Girl with 2 hearts now back to normal

LONDON, July 14 (UPI) -- Doctors say a Welsh teenager given a second heart as an infant has lived with just her own now-healthy heart since they removed the donor organ three years ago.

Hannah Clark, 16, of Cardiff joined her doctors at a news conference Monday, ABC News reported. The case was reported this week in Britain's major medical journal, The Lancet.

Dr. Magdi Yacoub was the lead surgeon in the transplant at Harefield Hospital near London and also a surgeon when the transplanted heart was removed when Clark was 13. He has been knighted for his services to medicine.

"The possibility of recovery of the heart is just like magic," Yacoub said. "The heart, which was not contracting at all at the time, we put the new heart to be pumping next to it and take its work, now is functioning normally."

Clark had to take immuno-suppressive drugs to protect the transplanted heart. She survived cancer several years ago and remained at risk for cancer or Epstein-Barr disease as long as she took the drugs.

Doctors knew Clark's original heart was healthy years ago. But they only decided on the risky operation to remove the transplant when she was 13.

For the past three years, she has been able to live completely normally. Now, she hopes to work with hospitalized children or animals.