christmas Eve! Eurotransplant registers a suitable donor organ. Yaren is successfully transplanted at Christmas and now - just three and a half weeks later - she can return home.